July 21, 2006
Museum of the African Diaspora Offers Anecdotal Evidence of a Homesick Humanity
|Thor Swift for The New York Times|
|One of the museums interactive displays features morphing faces and clothing to represent Africans contributions to fashion.|
|Thor Swift For The New York Times|
|The face of an African child that stares out through the facade of the Museum of the African Diaspora is a mosaic of smaller images.|
SAN FRANCISCO — Museums are morphing. Once they were chroniclers or collectors, gathering objects and facts and putting them on display. Now many have become crucibles: places where a cultural identity is hammered out, refined and reshaped. Along the way they also have become community centers, where a group gathers to celebrate its past, commemorate its tragedies and convey its achievements to others.
That is what the Museum of the African Diaspora, designed by the North Carolina firm the Freelon Group, is meant to be. It is just down the street from two other such institutions being built here: the Mexican Museum and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. With its 20,000 square feet, the African museum’s $20 million building houses no permanent collection and promises no scholarly revelations.
Instead the museum describes itself on its Web site (www.moadsf.org) as a “collector of stories,” one that “promotes, explores and appreciates the contributions people of African descent have made across the globe.” It intends “to foster a greater understanding of human history and promote cross-cultural communication.”
Those are sweeping ambitions, which are only fitfully realized in the museum’s permanent exhibits; the tendency to “promote” often eclipses the goals to explain and explore. But the museum, which boasts of 40,000 visitors since its opening in December, also says it intends over time to shape an understanding of the “African diaspora.”
What does that term mean? The Greek word, which once referred to the exile of Jews beginning in the sixth century B.C., implies more than just dispersal. It implies an emotional quality of both displacement and attachment. In the case of Africa, it alludes to the spread of African people, ideas and cultures throughout the world, both through the brutality of slavery and the voluntary migration of populations. It also suggests a continuing yearning for what the continent represents.
The scope of the African diaspora is visible in the single most telling exhibit at the museum: an enormous sepia-toned mural that, unfortunately, can only be seen fully from outside the building at a distance (and is marred by window glare). It is a face of an African child photographed by Chester Higgins Jr. of The New York Times. Up close, awkwardly seen as you mount the stairs that cut across the image on the way to the second floor, the face is revealed to be a mosaic of smaller images constructed by Robert Silvers using more than 2,000 photographs solicited by the museum. They include portraits of Masai women, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, a Pangale elder, celebrities and anonymous soldiers, graduates, children, dancers, merchants, ballplayers. It is a fantastically detailed evocation of Africa’s worldwide demographic legacy.
Some of this variety is also meant to be captured in the community events and public programs the museum has organized (including an evening with an Ethiopian Jewish comedian) and its collaborations with other museums (which is to include, in 2007, a French photography exhibition about Africa).
But in the permanent displays, where the institution presumably presents its central vision, this concept of the African diaspora starts to break up into inconsistent fragments, like the mural’s poignant face. It splinters into miscellany, even as the museum’s vision of Africa itself becomes almost unreal in its bland uniformity.
At first the idea of the African diaspora is made as broad as possible. “When did you discover you are African?” is the question posed on the entrance wall facing visitors; the implication is that all visitors are African — even if they don’t know it.
In another display, human migrations over the millenniums appear as lighted paths on a global map, expanding outward from Africa where geneticists now believe Homo sapiens originated. We are all members of this diaspora. But this makes African identity so broad as to be meaningless.
In other displays, different problems arise. With only about 3,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space, and no objects or artifacts of its own, the museum seems to have at once too little material for its subject and too much ground to cover. Everything is simplified.
Africa, after all, far from containing a single nation or people, has been host to scores of tribes and kingdoms with vastly varying social arrangements and cultures. Yet all of that history and detail is ignored (as are contemporary realities). What unites the continent in our imaginations is the crippling yoke of slavery to which its many heritages were harnessed during the Western world’s modern history (as well as during periods of Arab domination). Here, the continent is recalled through the scrim of that exile, simplifying Africa, reducing it to a diaspora dream of a lost home.
In the first main exhibit, called “Celebration Circle,” a film is shown on a 180-degree screen in a circular room. Racially diverse speakers testify to the joys of families, feasts and celebrations. They then pay tribute to Africa as the primal source of human society and brotherly sentiment. This evokes a warm communal feeling of course, but it is a mythical image, portraying an entire continent as a realm of pastoral and celebratory bliss.
That image of Africa as a vague source of pleasure and plenty remains in other exhibits as well. One wall, titled “What You Wear ... and Who You Are, a World of Choices,” shows three human figures created out of a shifting collage of traditional African and contemporary dress, their video-heads morphing into a sampling of humanity.
Africa is, the wall implies, the source of much diversity as well as much celebration. But no information is given about these clothing styles, Africa’s varied cultures or their influences on worldwide fashion and customs.
More concrete information is provided on a wall devoted to foods influenced by Africa as push-button-display video slide shows. One screen revealingly suggests, for example, that one reason Southern recipes now use plenty of greens is that black slaves typically used these cast-off scraps of vegetables for cooking. But is the exaggerated suggestion necessary that the worldwide taste for eating greens on a regular basis “comes from Africa”?
This impulse to celebrate even weakens the museum’s most informative display: a wall of touch-screens surveying the rich African influences on world music, complete with examples, including tribal chants, ragtime, rumbas, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop.
But in the midst of descriptions, which should be tribute enough, come exaggerations. The importance of music to African social events and ritual, for example, is ascribed to “the values that African cultures place on inclusion” — except that music is central to every culture, inclusive or not. So eager is the urge to herald African influence that when it comes to European and American symphonic compositions, the exhibit ascribes almost every stylistic characteristic, including contrapuntal complexity and harmonic dissonance, to African influence (and makes other errors along the way).
This African romance may help spur a sense of connection and identity, but it ultimately interferes with historical understanding. A stylized short film about Toussaint L’Ouverture, made by Doug McHenry, filters out so much detail and eccentricity that this complex 18th-century leader of Haiti’s slave revolution becomes a cartoon martyr packaged for contemporary tastes.
The most moving permanent exhibit has little to do with forging an identity or image. All celebration is silenced in a darkened room lined with benches. Original accounts of enslavement and liberation are heard, powerfully read; they dwarf the other displays with their historical fact and elemental humanity.
Perhaps, over time, given the ambitions of its new executive director, V. Denise Bradley (who was hired in September after the permanent exhibitions had been designed), such documentation may become more the rule than the exception. The museum, with an annual budget of $4 million to $5 million, may even overcome the burden of these permanent exhibits with community events and collaborations.
Later in July, for example, a visiting show, “Carrie Mae Weems: The Louisiana Project,” will use photography, narratives, videos and archival material to create an installation that evokes the mingling of cultures in New Orleans over the course of 200 years.
The museum may also provide a kind of laboratory to help refine planning for one of the largest museum projects of the next decade: the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
But in taking on the new role of cultural crucible, museums are assuming burdens undreamed of by traditional collectors. And so far this particular crucible still needs to be shaped.
Published in the Arts section on July 20, 2006.