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A CONGO CHRONICLE Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art
The Museum for African Art New York City April 23-August 15, 1999
Reviewed by Steven Nelson
This exhibition, originally planned to accompany the Museum for African Art's "Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History" (1996), was an intense examination of the ways in which Congolese visual artists have worked at the crossroads of history and collective memory. The nearly fifty paintings on display by Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu and others are not only politically charged examples of Congolese urban art; they are also history paintings which, on a fundamental level, function in a fashion similar to that of works such as Jacques Louis David's 1785 Oath of the Horatii as well as his 1793 Death of Marat. To make such a comparison is to underscore the affective power of the included work as well as the artists' ability to deploy the past as a means to articulate a present reality. What is most striking about this history is how artists molded the figure of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Congo, into a metonym for Congolese history itself. Lumumba`s dramatic rise to power and meteoric fall from grace became the foundation for an art of pain, an art of suffering, and an art of catharsis. Lumumba is canonized on canvas: he is the prophet rendered in paint.
Guest curator Bogumil Jewsiewicki designed the exhibition in six sections: "Urban Art: Themes and Techniques," "Lumumba: Portraits of a Leader," "Lumumba: His Rise and Fall," "Lumumba Immortalized," '"The Memory, the Legacy, the Appropriation, ' and "Prophetic Ancestors." An introduction to the exhibition provided the viewer with a timeline of Congolese history from Henry Morgan Stanley's 1872 crossing of the Congo River to Mobutu Sere Seko's 1997 removal from power and Laurent Kabila's subsequent seizure of it. The timeline gave the visitor a cursory-and very helpfullist of paradigmatic moments in Congolese history and supplied a sociopolitical frame for the work on display. As part of this theoretical orientation, the exhibition also included a re-created "Congo Cafe," complete with tables and chairs, its walls adorned with a mural and popular paintings. There one could read news clippings about Lumumba dating from the 1950s to his 1961 assassination as well as...