The twenty-three superb works on view reveal how art, ritual, and religion intersected during key phases of the human life cycle in traditional African societies. By considering such rites of passage as birth, childhood, initiation, marriage, and death, we are made aware of the vital roles the objects played in maintaining the ritual and social lifestyles of individuals and their communities. The works also demonstrate how the ever-present and unending interactions between humans and spirits, gods, and ancestors were made manifest through art.
“Life” and “object” are juxtaposed to highlight the fundamental link between art and life, and between ritual and artistic meaning. Even without a deep knowledge of the ritual circumstances of the objects, their formal eloquence and the stunning range of styles and media testify to the diversity of artistic traditions and the individual genius and creativity of the artist in African societies. Yet their artistic value depended as much on the ritual processes through which they became symbolic objects as it did on their sculptural form. The exhibition makes us aware that art in African societies was inescapably tied to the social life and ritual systems of its makers.
Chika Okeke-Ogulu, Assistant Professor, Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, and the Center
for African American Studies
Holly W. Ross, Independent scholar
The exhibition has been organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Additional funding has been provided by the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University.
The organic and active interconnection between the living and the dead, between humans and spiritual entities, and the cyclical path linking the natural and metaphysical worlds characterized the worldviews of many indigenous African societies. Religious and ritual systems as well as social and political practices affirmed, reified, and sustained these complex relationships that were so important to the concept and performance of personhood.
African peoples imagined the individual person as an important agent within a closed cyclical cosmology, from birth to childhood, adulthood to death, and return—in due time—to the phenomenal world through the process of reincarnation. The humanity of a person was made complete only by participation in the social life of the community, but was equally dependent upon actions of deities and spiritual forces, as well as ancestors who must have lived full and successful lives during their sojourn on earth.
Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art presents twenty-three superb works associated with divination, childhood, initiation, passage to adulthood, and marriage, as well as death, funerary rites, and ancestorship selected from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and private collections. The exhibition focuses on the conjunction of art, religion, and ritual in key phases of the human life cycle in indigenous African societies. Through the display of objects in a wide range of media, the exhibition makes apparent how the course of birth-death- reincarnation, and the unending process of interactions of humans, spirits, gods, and ancestors were made manifest through art.
The term “life objects” is important in understanding the place of art in the intricate philosophical, religious, and ritual complexes with which this exhibition is concerned. Objects ordinarily describe concrete phenomena evacuated of any form of life—“object” and “life” usually connote two opposing concepts or things. When conjoined as here, however, they suggest two contexts of artistic production and practices in many African societies. First, the objects on view, considering their formal conditions, are de facto sculptures. Yet their artistic value in their local context depended as much on their physical attributes as on the ritual processes through which they simultaneously became objets d’art and symbolic objects—forms endowed with powerful symbolism through prescribed ritual action. Second, we are made aware of the vital connection between man-made objects and the life of the individual and community. The use of objects in rites of passage or in the affirmation of important stages in human life thus conferred on them roles as participants in the maintenance of the life of individuals and their communities.
The exhibition raises an important question about the place within an art museum of objects whose aesthetic qualities are overwhelmed by their original ritual functions. It resurrects the ongoing and pertinent debate about the migration to the museum of art objects previously consigned to ethnographic inquiry and exotic fascination. To be sure, it is impossible to appreciate the full extent of the formal choices creators of these works made without considering, on the one hand, the sociocultural conditions in which the artists performed their artistic subjectivity and, on the other, how other aspects of the human experience determined and thus extended the scope of art in African societies. This presentation makes clear that in many African societies, art was indeed ineluctably connected with the affirmation of life, and that life—supported by ritual processes—endowed art with meaning more profound than the possibilities of its formal conditions. It makes us keenly aware of an important aspect of the artistic experience—its dependence on, rather than autonomy from, social life and human knowledge systems. Yet, even without deep knowledge of the ritual contexts of these objects, their formal eloquence and the stunning range of styles and media testify to the diversity of artistic traditions and individual creativity in indigenous African societies. It is the combination of intriguing and powerful formal qualities and a surplus of ritual symbolism in the “life objects” that this exhibition emphasizes.
A noteworthy feature of Life Objects is the inclusion of vintage photo postcards produced by African and European photographers in the first decades of the twentieth century. These photographs depict objects similar to the ones on view in their original contexts. The postcards, veritable works of art by themselves, provide visual accounts of objects whose cultural contexts are otherwise lost in their new lives as museum objects.
Chika Okeke-Agulu Assistant Professor, Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, and the Center for African American Studies
