Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her indigenous group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

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Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

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In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.¹ Writer Charlson L. Ong, in a 1989 article for the Daily Globe, articulates a popular impression of Villanueva toward the height of the artist’s prolific practice: “[Villanueva is] most everyone’s idea of a mumbaki—a Cordilleran shaman who invokes ancestral and nature spirits.”²

The events that signaled the opening and dismantling of the maze aspired to states of revelry and trance by way of an eclectic ensemble. Musicians wearing their malong, or tubular garments, played Muslim instruments. Cordilleran elders performed a cañao, a sacrificial ritual. Villanueva’s performative agency assembled a social world through degrees of mimicry and guise. Though not of Indigenous origins, Villanueva wore a bahag (loincloth) and applied white circular patterns on his skin, signaling affinities with Indigeneity through a competently invented self. Certain magical effects were attained through crafty, logistical trickery, while others solicited improbable cosmic interventions. At the closing ceremony, Villanueva performed a borrowed ritual to call rain to the site, expressing the artist-shaman’s ambitions to synchronize spirit and atmosphere. A documentary by Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion condenses Villanueva’s fascinating duality through its title Showman/Shaman, a duplicitous play between guise and embodiment that parallels what he, in his life, had sought to overcome.  

While the trope of the artist-as-shaman is certainly as alluring as it is ethnographically contentious, it must be seen in light of a sensibility that thrived in the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), of which Villanueva was a founding member. The Cordilleran region is a mountainous territory inhabited by several ethnolinguistic groups. In the nearby city of Baguio, BAG cultivated a subjectivity that not only sought affinities with the Indigenous but also found, within the halo of that affinity, the aesthetic and moral grounds on which to practice their postcolonial agency. This essay looks at the modern as the discursive milieu that grants the figure of the artist-shaman its historical vitality, which I will also call its anomaly.

In 1992, the Indigenous inclination of BAG was inscribed into a narrative of modernism when three of its members—Villanueva, Tommy Hafalla, and Willy Magtibay—received the Thirteen Artists Awards from the CCP. The Thirteen Artists was first conceived as an exhibitionary project in 1970. Then CCP director Roberto Chabet pinned its lineage to the historical group of Filipino modernists who had turned away from Classical values. The loose metric upon which he based the selection of artists—“recentness, a turning-away from past, familiar modes of art-making”³—expressed the modernist urge for forward traction which oriented succeeding iterations of the awards. The attention given to BAG in 1992, however, suggests other institutional desires. In his notes as CCP director for visual arts, Virgilio Aviado praised the awardees’ use of “old, ancient and traditional methods for modern expression.”⁴ Pointing to pursuits such as “the retribalization of the Filipino” and the search for identity through a recuperation of traditions, this sentiment stresses the national as it draws on the otherness of Indigeneity as a modernist cipher of the authentic.⁵

The term “tradition” is in itself duplicitous, one that assumes diverse uses in countries that share colonial histories. Art historians Geeta Kapur and Leonor Veiga, in tracing fragments of tradition within the largely secularized arenas of Indian and Indonesian art, rethink the notion of tradition as an ancestral practice that has survived modernization. Kapur approaches it as “an ambivalent, often culpable sign,” deployed in post-colonial nation-building, at times conceived and re-functioned for nationalist aims.⁶ Veiga cites British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that the invention of tradition, often prompted by the birth of the modern nation-state, attempts to repair the “social voids caused by secularization.”⁷ Whether enacted on the level of the state or at the grassroots, the process of invention can be essentialist in its appropriations, as it lifts an ideal tradition from a ritual milieu and casts it along the quest for nationhood, identity, and origins.

