When James Green was a little boy growing up on the family farm in Kalahari in South Africa, he spent a lot of time looking for rock art created by artists thousands of years ago on the walls of caves and rocky outcrops near his home. He loved the artwork itself, and also how the shapes of the rocks and the patterns of the lichen played with the art to make it feel even more alive.

During the pandemic shutdown, Green, now assistant curator of African Art at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), thought about that rock art as he planned how to refresh and renew the African Art exhibit.

As part of that effort, he incorporated the curvy, pitted, grey concrete exterior of the Louis Kahn-designed stairwell into the African Art Gallery. Working with Eric Lin from the Yale School of Drama and Cecilia Estanislao, a YUAG graphic designer, he created what feels like the wall of a cave where 40 images taken by Kenyan photographer and rock-art specialist David Coulson play in a loop. Since Green could not bring the rock art to New Haven, he, Lin, and Estanislao figured out a way to bring museum-goers to Africa, with their imaginations as the ticket.

The stairwell, itself a work of architectural art, is transformed into a shapeshifting canvas that is an exposed boulder, then a flat rock pavement, then the inside of a sheltered cave. Works of artists from Morocco to South Africa, some from 30,000 years ago, dance before the viewer’s eyes, from realistic interpretations of animals and people to abstract representations of what feel like spiritual and religious concepts.

What did these artists from so many years ago intend when they created their work? What were they trying to communicate? Is this art a celebration of beauty? Joy? Sorrow? Did it help heal the sick? Encourage rain? Was its intent to teach, to warn about, or to condemn some kind of behavior? How did these painters and engravers think about art, how did they define it, and what was its role in their community?

The Importance of Community

The notion of community, and the important role that art and artists play in it, is integral to the newly reorganized exhibit. Instead of relying upon a thematic arrangements as in the past, the gallery is now also organized according to cultural groups. As a result, the idea of the artists themselves, although many remain unidentified, and their role in the community, is elevated.

YUAG’s African art collection includes in its entirety about 3,000 pieces representing more than 200 cultural groups from antiquity to the 20th century from artists all over the continent. While reworking the exhibit in the gallery, Green took some pieces off view and added in others, so that while the number of works on display is smaller, when combined with the information offered about the works, it feels even more comprehensive.

In addition to introducing the rock art, Green also has placed a greater emphasis on newly acquired textiles, including one donated by the Shoreline Unitarian Universalist Church in Madison, and the displays place a sharper focus on works by identified artists, where possible.

“One of the things that’s so great about this Louis Kahn building is that it has this extraordinary ceiling and walls that can be moved relatively easily to make new space,” he says. “The idea is that the gallery should be able to shift and change.”

He says his intention while reworking the exhibit was pretty simple.

“I just wanted to provide a little more sense of the continent,” he says. “So, you’ll see as you enter now, a map on your right that also lists out about 200 cultural groups.”

He also worked hard on the labels to provide information that, likewise, allows the viewer to understand the works of art and how they relate to different cultures on the continent. The exhibit also plays to the collection’s strengths, and shows how certain styles predominate in some cultures. And, while some of the works in the African art collection can be challenging and dramatic, he says the exhibition now also places an additional emphasis on beauty.

Those Who Have Left Their Imprint

While re-imagining the exhibit, he worked hard to respect the work and vision of those who collected the art, and donated it to the museum, and of others who have left their imprint on the collection. The YUAG staged its first exhibition of African art in the early 1950s, shortly after the Louis Kahn building opened. The collection originally included North African textiles donated in the 1930s and wood carvings from West and Central Africa, collected by Ralph Linton, a former professor at Yale, and purchased for the gallery by the Osborn family. In the early 2000s, Yale graduate Charles B. Benenson, who favored art that he considered “loud” and “aggressive,” donated almost 600 works of art and endowed a curatorial position for the collection. Working with Susan Vogel, the previous director of the gallery, Benenson collected an impressive array of works by both master artists and popular artists. The collection was then enhanced by antiquities donated by SusAnna and Joel B. Grae, North African jewelery donated by the Prussin family, and decorative arts donated by Paul F. Walter.

“What is often forgotten is that the collection is very much shaped by individuals,” Green says.

While Green has a great deal of respect for the collection, and the way it was exhibited in the past, he also saw ways to enhance the experience of those visiting the gallery.

‘As Originally Intended’

One example involves one of the most impressive pieces in the collection a Urhobo figure of a nursing mother. This figure, from the late 19th- or early 20th century and from southern Nigeria, likely would have been part of a group of spirits representing “edjo re akare,” or ancestral spirits in carved form. Sometimes used in annual ritual festivities, it would have been displayed in a shrine.

While the gallery was closed during the pandemic, the figure was given time and attention in the conservation workshop. Working with carved polyethylene foam, Japanese tissue, and funori, an adhesive extracted from seaweed, the figure was painstakingly repaired.

Seven feet tall and carved from a single piece of hardwood, the magnificent piece now stands in a place of honor at the front of the gallery, right near the entrance.

