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Artistry of the Everyday: Beauty and Craftsmanship in Berber Art by Lisa Bernasek Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum Press, Harvard University, 2008. 125 pages, 10 b/w photographs, 25 color plates. $21. 95 paper
reviewed by Diana Wylie
Charm-like disks and beads dangle from a necklace made of coral and, oddly enough, cloves. Stone bracelets are engraved with an ancient script. Milk pots, the color of café au lait, bear geometric designs as if their makers had doodled on them with brown paint. These are some of the visual delights on display in Lisa Bernasek's Artistry of the Everyday. The catalogue builds upon objects displayed between 2004 and 2006 at Harvard University's Peabody Museum: the show was titled "Imazighen! Beauty and Artisanship in Berber Life," to which Bernasek has added five short explanatory essays, page-long discussions of twentyfive objects, and ten photographs dating from the late nineteenth century to 1953, the period she focuses on. The book is beautifully designed and produced: Its size, quality of image as well as text, and even its shape are close to ideal.
One indicator of the book's integrity is that it is modest. It doesn't claim to offer a survey of Berber art across North Africa or throughout time. None of the original Boston-based collectors was in any way systematic. As a result, the Peabody Museum collection is neither "complete" nor "consistent," as Bernasek readily acknowledges. Instead, the collection reflects the idiosyncratic tastes and experiences of the donors, Americans who visited the mountainous Kabylia region of Algeria in the late nineteenth century, the RJf Mountains of Morocco from 1926 to the 19405, and the Sahara Desert from 1947 to 1962. These three sites are quite diverse, reflecting the tough exigencies of life in the mountains and the desert, as are the objects themselves.
What the pieces share is their everyday nature, or so Bernasek argues. It is true...