It is from these discursive frames that I draw the term “invention”—but in conceiving it as a guise, I refer to invention as an activity that is intimate in that it arises out of appearance and bodily enactments. Its pronounced exteriority, commanding recognition through all its elaborate adorning, nonetheless strives for a depth of affinity. Shamanism is traditionally practiced within paradigms of the magical and the religious. The shaman is a medium who brings access to the sacred in communal life. Villanueva echoes this function of mediality and retools it into a poetics. In an undated essay titled “Cosmology in Art: An Experiential Process,” he writes that it “is the unique position of the artist as a go-between of the visual and recognizable world and that of the world that is beyond phenomena that strengthens the artist’s role in the society.”⁸ By rendering sensuous form to “unconscious feelings and thoughts of the social environment,”⁹ the artist-medium, much like the shaman, is seen to perform both a psychic duty and a social one. The artist may not necessarily aspire to summon the sacred but at least to access the subliminal through communal experience.

Early on, Villanueva’s poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena materialized in what several writers had contemporaneously tagged as his surrealist paintings. Taking part in a 1975 exhibition that announced the surrealistic as a common ground, Villanueva relished the ways in which this pictorial modality granted him “a freedom of expression” to mine “dreams, desires, and even fears,” a subliminal repertoire from which he found “a greater sense of realism.”¹⁰ Painting butterflies and arid terrains with winged and “evolutionary beasts,”¹¹ the artist signaled the dreamlike before assuming the register of social allegory, like the painting Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Pasig; año 1985, which divines the degradation of the Pasig River.

In these secular visions, the painter, allied to the prophet or seer, foils a faithful inscription of an external reality; he prefers the clairvoyant register to signal a harboring malaise. The subliminal in Archetypes may refer to the visceral qualities of ritual revelry heightened by drumming and dancing as well as to understandings of the primordial—from Indigeneity to the archetype of a labyrinth. Villanueva notes the archetype’s recurrence “in many ancient cultures—from Ancient Egypt to Neolithic Europe, particularly England, to the American Indians, the Chinese, the Australian Aborigines.”¹² Through the motifs and sociality of ritual, artist and viewer are presumably drawn closer to a primordial consciousness rooted in Indigeneity—an affinity that is nonetheless anomalous as it assumes that psychic license can collapse material difference.

Villanueva was raised in Metro Manila, the urban center of modernization in an archipelago defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Indigeneity and tradition typically correspond to an imagination of what lies beyond this center, a vision of cultural periphery conceived according to colonial delineations of territory. Ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleran highlands, having resisted Spanish colonial efforts, retained significations of otherness during the American occupation as they cast a reverse-image of what was largely seen as a Hispanized and Christianized population in the lowlands. In Philippine modernist painting, this otherness becomes material for an artist’s self-conscious evocations of identity and shared origins, which are at times prone to essentialist portrayals. As Filipino art historian Flaudette May Datuin remarks of modernist Victorio Edades’s depictions of a Cordilleran idyll in Two Igorot Women (1913), “Identity is presented as an eternal and unchanging ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnic’ moment, often associated with the chthonic and submissive female ‘savage.’”¹³

Villanueva’s anomaly rests on a more pronounced representational ambivalence as it is the artist’s body that gestures and personifies, while the otherness of the highlands remains the milieu’s chief source of invention.¹⁴ The fraught territorial divides—wherein periphery and center ideologically align with constructions of tradition and modernity—produce anxieties surrounding the right to represent. Villanueva’s shamanism may thus inspire contrasting attitudes: on the one hand, the celebratory yearning for precolonial identity and then, on the other, the charge of appropriation and self-exoticization. If both these viewpoints spin on tense questions of authenticity, might other readings be possible when we consider what it is about the mediality of the artist-shaman that is fruitfully anomalous?

Villanueva’s biography unwittingly subverts the myth of identity as origin. The anomaly of a body standing in as a medium, proxy, or artifice emphasizes identity’s performativity, one that entails a prolonged process of affinity to stage and to overcome its masquerade. His consciousness of ethnic diversity developed during his childhood visits to Palawan and, eventually, through projects in documentary filmmaking, where he observed and befriended Indigenous groups in several parts of the country. In the late 1970s, dismayed by what anthropologist and BAG member David Baradas has described as a commercialized arts scene that favored homogenizing Western styles, Villanueva moved from Manila to Baguio.¹⁵ This transition brought crushing financial strains; he was then a young father developing an art practice with little commercial or institutional support. What perhaps relieved these precarities was a growing sense of affinity with the thriving cultural and spiritual life he encountered in his visits to the Cordilleras—an affective kinship that differs from systematic ethnography. Scholar Katrin de Guia notes Villanueva’s apprenticeship with an Ifugao mumbaki as well as his visits to healers and mystics in Japan, the United States, and Australia.¹⁶

