African art: A shared, underexposed treasure in Philadelphia
Timothy Rub, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Julian Siggers, Rub's counterpart at the Penn Museum, may agree or disagree on most anything.
Timothy Rub, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Julian Siggers, Rub's counterpart at the Penn Museum, may agree or disagree on most anything.
But they are of one opinion about their current collaborative effort, "Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art," an exhibition of selected works from the Penn Museum's collection of African art and artifacts, now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"I am very excited about further collaborations after this," said Siggers. "We are already looking beyond."
Rub said the same.
"I hope this is the beginning of a sustained conversation about how we can work together in a number of different ways," he said.
The case of African art highlights the need. Each institution speaks to a different audience and has different ways of using objects in its collection. The Art Museum has virtually no African collection. And although the Penn Museum has a rich collection of about 10,000 African pieces, it has gaps in its Asian holdings.
This state of affairs is not an accident, and therein lies a tale of yet another Old Philadelphia "gentleman's agreement."
In 1928, Horace H.F. Jayne, curator of Asian art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and new director of what was then known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Art and Archaeology, sat down with Fiske Kimball, then director of the Art Museum. In the grand patrician tradition, they decided "to do what's best for the city," said Siggers.
In this case, the directors took a hard look at their respective resources and determined it was madness to compete.
Henceforth, they concluded, the Art Museum would concentrate on collecting European, Asian, and American art, and the university museum would concentrate on everything else, including clearly ethnographic materials, African artifacts, and works from classical antiquity.
Objects were transferred between the institutions.
"They gave us a great deal of Egyptian material and objects from classical Greece and Rome," said Siggers.
In 1931, the museums conducted a joint expedition to Persia (now Iran). From that effort, the Art Museum acquired a Sasanian Dynasty (A.D. 224-651) stuccoed portal with cylindrical columns and arches. It was installed at the entrance to the museum's growing Asian galleries.
In addition to such Near Eastern pieces, the Art Museum acquired some Chinese porcelain, Hindu sculpture, and Islamic manuscripts from the university museum.
Such acquisitions and focus allowed the Art Museum's Asian collection to flourish, which will become even more apparent when the newly renovated and reinstalled South Asian galleries open this year.
At the same time, the Art Museum's African collection has remained retiring at best. The Art Museum virtually ceded the field to the university museum.
There have been four substantial exhibitions of select Penn Museum African works at the Art Museum in the last half-century - in 1969, 1982, 1986, and the current exhibition in the Perelman Building, one of a suite of five African exhibitions encompassing photography, fashion, textiles, and artifacts.
One problem moving forward is that neither museum has an African curator.
(The exhibit at the Perelman Building was curated independently by Kristina Van Dyke, former director of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.)
"Securing funding for a new curator for the [African] section is part of our current strategic plan," said Siggers. "We do have a keeper of the collection who is very knowledgeable, and we also have many members of the Penn faculty who use the collection for research and teaching and periodically curate exhibitions here at the museum."
Rub said the Art Museum has significant African holdings - largely textiles - and some substantial artworks have been donated. (The Arensberg Collection contained notable African works, though not in great numbers; a few are in the "Look Again" exhibition.)
In the absence of a collection, the museum has not felt the urgency to establish a curatorial position. That has consequences, said Rub.
"The real question is advocacy within the institution," he said. "In order for the sustained focus to be maintained on any subject, you need somebody to say, 'This is important - we should be doing it. We should be presenting this work. We should be doing exhibitions, programs, even if we don't develop a collection.'
"That's an equally vital role for a curator who pays attention to a particular field over a period of time."