Art & Architecture : Ready to Take On the World : The UCLA Fowler Museum’s new chief curator aims to knock down barriers to exploring the art of many cultures.

Mary Nooter Roberts’ love affair with Africa began at the age of 5, and it has only deepened over time. What started as enchantment with a strange land, while living in Liberia as a young child, has grown into a passion for African art that reverberates far beyond her professional activities as a scholar, curator and educator.

“African art provides a way of thinking about the world and gives me a value system that goes back to my childhood,” said Nooter Roberts, who was recently appointed chief curator of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. “There’s such a sense of dignity and integrity and deep complex belief [embedded in the art]. The values are so strong and good. I derive so much personally from the study of African art, and I’m sure that other people would too if they felt comfortable with it and allowed it to take them to another universe.”

That’s asking a lot, and she knows it. Unfamiliar art can turn off--or scare off--those who haven’t cultivated an interest in it or don’t want to expose their lack of knowledge. But in her new position, Nooter Roberts will have plenty of opportunities to build an audience for the art of Africa--and many other parts of the world.

Known as the world’s foremost scholar of Luba art (made by people of southwestern Zaire) and the former senior curator at the Museum for African Art in New York, Nooter Roberts has joined the staff of an institution that was founded in 1963 as the UCLA Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology and evolved into the UCLA Museum of Cultural History, which presented exhibitions in the basement of Haines Hall. In 1992, when the museum opened its own building on the Westwood campus, it was renamed the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in honor of the lead donors, the Francis E. Fowler Jr. Foundation and Fowler’s sons, Francis E. Fowler II and Philip F. Fowler.

Since then, the Fowler has become one of the nation’s premier producers of exhibitions and publications on non-Western art. Drawing from the museum’s 750,000-piece collection and loans, in-house and guest curators have organized 44 exhibitions for the museum, 11 of which have been packaged as traveling shows and have appeared at 31 venues all across the country. The Fowler also has published 27 books in conjunction with its exhibitions and hosted six traveling loan shows organized elsewhere.

“The level of productivity here is phenomenal,” Nooter Roberts said, recalling a period last fall and winter when three Fowler shows appeared concurrently in the New York area alone--at the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Newark Museum. The Fowler also reaches into its local community by publishing curriculum resource units for teachers, hosting school groups and organizing public programs related to exhibitions in the galleries on campus.

Working with museum director Doran H. Ross, Nooter Roberts will oversee an exhibition program that encompasses a daunting range of art forms and geography, including Chinese embroidery, Peruvian ceramics and Mexican papier-ma^che. But diverse as the subject matter may appear, it fits under the Fowler’s umbrella of cultural history just waiting to be explored and presented in a meaningful context, she said.

“What I really am interested in, and interested in conveying, is the degree to which art can be a vehicle for complex systems of thought of other peoples of the world. It really can be a window into an entire philosophy, worldview, epistemology, whatever you want to call it. The richness of these systems is one of the things that really comes across in exhibitions at the Fowler and in other exhibitions that I’ve worked on before coming here.”

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Next on the museum’s exhibition schedule is “Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heap,” presenting 700 objects made of recycled materials from 50 countries, opening next Sunday and continuing through Jan. 2. The first project with which Nooter Roberts will be actively involved is “Music in the Life of Africa,” to be staged from Nov. 7 to July 15, in conjunction with exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African-American Museum.

“At the Fowler, we’re doing a contextualized presentation of musical instruments in Africa through 10 different case studies from all over Africa,” she said. “We will also have a fabulous African musical series that’s expected to bring in 90,000 schoolchildren during the course of the academic year. LACMA is doing a more aesthetic presentation, to look at the forms of African musical instruments. And CAAM’s show is about the influence of African music on African American music, and on music in general in the Western Hemisphere. Seeing all three of them, you get the whole picture. It’s been a really exciting first project for me.”

A tall, slim, dark-haired woman who likes to be called “Polly,” Nooter Roberts was born in St. Louis. Her father, Robert H. Nooter, joined the U.S. Foreign Service when she was 2 and moved the family to Uruguay a few months later. “We spent three years in South America. I have some memories of that, and I loved it,” she said. “But then we moved to West Africa and lived in Liberia for another three years; those are really my earliest, most vivid memories. I adored Africa, and my parents did too.”

She and her parents returned to the United States and settled down in Washington, D.C., but Africa had changed their lives. Her mother, artist Nancy Ingram Nooter, went back to school to study anthropology and began working at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, which was founded as a private institution in 1964, but is now part of the Smithsonian Institution. Nooter Roberts’ father continued in the Foreign Service, doing development work in Africa for many years.

