MoMA in New York Re-exhibition African Artists: Creating the "Alphabet" to Communicate with the World

Recently, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held a solo exhibition "The Endless World" for African artist James Johnson Sweeney. This is the second retrospective exhibition of African artists in the museum's history. One of Sweeney's most famous works is the "Bader Alphabet", where he combines writing and painting to try to communicate with the world while showing West African traditions and indigenous life.

Since the founding of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, African art has occupied a place — not the kind of African art you might think. In 1935, when the museum was located in a townhouse on West 53rd Street, curator James Johnson Sweeney curated the African Negro Art exhibition, which included 600 exhibits including painted masks from the Dogong, Baure ivory and bracelets, as well as Congolese stools and spoons. It was one of the most well-known exhibitions of the first 10 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it was also toured in the United States.

Why did this exhibition take place in MoMA, not in an ethnological or anthropological museum? Because Sweeney claimed that these ritual artifacts were actually modern art—and the best modern art of the era. "As a sculptural tradition of the last century," Sweeney says, "it has no rivals." ”

However, MoMA could turn these artifacts—these ostensibly plundered Benin bronzes, loaned by curators from the German Museum of Ethnography—into "modern" sculptures, but the nameless Africans who made the artifacts did not become "modern artists". Even in the 1980s, at the museum's infamous exhibition "20th Century 'Primitive Art'", the African masks and statues that appeared next to Gauguin and Picasso had no historical, legal, or religious background, or even mentioned when they were made. It wasn't until 2002, when Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor brought his famous exhibition The Short Century to MoMA PS1, that living African artists entered the museum, on an equal footing with their European counterparts, whose names were first known.

The Short Century exhibition scene, 2002

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923-2014) was one of the artists involved in the "short century". Originally from Côte d'Ivoire, he celebrates global citizenship and African history in numerous small paintings, along with manuscripts of his own designed writing system. More than a thousand such paintings are on display in the exhibition "Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound," a massive new exhibition that presents the decades-long vision of a profound, persistent artist who sees writing and painting as equally important parts of a world-wide body of knowledge.

Frederick Bruley Buabré

The exhibition presents an important gift the museum received, a series of paintings called alphabet Bété (1991), a writing system that Buabré designed for West Africa throughout his life, but also applicable to the world. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, a curator who joined MoMA in 2019, has assembled it with other works. The exhibition is considered deliberate, thorough, and unabashed in its cross-cultural character, with a deep humanism that is like a breath of fresh air in the downturn when people are caught up in the essentialism of digital identity.

Exhibition scene "Frederick Bruley Buabré: A World of Infinity"

Buabré was born in a small village in the contemporary western part of Côte d'Ivoire, inhabited by the Bade people. At the age of 18, he was conscripted into the colonial navy and was sent to Dakar, then the capital of French West Africa. After the war, he stayed there, entered the colonial government, and then, on March 11, 1948, he experienced a transcendental hallucination: the sky was open and seven suns danced around a central star; Buabré was inspired, used a new name (Cheik Nadro, "The Revelator"), and dedicated his life to the expression of celestial knowledge.

This sacred spark has been the source of its mythology since European and American art institutions began exhibiting Buabré's paintings in the late 1980s. At MoMA, there is a group of eight small paintings he made in 1991, each depicting a colored sun surrounded by dozens of spikes, which may seem as bizarre to people today as the coronavirus. However, unlike other "outsider" modernists who claimed to be inspired by God, Buabré apparently did not introduce any information from the spiritual realm into his art.

Works by Frederick Bruley Buabré

This illusion is more like a trigger, a look than an introspective dynamic. For the rest of his life, first art and then writing, he took a systematic approach to cataloguing and disseminating knowledge about this and the next.

He first invented the 401-letter Bader alphabet (to be precise, it was not an alphabet but a syllable list, and each word represented a combination of consonants and vowels, similar to the Japanese hiragana and katakana). Each word is a stylized reproduction of an aspect of Bader's daily life related to sound, with just a few strokes. For example, the pronunciation of beu is a basket with two handles; bhe is two separate legs; fo originates from a person who is cutting down a tree; gba is two people wrestling.

One of the "Bader Alphabet" series

In 1958, Bullbray published this syllable list and used it in manuscript writing in the fields of anthropology and spirituality. He then used his favorite colored pencil as a medium to explain the origin of each word on a cardboard the size of a playing card. The words are arranged in the order of the Western alphabet in the exhibition, with images of flies and snakes, drums and containers, showing a holistic and conceptual understanding, which is often where "alien art" is denied. They are fascinating, although I need the English interpretation of these words more. To non-Baders, the paintings appear to be isolated from the world, but Burbre sees them as a way of communicating across the world. Painting and writing, creation and communication, reason and spirituality, the Bader Alphabet highlights the enormous creative tension in Burbre's art.

One of the "African Faces Museum" series

In the Musée du Visage Africain series, images of scars and tattoos are surrounded in French, depicting African cities under walls or wedding and funeral ceremonies. In some late series, he painted a small painting for each of the world's more than 200 countries, glorifying democracy and women's rights: women's skirts and ballot boxes were patterned from national flags, with a French note that reads "Democracy is the Science of Equality." Burbré's use of French once again shows that he never regarded his art, or the Bed syllable table, as a private language. I think his identity as an artist and writer is more like William Blake or Xu Bing than an "outsider" artist.

This is only MoMA's second solo exhibition of black African artists. The first time was in 2018, showing a model of a dream city by Congolese artist Isek Kingelez. Like Kinlez, Burbrey was not trained as an artist. Like Kinlez, he imagined a utopia of global harmony in cardboard and bright colors. Like Kinlez, he first caught the attention of the West in 1989 at the 1989 exhibition "The Magician of the Land" in Paris — the first major attempt to place Western and non-Western artists on an equal footing, with participants in Africa, Asia, and Australia (unlike Europeans) who were almost entirely self-taught. Like Kinlez, Burbry entered the MoMA collection thanks to the Italian collector Jean Pigozzi. After seeing the "Magician of the Lands," Pigocci began collecting impressive collections of African art, and is said to have collected the most African art in the world.

Issyk Kinlez's "Urban Model" at MoMA

Both Bullbray and Kinlez deserve to be here. But not all African artists are self-taught, and I want to ask, why, nearly a century from the "Art of Black Africa" exhibition, when MoMA turned to the continent, was the most popular artist for self-taught rather than professional artist? Bullbray's solo exhibition is exactly the kind of retrospective of African artists I want to see at MoMA. One of the most moving works in the museum's 2019 retouching exhibits was a prison note by Sudanese artist Ibrahim el-Salahi. He is one of the leaders of Modernism in Sudan and a professor at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. He weaves together calligraphy and modern painting, and his career spans Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In their own ways, El-Sarahi and Burbrey brought African aesthetics to the world.

(This article is compiled from The New York Times)

The exhibition "Frederick Bruley Buabré: A Boundless World" will run until August 13.