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Art and Power in the Central African Savanna: Sculpture of the Songye, Luba, Luluwa and Chokwe Peoples
The Menil Collection, Houston
September 26, 2008-January 4, 2009
The Cleveland Museum of Art
March 1-June 7, 2009
The de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
June 27-October 11, 2009
"Art and Power in the Central African Savanna," which appeared in three venues in the United States, was organized and funded by the Cleveland Museum of Art and curated by its curator of African art, Constantine Petridis.
The exhibition included fifty-nine objects from the Central African savanna in four sections, each devoted to the arts of one group: the Chokwe, the Luba, the Luluwa, and the Songye. The presentation in Cleveland began with one piece from each group in the first gallery, accompanied by wall texts introducing the groups, an overview of the history of the region, and a discussion of power figures and their relationship to leadership arts. The premise of the exhibition, illustrated by the pieces in the first gallery, was that there is a commonality between power figures- the "fetishes" of archaic discourse - and sculptures created for leadership in these four groups. Leadership arts have been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications, as have power figures. Petridis contends that power figures, traditionally studied for their spiritual and magical associations, can have significant political meaning; conversely, arts that have traditionally been analysed for their political dimension can have magical and spiritual associations as well.
Petridis's analysis of power figures attributes significance to size, surface, and complexity of decoration. Among the Songye, the most prolific producers of these figures, large, usually...