Her parents also became serious collectors. “In those days, in the ‘60s, you could really collect African art at moderate prices,” she said. “There was a big supply then. Now it’s a much harder thing to do.”

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Although African art was “always a presence” at home for Nooter Roberts, she didn’t plan a career in the field. Fulfilling her desire to go to college in California, she chose Scripps College in Claremont and concentrated on philosophy and French literature. She spent her junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne, but her love of Africa was rekindled during 1979-80 on a trip to Tanzania before her senior year in college.

Suddenly she knew that her career would revolve around African art, but she didn’t change her major. “I’m sort of glad about that, because I work mostly with Francophone countries in Africa, so French has come into use in everything I do,” she said. “Also, the philosophy is directly related to my work.”

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Scripps in 1981, she headed back East to do graduate work at Columbia University. She earned master’s degrees in philosophy and arts in 1985 and a PhD in African art history in 1991. Meanwhile, she was getting essential hands-on experience in museums.

Working as a research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she became an intern to Susan Vogel, the curator in charge of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s gift to the museum of art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Highlights from the 3,300-piece donation were installed in a new wing named for Rockefeller’s son, Michael C. Rockefeller, which opened in 1982.

At that point, only one museum in the country was exclusively devoted to African art--the one in Washington. Vogel decided to leave the Met and start her own showcase for African art in New York. She founded the Center for African Art in 1984 and took Nooter Roberts with her as the first staff member.

“It was really exciting, watching the museum get off the ground, and doing everything from the most esoteric jobs to finding the right kind of nails,” Nooter Roberts said. The center outgrew its townhouse on East 68th Street, so Vogel moved it to SoHo and renamed it the Museum for African Art.

It opened in 1993 with a show organized by Nooter Roberts, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals.” Attempting to make mysterious objects more accessible without facile explanations, the show asserted that much African art is densely layered and not meant to be immediately understood. Even those who are part of the culture that produced the art acquire knowledge of it over time and through experience, she said.

About a year after the museum opened, Nooter Roberts moved to Iowa City, where her husband, anthropologist Allen F. Roberts, was teaching at the University of Iowa. They were based there until recently, when they both got appointments at UCLA. Roberts is a professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures.

While in Iowa, Nooter Roberts consulted with various museums and continued to organize exhibitions for the Museum for African Art in New York. One of her major shows, “Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History,” was conceived as part of a trilogy, which began with “Secrecy” and is expected to end with an exhibition on African writing systems. The book that accompanied “Memory,” edited by Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, won the College Art Assn.’s Alfred Barr Book Award for Museum Scholarship, marking the first time a work on African art was awarded the prestigious prize.

The art association’s honor emphasizes that Nooter Roberts labors in a relatively young field of art history. “The serious study of African art is kind of a 20th century phenomenon,” she said. “Early on, most African art was presented in natural history museums, where it was treated as material culture--artifact--and not regarded as art at all. There were important exhibitions that presented African art as art, going back to 1935 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but I’d say the opening of the Rockefeller wing in 1982 was the moment when African art took its official place in art museums, at least in Western perception. It was given a very beautiful wing. It was no longer relegated to the basement or next to the bathrooms or all the other marginal places where you often found African art in general art museums. It really began to flourish and to be seen as art.”

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But acceptance created a new problem, she said. “In order for African art to be seen as art, you had to present it as art--as sculpture on a pedestal, under lights, in galleries with beautiful carpeting and painted walls. All the things we associate with the presentation of art took place with African art. And that’s when it began to intimidate people. Not only was it art, which can intimidate people anyway, it was art of a culture that people here don’t know very well.

“Since then, a lot of exhibitions--particularly at the Fowler--have begun to break down the barrier between art and culture, and between art and artifact. People need to understand that those are artificial boundaries and to appreciate these objects. They are art, in the sense that they are made by artists who have gone through rigorous apprenticeships and are brilliant in terms of their skill, but these objects also have a role that is inseparable from life itself. African art cannot be separated from daily life or from religious life, or from education or politics.”

Once those concepts are understood, African art “can give people in the Western Hemisphere a way to rethink art in Western contexts as well,” she said. “And I think this is the place where you can do that. Even the name of this museum, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, removes us from the limitations of an art museum, but also removes us from the generalizations and stereotypes of a natural history museum. We have this absolutely tremendous collection from all over the world, but because it’s framed by a museum of cultural history, it’s open-ended. And that’s what I love.”