This affinity with the Indigenous coalesced into a politics of identity through the formation of BAG in 1987. The end of the decade witnessed demands for the state to establish regional autonomy in the Cordilleras. Members of BAG foregrounded cultural identity by inflecting genres of Western origins—film, painting, photography, sculpture, performance—with markers of the local. Materials were sourced from immediate environments and themes carried Indigenous motifs. As an alternative to the secular, commercial, and individualized model of art production in Manila, BAG advanced an ethos of communality: disciplined, spirited organizing—which bred the artist-run international Baguio Art Festival—and a freewheeling camaraderie among travelers, musicians, performers, and artists of all persuasions. The modernist atmosphere of experimentation energized BAG’s postcolonial quest—a quest not just for national origins but also for a real sense of originality, a defining self-consciousness that yielded, for Villanueva, the liberties and the conceit of representation.

In probing the meeting points between tradition and modernity, Geeta Kapur advises us to look “not for hybrid solutions . . . but for a dialectic.”¹⁷ Leonor Veiga then nominates the category of a “third avant-garde” that recognizes the postcolonial agency of artists in using appropriation as a conceptual strategy to capture tradition’s transgressive stance. The “third avant-garde,” in undoing “the taxonomical division between art and ethnography,”¹⁸ fulfills what Kapur has described as a “double-dismantle.”¹⁹ It objects to invented traditions that serve nationalist interests, and it defies the Western monopoly of the avant-garde.²⁰ While much of Veiga’s astute propositions resonate with the conditions of BAG—chiefly, with its ambitions to undo Western aesthetic models and modes of display—Villanueva’s visceral and spiritual performances seem somewhat at odds with the transgressive, radical, and antagonistic edge that defines the vanguardist posture.

The artist-shaman is positioned here as an anomalous figure of postcolonial modernity. What I have been describing as an anomaly is motivated less by the wish to advance than by a long look backward, a nostalgic turning that is naively but also deliberately revivalist in its urges. In working with ritual, however, Villanueva was not only concerned with the symbolic operations that bind it to tradition but also interested in its facture, its design, and its plasticity, recalling the modernist fascination with medium specificity and surface. The artist-shaman thus commits impieties in their revivals, animating the atmosphere of ritual while remaining unfaithful to its ethnographic source.

An anomaly is an instance of irregularity, an improbability, or a moment of anachronism; it derives its effects by virtue of its dislocations. When Villanueva traveled to stage more ritualistic performances in countries like Japan and New York, he seemed more inclined to approach Indigeneity as an activity of invention and guise. It is perhaps the artist-shaman’s more improvised works, like the 1991 project Panhumuko, that reveal another side to his mediality. Largely intuitive, diverging from the elaborate ensembles of Archetypes, Panhumuko foregrounds the shared, symbolic, subliminal space of ritual, which is also a conceptual space to address modernity and its attendant malignancies.

Showman/Shaman documents the performance.²¹ In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon displaced several Indigenous Aeta communities, forcing them into evacuation camps. Panhumuko, a Sambal word that translates as “surrender,” was prompted by the intention to make an offering that could appease Apo Namalyari, a deity of the Aetas. Around this time, Villanueva had been preparing to travel to New York to serve as an artist-in-residence upon the invitation of the Filipino cultural group Amauan.²² He was conceiving an engagement that could inform his work at the residency. Villanueva, accompanied by documentarians and a linguist, made the trip to Zambales to find Aetas receptive to holding a ritual offering. The plan did not work with one group, but he was welcomed by another, whose elders (whom he described as “shamans of the community”) reacted with enthusiasm.²³

