But many other African artists who worked at the same time, and similarly bridged “traditional” and “modern” categories, continue to have profile problems outside of Africa, which is to say they remain unnamed, and so unstudied.
There have been a few exceptions. In 1980, Susan Vogel organized a solo show called “The Buli Master: An African Artist of the 19th Century” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1998, Roslyn A. Walker did the same in “Olowe of Ise: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings” at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, throwing a spotlight on one of Bamigboye’s older near-contemporaries. (The Olowe exhibition catalog was the first full-length scholarly publication ever devoted to a single “traditional” African artist; Yale’s Bamigboye catalog now joins it.)
Even if, as some scholars assert, the concern with determining solo authorship in African art is merely a Western obsession, geared to museums and markets, we are long overdue in giving the careers of Africa’s great artists the monographic attention we lavish on their global counterparts.
To do so will require cooperation between continents and cultures. On the occasion of the Bamigboye show, Yale University Art Gallery and the university’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage have partnered with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments on a conservation training initiative, with the aim of creating an ongoing collaboration among the institutions, evident in the presence of the loans from Lagos in New Haven.
Maybe if the restitution movement, now in bud, can truly flower, exchanging resources rather than hoarding them, as the West has done, can become a new two-way norm, and Africa’s great artists can claim their fame in the world as they have always done at home.
Bamigboye: A Master Sculptor of the Yoruba Tradition
Through Jan. 8. at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.; (203) 432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu.
