New Exhibition: “Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time” at Neuberger Museum of Art.

March 1 – June 14, 2015

“In the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Kuba peoples are renowned for their cut-pile raffia cloths. When sewn together and layered, they form extraordinary skirts and overskirts that wrap around the body multiple times. Characterized by resplendent surface elaboration, these garments are detailed and complex like other Kuba decorative arts, a feature found in no other African kingdom. Remarkable not only for their beauty but also for their large scale — some of these textiles reach nearly thirty feet in length — they are worn on special occasions by men and women, and display the status of the wearer.

Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time is the first exhibition to bring together works from two of the earliest collections of Kuba textiles: the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, Belgium, founded by Leopold II in 1897, and the Sheppard Collection at Hampton University in Virginia, gathered between 1890 and 1910 by the American Presbyterian Congo missionary, William Henry Sheppard, the first Westerner to be received by a Kuba king in 1892. Additional important loans to the exhibition come from the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three private collections.

The Kuba collections of the Musée Royal de l’ Afrique Centrale and Hampton University distinguish themselves by their precision in dating and provenance. Kuba textiles of established date are rare but the groundbreaking research from these institutions makes it possible, for the fist time, to establish a foundation for their historical trajectory. Twenty-five skirts and overskirts worn by men and women from all social classes have been selected for Kuba Textiles from these two major collections. By comparing the techniques and styles of early documented textiles to examples collected during the past forty years, one can for the first time, through expert evaluation, not only attempt to establish a chronology for these works but also dispel the notion of a monolithic Kuba style.

Woman’s Overskirt (ncák minen'ishushuna)
Kuba peoples, Bushoong group, Nsheng, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Late 19th - early 20th century
Raffia, cotton cloth, wool, appliqué, embroidery, with cut-pile (borders)
26 x 67 3/8 x 4 inches (66 x 171 x 10 cm)
Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, EO.0.0.27401
Gift of Nyim Lukengo’s wife to Marcel Van den Abeele, before 1924
Photo credit/copyright: Collection MRAC Tervuren; photo J.-M. Vandyck, MRAC Tervuren ©

Kuba Textiles considers skirt and overskirt embellishment within the context of Kuba style generally, but unlike other exhibitions that view these works alongside a panoply of Kuba arts, this show considers them alongside directly related objects. The first section of the exhibition features the earliest known wooden sculpture of a seated Kuba king (ndop) from the eighteenth-century, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum. As depicted on the carving, richly embellished accessories will be displayed alongside the carved wooden sculpture. These objects are drawn from the Musée Royal de l’Afrique. The inclusion of a royal sculpture recalls the importance of embroidered textiles among the Kuba peoples since the founder of the kingdom was identified with wearing lavish woven cloth. The second section — the core of the exhibition — displays selected skirts and overskirts, the surfaces of which are entirely covered with embroidered, appliquéd, or tie-dyed patterns displayed in an asymmetrical or irregular way. Amid the textiles there are two small clusters of objects. One of these groupings features postcards and trade cards that illustrate the popularization of Kuba decorated textiles and the splendor of the King’s accoutrements in the early twentieth century until the 1950s. The other cluster displays cosmetic boxes that contained tukula, a powder extracted from a hard wood tree used not only as a cosmetic but also to dye textiles, as well as an ensemble oftukula blocs, known as mbwoong itool, which feature motifs similar to those found on many of the skirts. Made by women, these small-carved blocks, crafted from a camwood paste, were often used in funerary celebrations.

The exhibition concludes by suggesting the influence of Kuba textile design on twentieth century western art and stage design, pairing Kuba textiles with both enlarged facsimile details of a well-known painting by the great Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), as well as a garment designed by the great German costume designer, Jürgen Rose (b. 1937). In both instances, the painting and the costume borrow from Kuba patterns, share its affinity for the ubiquity of ornamentation, and demonstrate the continuing influence of Kuba design internationally.

Overall, the exhibition features eighty-two works (forty-one textiles and forty-one objects) many of which date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and most of them publically exhibited for the first time in Kuba Textiles. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 140-page catalogue, fully illustrated in color. It will contain five scholarly essays by: Dr. Patricia Darish, independent scholar; Dr. Christraud M. Geary, Teel Senior Curator Emerita of African and Oceanic Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Christina Giuntini, Conservator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Dr. Verena Traeger, Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna; and Dr. Julien Volper, Associate Curator, Musée Royal de l’ Afrique Centrale, Tervuren. These essays will provide important, new scholarship on Kuba textile design from historical, technical, and contextual perspectives, based primarily on archival documents.

Generous support for the exhibition Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Timehas been provided by The Coby Foundation, LTD, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, and ArtsWestchester, with support from the Westchester County Government, and Elisabeth and Bob Wilmers. Additional support is provided by Members of the African Arts Council, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Purchase College Foundation.”

Visit the site of the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Kuba Images online at Smithsonian Eliot Elisofon Photograph Archives

Some Kuba textiles in use as court regalia, 1970. These are just a glimpse of the wonderful set of photographs taken by Life photographer Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973) of the Kuba royal court in 1970. To see more, and many other remarkable photos, visit the Smithsonian archive here.