The central element of this project was the ritual atmosphere approximating a collective trance; the making of the installation-offering appeared like a means to achieve this end. Improvisation, play, and eclecticism marked Panhumuko: Cordilleran dances inspired Villanueva’s actions, the Aetas made percussive sounds with bamboo drums and tin cans, and intuitively, the group assembled the installation by an open well by scattering coals, erecting bamboo stems, hanging vegetables, and arranging candles shaped in human form. A semblance of this resulting material form was then constructed as an indoor installation at Lincoln Square Gallery, New York a month after. Villanueva’s impious, eclectic acts seem like an echo of folk religiosity, a cultural response to the colonial imposition of Christian belief. Writing about the human-shaped candles taken from Quiapo Church in Manila, Villanueva relays his fascination with these ritual objects whose “roots are in the animistic traditions of the past” but are now integrated in Christian practices, an integration he regards as “one of the richest points in Filipino culture.”²⁴

Villanueva’s ritual performances may be read as sites of a similar dialectic. Episodes of calamity most sharply manifest an existential rupture, what Villanueva intuits as “man’s alienation from nature,” which brings about environmental havoc.²⁵ The poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena—fulfilled in Panhumuko as a communal experience of psychic release—signal a postcolonial disavowal of modernization’s rational processes. Villanueva favors installations because their assembly calls for communal acts that “quiet the rattles of intellect and allows intuition to reign.”²⁶ For hours in Zambales, drumming, dancing, and chanting ensue as they build the offering. As a performative gesture, Panhumuko attempts to alleviate a collective unease toward modernity’s malignancies, here construed as calamity, loss of community, and ecological disconnect.²⁷

Villanueva held Indigeneity as a modality of being that may yield a cure for modern problems. The artist then assumed the role of a medium to access an eroded subjectivity or to approximate its guise. What he aspired for, it seems, was an exit from modernity, an exit that was never totally fulfilled when modernity created the conditions for his agency and emergence. The anomaly of ritual proceeds from the artist-shaman’s autonomy and invention. Villanueva’s charismatic performances, while sympathetic to Indigeneity, claim a duplicitous worldliness, an independence that appears to keep him unbeholden to one group or spiritual belief. It is through this anomalous position that he performed his dislocations, ruptured categories, and constituted the self as an improbability.

The artist died of leukemia in 1995. The early onset of illness and exhaustion may have manifested in the pain he expressed during the ritual of Panhumuko, which led the Aeta elders to initiate a curing ritual.²⁸ If an anomaly absorbs the time’s contradictions, the modern played out its paradox fully through his body, through to its demise, as though the shaman also absorbed the very malignancy he sought to cure. This emblematic affliction finally makes palpable the contradictory status assumed by the artist and the shaman in modernity, as these figures dwell at the tense point of magicality and marginalization that comes with embodied, material, and terminal pains. To foreground an anomaly is to anticipate such fetishizations, duplicities, and ambivalences. Villanueva’s shamanism was in some ways a show and a representative conceit. It was also a profound affinity, an invention that was, at the same time, his becoming.

The author is grateful to Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Rica Concepcion, and Kawayan de Guia for sharing their archives, documentation, and memories.

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Early press reviews of Niati’s exhibitions highlight the artist’s focus not only on gender and violence but also on sound. A review of a group exhibition at the Galerie M’hamed Issiakhem (March 8–April 10, 1987) in Algiers that included artworks by Niati alongside those by Hamida Chellali, Akila Mouhoubi, and Baya Mahieddine notes the artist’s focus on sound or, rather, its absence. “Women are at the heart of Houria Niati’s inquiry. The twelve pastel works on paper and the four paintings on canvas all take the woman as their main subject or, more precisely, the suffering of a woman,” the author observes before adding that the paintings make palpable the “forced silence” to which women have been subjected.² The article draws readers’ attention to the “silence” and “imprisonment” that are discernible in Niati’s depictions of women, many of whom are shown in inhospitable spaces populated by sharp-toothed hybrid creatures and floating masks—as in The Last Words Before the Long Voyage (fig. 1), an oil pastel from 1982. In other works from the same series, which is titled Delirium, women are shown confined in black rectangular and arch-shaped spaces or reclining next to a window and looking into the starry night. Some float through an abstract space in menacing proximity to serpents. The lack of interaction with other figures and their visible solitude submerges them in an overwhelming silence. Yet, while The Last Words Before the Long Voyage depicts a solitary figure surrounded by dangerous-looking animals, the title references the words spoken prior to embarking on a mysterious journey. In fact, sound in the form of poetry and music would become key aspects of Niati’s artistic practice, in effect “activating” the paintings.

