Whom You Know: Reconfiguring the African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents March 8

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Reconfiguring the African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents March 8–June 2011

Highly creative re-imaginings of the iconic form of the African mask comprise a unique installation to be held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 7 through June 2011. Some 20 works of art have been selected that span the Museum's own holdings in two areas—19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and the Arts of Africa—for this collaborative curatorial project, Reconfiguring the African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents.

Among the works to be on display will be whimsical sculptural assemblages constructed of incongruous combinations of discarded consumption goods by two contemporary artists from the Republic of Benin, Romuald Hazoumé (b. 1962) and Calixte Dakpogan (b. 1958). The works are self-consciously ironical references to the fact that the mask is the African form of expression most renowned in the West. Hazoumé's signature works—including Ibedji (No 2) Twins (1992, CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva), which will be on view in the installation—are faces created from plastic gasoline jerry cans to which features made from a variety of scrap matter are added to personify them. Dakpogan, who is represented in the installation by Woli (2007, CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva), draws upon such disparate media as computer parts, glasses, and pens, and assembles them according to a process that parallels that of the modernist photocollage.

Illuminating juxtapositions in Reconfiguring the African Icon will include works in a variety of media by modern and contemporary artists from Africa, Europe, and America, such as a photomontage by German Dada artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978), the iconic photograph Noire et Blanche by Man Ray (1890-1976), a series of photographs by Cameroon-born Angèle Etoundi Essamba (b. 1962), and sculptural and photographic works by American artist Willie Cole (b. 1955).

A podcast episode in the Met Podcast series, featuring voices of artists represented in the installation as well as different curatorial perspectives on their work, will also complement an extended web feature on the Museum's website at www.metmuseum.org.

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