“This was previously displayed in the round,” Green says. “But you would never have seen this in the round...This would have been in a shrine with a wall behind it. So now you approach it as you would have approached it as originally intended.”

A Reflection of Spiritual Openness

One of Green’s favorite parts of the collection is his area of expertise.

“I mean, art from the Congo will always be my absolute favorite,” he says.

Green’s Ph.D focused on the art of the Teke people in the Republic of Congo, members of one of the oldest of Bantu tribes. He did field work in Mbé, the spiritual center of this region of the Congo, and delved into the history of colonialism and African history, from the perspective of the Teke.

Through interviews and other investigations, he examined what changed and what continued in terms of beliefs around certain materials, including the ivory used for billiard balls, knife handles, and piano keys.

Green’s work examined raw data collected at the time as he worked to understand the economic value system of the Teke. Among many other things, he learned that the art of the region had to be both beautiful and serve a practical purpose.

“That means it has to be practical as a tool of a diviner, or serve as a religious function, or to serve as a bridge to the world of the ancestors,” he says. “These beautiful carvings are a reflection of the spiritual openness or the blessings that the artist had. It’s all very linked.”

Among the works of art that might be expected, including an ancestral shrine figure that marks the crossover point between the world of the living and the world of ancestry, Green has also included a display of raffia hats, “something you’d never expect to see in a gallery. I’ve tried to highlight some of the less expected.”

A First Love

Developing the rock art portion of the exhibit was fun, he says.

“Rock art was my first love, from a personal point of view,” he says. “I spent a lot of my childhood looking for rock art sites. It’s really such an important art tradition that is not represented in gallery space...It’s part of the landscape, and you can see how different artists might have been inspired by the shape of a rock or the shape of lichen. It is absolutely site-specific. I have really always felt this loss, to not to be able to see rock art in relation to other African art traditions.”

David Coulson, a photographer from Kenya, spent years documenting the sites all over the continent, ultimately collecting photographs from about 800 sites. In 2013, he sold the digital files to the British Museum, which created the Trust for African Rock Art, or TARA. Those files, combined with the museum’s unique stairwell, inspired Green to try to put the rock art in the same room with the other art from the continent.

“We have the Louis Kahn stairwell and it’s a really difficult space, and it’s a listed structure, so you can’t just hang works of art on it,” he says.

Green once saw art projected on Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and wondered if it could be done in the gallery.

“I thought, ‘That’s so cool,’ so I met with the projectionist at the school of drama and we started talking about it,” he says.

Over the course of about 2 ½ years, they developed on the project with the help of Erin Sims, a student from the Yale School of Drama, who worked on the computer programming.

How the Story Should Be Told

As for the future of the gallery, Green says he’s giving a lot of thought as to how the story of African art should be told, and how objects at the Beinecke and Peabody Museum might help tell a richer story.

“We are in this period of re-evaluation and research and coming to new understandings as carefully as we can, to examine the routes that these objects took to end up in New Haven,” he says. “I think there will be a lot of international connections to be made.”

In fact, the current exhibit includes items from the Benin Kingdom. Art from Benin is both famous and controversial for having been abruptly and violently looted from its creators and rightful owners.

“We are really looking into the provenance and history, and looking into whether we have any objects we shouldn’t have,” he says. “We do have a few works from Benin, and they are on view with labels that describe the raid on Benin. We have been conducting thorough provenance research, so we will know how they came to us.”

The goal in part is to contribute to a Benin digital project that would link all of the works across all of the collections where they now live, and for a new museum to be opened in Benin, he says. If the pieces at Yale are wanted for that project, they will be included, he says.

“Or if they prefer to have them at Yale, where people can learn about this culture and this art history and this incredibly dramatic moment, that’s fine, too,” he says. “That decision needs to be made by the court of Benin. Now is a moment of research, sharing information, [and] presenting these objects, and then it’s really up to them.”

Green also is hard at work, in conjunction with the National Museum in Lagos, on an exhibit that will focus on the extraordinary 50-year career of the Nigerian artist Moshood Olusomo Bámigbóyè.

“Active in the early to mid-20th century, Bámigbóyè was one of a number of Yorùbá wood carvers with workshops in southwestern Nigeria and is best known for the spectacular masks called Epa that he carved for religious festivals in the region,” says a description on the YUAG website. “Weighing up to 80 pounds and measuring over four feet tall, with intricate superstructures that could feature dozens of finely carved individual figures, these masks represent some of the most complex and elaborate works of Yorùbá art ever made.”

The exhibit will also include information about the artist provided by his family, says Green. “They are defining the narrative,” he says. “They’ve been so generous.”

As excited as Green is about the work he’s done in the gallery and the work being done on the upcoming exhibit, he wants to remind people that these spectacular works are merely highlights from the broader collection, housed both at the gallery and at The Margaret and Angus Wurtele Study Center at Yale’s West Campus.

At the West Campus, the works “are on open display easily accessible to anyone who wants to see them,” he says, encouraging people to take the shuttle bus over there and enjoy them.

“These objects are meant to stay in circulation and to be always accessible,” he says. “We want to make sure everything is out in the open and useful. And inspiring. You know?”