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Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria
British Museum, London
March 4 to July 4, 2010
It was a moment of great excitement last March when the lfe exhibition opened at the British Museum in London (Fig. L). The old library hall where the opening speeches were set to take place was crammed with people and the guided tour through the exhibition for special guests had to be repeated numerous times to accommodate the large number of VIPs. People said that the BM had never seen such a large number of Nigerians before; they had come from as far as Lagos to share this evening, to be there to honor the Oni of lfe and proudly celebrate the cultural heritage of their country. The opening also marked a new culture of collaboration between the BM and Nigerian museums after decades of mutual distance.
In fact it was the first time that such a large corpus of lfe works of art had been presented in London, much less in the world, as many of the works had not been exhibited before, not even in Nigeria where they are kept. In total ninety-eight objects from the holdings of the National Nigerian Museums were exhibited along with two from the collection of the BM - the spectacular stool cut of a solid piece of quartz and the formidable crowned brass head of a king. The exhibition - organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, with the Fundación Marcelino Botin, Santander, Spain, in collaboration with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments Nigeria - had been presented first at two Spanish venues, Santander and Madrid, and London was the last European venue before it moved on for an eighteen-month tour through the United States. It is now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and thereafter will travel to the Virginia Art Museum in Richmond, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and finally to New York, to the Museum for African Art. Given the complex organizational structure and the involvement of several people in creating the exhibition, the authorship of the distinctive British Museum version remained hidden; no mention was given in the acknowledgements in the exhibition as to who actually curated it in...