Kuba: some early textiles and photographs

In this post, to mark the on-going Kuba textile exhibition at the Textile Museum, Washington, we will look at some fine images of textile production and use among the Kuba, plus a couple of cloths from notable early collections. These photographs were taken by the Polish photographer Casimir Zagourski (1883-1944, )who lived in Leopoldville, in the then Belgian Congo, from 1924 until his death. They form part of a large series of images that Zagourski distributed in the 1930s as postcards and complete albums under the title L’Afrique qui disparait. These were published in a book Lost Africa by Pierre Loos (Skira, 2001). For more information on Zagourski see C. Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa 1885-1960 (National Museum of African Art, 2002).  Click on any image to enlarge.

The earliest foreign visitor who was able to reach the capital of the Kuba kingdom was the African American missionary William H. Sheppard, in 1892. The large collection of artefacts he assembled, including the cut pile embroidered panel below, is now in Hampton University Museum, VA and is the most important source of information on Kuba material culture in the late C19th. See the Center for African Art catalogue Art/Artifact (1988) for more details.

The next important visitor to document the Kuba kingdom and its neighbours was the Hungarian ethnographer Emil Torday (1875-1931.) Torday’s extensive collections of Kuba and related objects gathered between 1900-1909 are now in the British Museum, London, and the MRAC, Tervuren, Belgium. For more information see John Mack, Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo 1900-1909 (British Museum Press, 1990). For some of Torday’s own photographs and an article see here. Torday collected the panel below which is now in the British Museum (Af1979,01.2675.)

“Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa”–major new exhibition now at the Textile Museum, Washington.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the opening of this important new show and the accompanying Fall Symposium at the Textile Museum. This is a beautifully presented show, with each piece carefully mounted, sensitively lit, and displayed against a restrained chocolate brown background that does justice to the artistry and variety of superb Kuba textiles on view. The wider context of Central African raffia art was shown by the inclusion of a small number of textiles from other regional traditions (more are shown in the catalogue) and by a group of fine baskets, primarily from the Tutsi and Hutu peoples of Rwanda. The Textile Museum and the curator, Vanessa Drake Moraga, are to be congratulated on this splendid exhibition.

Below is the gallery guide. Click on each image for a larger view.

The exhibition catalogue is available from the Textile Museum. Click on the image below:

Finally there is a program of events to accompany the show. Click to view.

Central African Textiles: Art and Cultural Narrative–fall symposium at the Textile Museum, Washington

“This weekend-long symposium brings The Textile Museum’s fall exhibition, Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa, to life. Join renowned scholars and authors as they shed light on why Kuba textiles are considered among the most beautiful and influential of African art forms.

Emerging in the early 17th century, the Kuba kingdom grew into a powerful and wealthy confederation of nearly 20 different ethnic groups located in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Kuba are renowned as masters of the textile arts and surface design. The improvisational, abstract aesthetic of Kuba textiles captivated the members of the European avant-garde movement between 1910 and 1930, and its influences can be seen through modernism, fashion, fabric design, and the decorative arts.

Six presenters will place this artistic tradition in the context of Central African culture and the world of ritual the textiles were created for, in addition to exploring the lasting influence of their striking designs.”

Full details here

Very interesting program with well chosen speakers. I hope to be there…

Exceptional early Kuba cloth at Sotheby’s Paris

Lot 7 in Sotheby’s forthcoming African Art sale “A New York Collection” to be held in Paris on November 30th is this superb early raffia textile from the Kuba kingdon in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Estimated at Euro 1000 – 2000 and measuring 76cm x 57, this piece is reminiscent of some of the earliest Kuba cloths from the British Museum’s Torday collection.

Beyond the Kuba in Congo surface design

The embroidered and appliquéd raffia cloths of the Kuba peoples of Congo are very familiar to collectors of African textiles and to all those with an interest in indigenous African design. Remarkable and beautiful though the finest Kuba cloths were, they are only the best known and most easily found of what was once an extensive variety of raffia textiles woven by almost all peoples of the Congo basin. Today it seems likely that only Kuba cloths are still made in Congo and the few non-Kuba examples that occasionally reach the market come mainly from old European collections assembled in the colonial period. The best place to see examples from these other areas is in museum collections, some of which are now accessible on-line. I will have more to say about these in subsequent posts.

Last week at a small "tribal" art fair here in London I greatly admired an early C20th mat attributed by the dealer to the Mangbetu people. It reminded me to look again at this obscure and unjustly neglected aspect of surface design in Congo. These amazing and exceptionally rare examples are all from the collection of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. As yet they are not on-line - these images are scanned from COART, E. La Nattes. Annales du Musée du Congo (1927)

Kuba Kitsch ?

Cut-pile embroidered squares from the Kuba kingdom in the D.R. Congo are among the best known of African textiles. Their abstract geometric designs and exploration of complex symmetry have long been appreciated by collectors who otherwise show little interest in African fabrics. However although large quantities of new cloths are woven in Congo and are readily available internationally, there is relatively little published information about the circumstances in which they are now produced. Catholic missionary involvement in at least some kuba cloth weaving goes back to the early decades of the C20th, but we have no knowledge of the ways in which this may have impacted design. The two cloths shown here are the only examples I know of that have figurative designs. The first was bought several years ago from a dealer in Portobello Road, London, the second, which belongs to a UK private collector, was found in a tourist market in Namibia. Whilst perhaps visually disturbing to a connoisseur of classic kuba pieces they do raise a number of interesting questions. Clearly the imagery of these two indicates a certain context but are they typical of a wider number or very isolated examples. Are figurative kubas intended solely for specific local presentational or display uses ? Several Congolese dealers who buy regularly in the markets of Kinshasa were surprised to see these suggesting that they are far from common. Any information or images of further examples would be most welcome.