World Music and African Art

by Professor Victor Provost, Music

On the morning of Thursday, November 16th, the Montgomery Scholars World Music Honors class set out for the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.  Despite a few metro delays, the class mustered in front of Shonibare’s vibrant Wind Sculpture VII for a group photo before heading inside to explore.  Several students pointed with excitement to the large banner hanging near the front door which read: Into the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya.  In the preceding weeks, they’d listened to and reflected on the music of the Drexciya – the pioneering Detroit-based electronic music duo and the inspiration behind Ayana V. Jackson’s multimedia exhibit.

The museum is sublime – circular, with an open channel through the center such that you can peer from floor to floor, obscuring the physical boundaries between exhibits.  I’ve visited NMAA several times and I’m always struck by the abundance of sound in this space.  The looped guitar riffs of “Guitar Boy Superstar” Sir Victor Uwaifo ricochet off Duke Ellington’s big band impressionism, dodging throbbing soundscapes and scattered voices.   Students saunter off in small groups, giggling and chatting as they descend into the galleries.

Jackson’s Into the Deep commands the main gallery on subfloor 1 with life-sizes figures, immersive audio/video, deliberately curated scents, and projection art.  Students spread out through the gallery, gazing through portholes, flipping through copies of Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic”, and standing, enraptured, opposite wall-to-wall video installations.  As they continue to filter through the rest of the museum, there are occasional outbursts of conversation, discussion, and laughter.

Here are some comments from the students.

“One exhibit that was memorable to me was the one about the West African photography industry before the emergence of film industries like Nollywood. One of the notes for a photo stated how West Africans did not have as many resources as the photographers in the West. Despite their lack of resources, I still saw the creativity the expressed with the “little” they had. It was so beautiful and a reminder to me that my culture is beautiful.”

“Before going to the museum, I honestly expected all of it to focus on the African continent, so I was pleasantly surprised at the African-American exhibits and embarrassed by my assumptions. Overall, I loved how varied each exhibit was from the other and how they weren’t all simply visual as some included sound and even smell. I also enjoyed learning about the deliberate decisions that each artist made in their exhibit/artwork to create a specific look or effect.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at the museum. There were a limited number of exhibits that made it less overwhelming to look at everything, while there were a number of interactive items that made the experience very interesting. I thought that the last exhibit representing the Black Lives Matter movement was intense, informative, and powerful, representing the struggles of African American people. The exhibit modeled after Drexciya was also fascinating to see, the atmosphere and the visual representations along with the music in the background was captivating and added a realm for the story of the Drexciyans to commence.”