Courtesy Chazen Museum of Art
A large sculpture of a Black African woman in an elaborate long flowing gown type dress.
'Sower in the Field' by Mary Sibande: 'I am going to live large and be present.'
Guest curator Margaret Nagawa suggests that viewers come to “Insistent Presence,” the Chazen Museum of Art’s fall exhibit of new African art from its own collection (through Dec. 23), with “an open heart.”
Although Nagawa, from Uganda and a doctoral candidate in contemporary African art at Emory University, has written illuminating background texts for the works (found mounted next to the works of art in the galleries and in the exhibit guide book), she recommends looking first, reading later. That’s what she did in the process of putting the show together. “I want to look at the work before I read that text. I can bring my own knowledge or experiences. I can start there, before listening to another voice.”
Her goal is to get the viewer into a dialogue with the work: “I come to it from one perspective, and what you bring to the work is just as important as what I may bring to it.”
The works, acquired thanks to an initiative from the Straus Family Foundation to augment the museum’s collection of contemporary African art, are all new since 2020. Only a handful have been on display at the museum before this show.
Chazen chief curator Katherine Alcauskas underscores that the pieces strengthen the UW-Madison’s “special relationship with Africa, through the African Studies Program and other interdisciplinary programs” such as some agricultural exchanges. The donors were “interested in raising more attention to those relationships,” says Alcauskas. The pieces were acquired over four years — “though COVID threw us for a little bit of a loop,” she recalls, limiting trips to Africa and pushing gallery and studio tours onto Zoom. Alcauskas was nevertheless “impressed with the quality of the works throughout the research process.”
Nagawa also advised the museum on the purchase of some pieces. Curators often “contribute in that way to enrich the story they are trying to tell,” Nagawa says. Her suggestions for purchase focused on “additions that I thought would be enriching to what was already [in the Chazen’s collection], instead of adding new directions.”
The 45 pieces in “Insistent Presence” are from “very different artists, working in different countries, under different circumstances with different kinds of education — and using materials that are extremely diverse,” says Nagawa. Yet she wanted to highlight the larger picture: “I saw that a lot of them dealt with the body — the human figure was quite present, but so was its absence. I was intrigued by that.” Even those pieces without figures, Nagawa says, reference the body.
Nagawa sees “a lot of optimism” in the works. She cites the life-size sculpture of a woman in a flowing gown, called Sower in the Field, by South African artist Mary Sibande. “The women in her family had all been domestic workers,” says Nagawa. “After 1994, with the end of apartheid, in her family that history was broken.”
Sibande plays with the uniform/dress, its “big sleeves and train,” says Nagawa, in ways that “for me signify that the dress of the maid no longer has a place in this family. [It says] ‘Where I am at, is beyond that. I am going to live large and be present.’”
Much of the art is very much of the moment. A sculptural installation, Barthélémy Toguo’s Exodus, speaks to a global problem with housing, and the large population that is unhoused in Africa. The piece, a bicycle towing a cart filled with bags made of colorful kente cloth, alludes to our transitive society, “movement without real destination,” says Nagawa. Toguo’s work prompts the viewer to “think of solutions. How do we take care of one another?”
Nagawa also points to a quiet work, Ranti Bam’s vaselike sculpture Osaan. “She works in clay, oranges and blues — it’s very easy to walk right by it. She has worked with the clay in such a way that makes it feel like it is fabric. And yet it is clay. I like that play between the warm and cool colors and how evocatively it walks between textile and clay.”
Her own response to Bam’s work underlines her recommendation to the viewer to pay heed to their own impressions. “People might think, ‘Oh, this is from Africa, it has nothing to do with me,’ but it is important to bring our whole selves to the work, and have that kind of openness.”
