Remembering history through art

I collect moments of history. My home is filled with revolutions, uprisings and wars.

From the eruption of Iran’s Islamic revolution to the demise of the Soviets’ communist revolution, through wars in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and during uprisings from Johannesburg to Jerusalem, I’ve sought at least one piece of art to capture the turmoil, tragedy or the human pathos of each experience.

The collection has converted my townhouse into an eclectic museum chronicling the past three decades of global change. Every day it reminds me of the extraordinary times in which I’ve lived. Others see the objects merely as art. Years, even decades, later, I still see the events and environments that produced them.

One of the pieces that started the collection is a large oil painting, now hanging above a fireplace, that I bought during the first black uprising in Soweto, the pitiful blacks-only suburb of Johannesburg. The uprising began after schoolchildren peacefully protested new rules about instruction in Afrikaans, the language of white Dutch settlers and a foreign tongue for young blacks.

I was in Soweto when South African police responded June 16, 1976, with tear gas and then bullets, igniting months of fury over the larger issue of apartheid. Hundreds died.

A white South African woman who sold art for black artists out of her home carefully unrolled the canvas--and it instantly grabbed me. In warm golds and reds and greens, the abstract depicted two African boys playing a small drum and a thin recorder. It exuded simple joy.

The artist was Hargreaves Ntukwana, who lived in a black township and was then among a small group of emerging artists. His favorite technique was to blow diluted oils, usually strong sunny colors, onto canvas or paper. He wiped away the excess, leaving a background with energy and movement. In black ink, he then drew figures out of overlapping and conjoined round shapes that created a sense of rhythmic action.

To this day, visitors often comment on the winsomeness of the figures. A cabinet minister from Jordan who came for tea a few years ago remarked, “Oh, how lovely. You have a picture of E.T.”

Ntukwana, now deceased, later produced masses of this genre for European and U.S. galleries. Like all my art, commercial value or potential never influenced my choices. During the grim days of getting tear-gassed with black kids or covering other gruesome aspects of apartheid, the big canvas offered relief. It made me smile. It still does.

Among four large wooden sculptures on lighted pedestals in my living room is a kondi, a “power figure” or fetish used by medicine men for magic in the battle between good and evil. I acquired it during a 1977 war in Zaire. The conflict became known as the “termite war” because of the giant red-clay termite hills that rose several feet high, offering cover to fighters, and because Katangese rebels steadily nibbled away at territory around one of Africa’s richest mineral deposits.

The kondi’s roughly carved body is studded with dozens of old metal pieces, some wrapped with bits of cloth. The bellybutton area has been carved out, stuffed with small indiscernible items and covered with reflecting glass. One raised arm holds an arrowhead-like dagger, indicating its intent was to help hunt wrongdoers. Kondis were considered so powerful they were often kept in their own huts.

I bought the piece in the village of Mutshatsha. I worked for CBS at the time and the camera crew--incredulous that I paid $90 for something it thought was so ugly, refused to help transport the kondi with our gear, so I hauled it around for days in an old cotton flour sack.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art opened a decade later. The piece Time magazine selected to illustrate its coverage was almost identical to mine.

After bouncing all over the world with me over the years, the kondi’s nose is no longer all quite there. But it’s still exquisitely ugly. And I still love it.

My museum also includes many memorable pieces from years of traveling in Iran during the revolution and its own eight-year war with Iraq. One of 10 miniatures on my dining room wall--a warrior riding his steed during Persia’s medieval period of greatness--was supposedly painted with the single eyelash of a squirrel.

As the collection has grown, finding ways to display it has required creativity. A kitchen wall and a window seat are decorated with Iranian gabbehs, the unusually thick but starkly simple tribal carpets woven by former nomads, mainly women. Each one is unique and inspired by folk motifs. Small figures or animals, which emerge from the weaver’s imagination, seem to wander across each carpet’s solid field.

I either know the story depicted in each carpet or I’ve made one up from the experiences of that trip.

Some of my living room end tables were crafted from chess sets acquired during assorted Mideast wars, when playing chess was one of the few diversions as bullets and bombs and shells went off outside. During the five years I lived in the Middle East, I went to the bazaars and souks in Beirut, Tehran, Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul and offered to play for a set. If I won, the set was free. If I lost, I paid.

Every time I look at the sets of individually carved pieces--of stone or wood or bone and each positioned on opposite ends of the board ready to play--I think of the game that led to its acquisition or subsequent matches that got me through encroaching battles.

I’ve also used unusual spaces to display history. After the coup that ousted Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, I bought one of the red velvet shields elaborately adorned with silver filigree that had been used by the royal palace guard. It now hangs on a stairway wall.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, I went to its Muslim republics in Central Asia as they broke away from Moscow. Few Americans had ever heard of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, the poorest Soviet regions. I became enchanted with the richly embroidered caps worn by both men and women either to identify their ethnic group or for a rite of life. I collected several in each republic and later found others during a trip to Afghanistan. The brilliant colors of the caps were such a contrast to the darkness of the Taliban’s rule. More than two dozen caps from Muslim countries in Asia now cover a stairway wall.

Not all of the pieces constitute traditional art. Two tribal belts, each with a squat, snub-nosed dagger, that I bought on the eve of Yemen’s civil war in the mid-1990s, hang lengthwise on narrow sections dividing my living and dining rooms. An arrangement of Moorish mirrors big and small--of inlaid wood or brass and hand-painted or carved--collected while covering Mideast wars since 1973, bounces light in from French doors to my patio. What an irony.

I do have items that don’t mark moments of historic upheaval. The ceramic tiles on my kitchen walls were designed by the Balians, an Armenian family who moved to Jerusalem a century ago to restore tiles on the beautiful Dome of the Rock, the landmark that dominates the ancient city’s skyline. Today the Balians straddle both sides of the Jerusalem divide, with Palestinian pottery on the Arab side and Armenian ceramics in the Jewish sector.

The son who now runs the business convinced me that I had to have a symbol of peace in my home, appropriate because the transaction coincided with the first pact between Israel and the Palestinians. After designing a mosaic pattern of vibrant blue, red, green and yellow, Neshan Balian insisted the backsplash for the area above my stove depict the tree of life from Jericho--the first place handed over by the Israelis to the Palestinians.

Over the years, I’ve developed four rules as I collected: First, don’t buy anything that should remain in the country of origin.

Second, on the other extreme, no tchotchkes.

Third, in displaying pieces, keep the focus on the pieces of history--which is why all my other furniture is white.

And, finally, don’t overfill space or get cluttered. That’s why I’ve stopped collecting.

Well, almost.