Strands of Lasting Significance

According to the Yoruba people, Homo sapiens can be summed up in a phrase: “Eda, Omo Adarihurun”--humanity, the species that grows hair mainly on the head.

As such, we are also the species that gave birth to the hairstyle, a wildly expressive, nonverbal language that spans cultures and time to communicate who and what we are.

Nowhere is this urge to coiffure more spectacularly represented than in “Hair in African Art and Culture,” an exhibition of artifacts and photographs from traditional and modern African cultures that’s on display at the California African American Museum.

The idea for the exhibition originated with Frank Herreman, a self-described bald Belgian art historian who in 1995 became the director of exhibitions at New York’s Museum for African Art. “Coming from Europe, which has a very small African population,” Herreman says, “one of the first things that struck me was sitting in the subway looking at the African American kids and their wonderful hairdos. I thought, why not make a show?”

Herreman invited art historian Roy Sieber to co-curate the exhibition, choosing masks and figure sculptures from across the African continent dating from the late 19th century to the present day. The objects, which were primarily used in religious ceremonies, display hairstyles with high sculpted ridges and long looping braids that corkscrew around the head. Despite the fairly abstract interpretation of the figure and face in most of them, the two curators point out the remarkable realism of the hairstyles.

“African art is always called abstract, because the heads and body parts are too large, but the hairstyle and scarification patterns are precisely accurate,” explains Sieber, emeritus professor at Indiana University and one of the first art historians to specialize in African art. “Everyone has a face, feet and hands. There is nothing individual about them. In African art, what distinguishes a person at a certain moment of their life is hairstyle and scarification.”

The exhibition displays photographs taken by anthropologists alongside the traditional sculptures, which proves Sieber’s point. For example, a series of four pictures of a Fanti woman, taken in the early part of the 20th century in Ghana, shows her hair being parted and twisted into two pigtails that shoot straight into the air. The final style very nearly matches a Fanti figure that’s also in the show. Similarly, in a pair of photographs showing Pende or Mbala men, hair is chiseled into sharp crests, precisely matching the hairstyles of masks and hats from the same area.

The exhibition also delves into the way hairstyles in these African cultures signify status and age--with some unkempt styles relating to the priesthood and healers and other decorative styles pertaining to royal status.

In contrast to scarification, which cannot be erased, Sieber points out, “in a particular group, if you knew internal traditions, you could watch the women go by and know where they were in the life cycle” by their changing hair styles indicating puberty, for example, or the onset of menopause.

Despite its symbolic meanings, hair was also a means of aesthetic expression, subject to the shifting winds of fashion. Prized objects, such as newly arrived tin cans in southern Africa, may be incorporated into a coiffure to show elite access to the outside world, while a man or a woman may be pegged to a specific generation by an outmoded or newfangled hairstyle.

The time-consuming process of creating coiffures was trusted only to family intimates. “Hair and fingernails are terribly dangerous if they get into the wrong hands,” says Sieber, by way of explaining the magic traditionally associated with these extensions of human life. “A woman’s comb was never shown publicly, never like the Spanish.”

Even the pillows and neck rests in the exhibition, long narrow blocks carved with symbols of the cattle that brides brought as a dowry to their bridegrooms, were closely guarded objects. “If you went someplace to spend the night, you took your pillow with you. In some places, when you died, it was buried with you. It was that much part of your persona,” Sieber said. Often these headrests would be passed from generation to generation and were believed to be a way of communicating with an ancestor in a dream state.

The exhibition closes with objects and photographs from the second half of the 20th century showing the flow of cultural ideals to and from the African continent. A full-scale Ghanaian barbershop, lent to the exhibition by Los Angeles collector and dealer Ernie Wolf, is installed against a photographic backdrop of a Ghanaian street scene. The small wooden building sports hand-painted American flags and cartoon-like portraits of Run-DMC and other Americans whose hairstyles the former proprietor, Kwesi B, had promised to create in his “Clubbing House.” Another African barber sign promotes “Black President” fades and goatees for potential rulers of a hip-hop inspired nation.

“In the last 30 years, African hairdos have inspired hairdos of many African American women and children,” notes Herreman, “whereas African men today wear hairstyles with names like Nike and Boeing that show American influences.” Recalling visits to Africa in the early 1960s, Sieber relates that one of the most popular hairstyles among African men was the “JFK,” in which hair was sculpted to look like the side-parted locks of the American president.

In a fascinating catalog essay, Kennell Jackson, an associate professor of history at Stanford University, outlines the 20th century history of African American hairstyles, in which he sees not just references to ancestry and traditions, but also expressions of the zeitgeist. Jackson points to 1960s activist Angela Davis and to her then-signature afro (which she has since lamented may be better remembered than her political ideas). Jackson says that Davis’ spherical hairdo sent a clear signal, “a salvo in the cultural and political wars” of the time, but it was something more.

“Orbiting the Earth, arriving at a perfect circle, spaceships--it [was] out there. I’m not proposing a causative connection,” Jackson adds in an interview, “but somehow this was a kind of modernizing of one’s head, keeping in context with the modernities at the time.”

Curious visitors can learn to modernize their own heads at hands-on demonstrations of braiding techniques at the museum, and through the exhibition’s videotape loops of a New Jersey stylist creating coiffures like the “Fululu” and the “Fence” shown on some of the sculptures from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

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“HAIR IN AFRICAN ART AND CULTURE,” California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, L.A. Dates: Through Aug. 19. Price: Free. Phone: (213) 744-7432.