Yale Art Exhibit Spotlights Celebrated Yoruban Sculptor

The piece, by famed Nigerian sculptor Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè, depicts two mothers with two twins. The style is soaked in tradition, but the sculptor has also found his own voice within that tradition, and in turn, given his subjects their own voices as well. Look closely, into the abstraction, and you can see the individual expressions of the figures, the things that make them unique, perhaps a mixture of dignity and worry in the adults, a sense of determination and mischief in the children. Look even more closely and you understand more of the relationships among the figures. The two mothers are themselves twins, and they are supporting each other; their outside arms, meanwhile, are there to protect and guide all of their children. They’re a small society unto themselves, even as they’re connected to everyone around them.

Two Heads Are Better than One is one of many arresting and engrossing pieces in ​“Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition,” on view now at the Yale University Art Gallery through Jan. 8. A thorough retrospective of a true master of his craft, the exhibit — organized by James Green, the Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation Associate Curator of African Art — offers rich artistic and historical context alongside Bámigbóyè’s most stunning pieces, and in the process, raises uncomfortable and important questions about the way we understand African art.

“Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè was a legendary figure in the arts of 20th-century Nigeria, described as … the ​‘carver who provokes elders’ awe,” one of many helpful notes in the exhibit explain. He was born in 1885 and was ​“around seven years old when his parents realized that his destiny was to be a sculptor, not a farmer like his father. He was apprenticed to an unidentified local master, and by 1920 he had established a workshop … where he worked within the conventions of the Yorùbá woodcarving tradition while perfecting his own unique style.” 

He received commissions from royal, religious, and colonial patrons, but the pinnacle of his achievement were a series of masks he made for an annual festival known as Ẹpa. ​“By the time of Nigerian independence, in 1960, he had gained national and international acclaim,” the accompanying note states. By the end of his life, in 1975, he had also been a chief herbalist, priest, and ruler of his region. He ​“not only expanded the definition of Yorùbá woodcarving but also actively contributed to the well-being and peaceful functioning of his society.”

The Yale exhibit is the first one to include all his major sculptures, and contextualizes them with other examples of Yorùbá artwork, both sculpture and textiles. It also gives a great deal of context for Bámigbóyè himself — the artistic traditions, stretching unbroken across the centuries, that he was a part of, as well as the tumultuous history of 20th century Nigeria that he lived through. More than just background information, it helps the viewer appreciate the ways that Bámigbóyè both exemplified his art and was an innovator within it. He was steeped in the knowledge and skill of the past, but was also a thoroughly contemporary artist, observing the society around him and reflecting it back upon itself, in a way that connected with a wide audience, inside and outside of Nigeria.

The exhibit contains a number of Bámigbóyè’s smaller pieces, from his carving knifes (themselves small works of art) to smaller wooden figurines to a board and pieces for playing games. Along with these come anecdotes about Bámigbóyè that, strictly true or not, add to the sense of him as a legend in his own time. ​“According to his praise song,” one note states, ​“Bámigbóyè was so talented that he could play … a complicated counting game, in which counters are moved within twelve cups from one end of a game board to the other, with one hand while he carved with the other.” In the note accompanying his carving knives, we learn that ​“Bámigbóyè used his entire arm in a fluid motion, and he never made preparatory drawings … according to legend, when Bámigbóyè’s right hand tired from carving, he simply used his left.”

If some of the language seems a little hyperbolic, the centerpieces of the show — as in, they are literally in the center of the large gallery devoted to the exhibit — suggest it’s deserved. The festival masks are huge, imposing pieces, and when a note reveals that they were all carved from single pieces of wood, the detail and depth of them become pretty mind-boggling. The masks were made for specific people. One was made for the mothers of twins. Another was made for a war general. Another, soberingly, depicts a slave trader. A final mask, which is perhaps the most impressive of a series of impressive pieces, was made for a ruler. The title of the piece translates to ​“you can look at it for a whole day,” and there’s some truth to it. Like the others — but particularly in this piece — the mask contains a multitude of people, ​“mothers with children” who are the ruler’s wives, ​“messengers, praise singers, courtiers, musicians, and warriors — a complete town in miniature.” Used in the festival (a helpful film demonstrates what that looks like), it would be a mirror to onlookers, who might see themselves, their neighbors, their society, in its connections to the past and its movement through the present.

Fascinating, illuminating, moving, and instructive, the exhibit on Bámigbóyè and his art makes a very strong case for mounting a series of similar future exhibits of individual Black and Brown artists working in non-Western European artistic traditions, showing not only the pinnacle of their achievements, but the deeper context from which they arose. 

The necessity of such exhibits is illustrated, in some ways, by the pieces in the art gallery’s permanent collection of African art, located three floors down from the Bámigbóyè exhibit. The pieces in that gallery, from a much wider swath of the African continent, are similarly striking in their artistic merit, but the vast majority of the accompanying plaques cannot name the individual artists who created them. The reasons for this are likely quite complicated, as the pieces, sometimes hundreds of years old, passed from hand to hand, from transaction to transaction, before arriving here in New Haven. But the problem is simple: somewhere along the line, the individual artists were erased. And that is still better treatment than much African art still receives in the United States; consider how many times such pieces end up in natural history museums, next to dinosaur bones and primate fossils, where — despite the best intentions of modern curators — they are still viewed as anthropological artifacts, and not as artistic successes. 

Just as Bámigbóyè reflected his own society, so the exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery reflects our society and its relationship to the art of Black and Brown cultures back at us. The work of recent decades, and the past couple years in particular, have done much to illuminate the problems, and have created space for people to start working on solutions. We still have a very long way to go. But the Bámigbóyè exhibit shows that doing that work, and presenting that art to others in a way that lets them appreciate it more deeply, is its own kind of beauty.

“Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Jan. 8. Admission is free. Visit the art gallery’s website for hours and more information.