The artist is perhaps best known for her series of paintings No to Torture (fig. 2), which she completed as an undergraduate at Croydon College of Art in the United Kingdom in 1982. Recently shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990 (November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024), this series is composed of a first painting depicting four women that is displayed alongside four other paintings, each of which focuses on one of the figures. Shackled at their ankles, their faces wounded by rapid incisions, the figures, the artist suggests, personify all women who have suffered colonial torture.³ The thick layers of paint and repetition of the figures across multiple canvases can be read as the artist’s persistent attempt to recover the tortured bodies without concealing the violence they were subjected to. Indeed, the dark smudges of paint that indicate their faces raise alarm about the aggression experienced by Algerian women during the war at the hands of French soldiers.⁴ No to Torture is a direct reference to two Orientalist paintings by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), both of which are titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, from 1834 and 1849, respectively. Niati’s work retains Delacroix’s composition but replaces his soft, blended brushstrokes with dynamically applied paint and deep incisions—an expression of anger at colonial injustice and violence, Niati explains.⁵

The solitude of the individual women in each of the four canvases makes the silence of incarceration palpable. Even the group painting does not reveal signs of conversation between the women, whose faces are rendered in a highly abstract way, with the green figure’s head immobilized by a rectangular shape that resembles a birdcage. Coincidentally, Niati completed No to Torture only two years after the Algerian writer Assia Djebar published a collection of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1980). In her introduction, Djebar points to the formidable absence of sound in Delacroix’s artwork, arguing that the women abruptly stopped their conversation when the door opened and the painter walked in. “Sound has truly been severed,” Djebar writes, adding that “only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in the painting.”⁶ It seems significant, then, that Niati often integrates sound in her paintings and installations, reciting her own poetry and singing Arab-Andalusian songs in front of her works in an attempt to complement the visual experience with a sonic one. While Tate only exhibited one of the paintings, and Niati did not perform in the gallery space, the display of No to Torture at the exhibition Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1993 was accompanied by the artist’s recitation of her poem “Delirium,” which played from speakers. The poem began with the following words:

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

The lyrical evocation of stories and tales that have become nearly obsolete suggests their healing powers could cure the “infected eyes,” the “resignation,” and the “demission.” Recited alongside the No to Torture paintings, the poem commits to restoring the sound muted first by Delacroix and then by the French army when it incarcerated and tortured Algerian women. The detention is addressed in the poem, which mentions “doorless and openingless” walls of rooms from which there is no escape. The call to listen resonates loudly in “Delirium,” as if asking viewers to focus on and try to hear the muted voices of the women in the paintings. 

During the opening of Forces of Change, Niati also sang three songs a capella in front of the No to Torture paintings (fig. 3). All three works were composed by the medieval singer, poet, oud and lute player Ziryab Ibn Nafi, who lived in exile in Muslim Andalusia and whose songs Niati discovered while working at the Algerian Ministry of Youth and Culture from 1969–76. For Niati, Ziryab Ibn Nafi epitomizes the experience of migration. Born in Baghdad, where he was the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s singer, he was forced into exile by his musical master El Mossili, who was jealous of his student’s increased success and power. Upon his arrival in Andalusia, he revolutionized medieval music, became the court musician for caliph Abd ar-Rahmān II, and gained fame as “the poet of Cordoba.” Widely considered to be the progenitor of Andalusian musical cultures in all their forms, his rich poetic-musical compositions have significantly shaped contemporary urban music in North Africa. When the Arabs lost Andalusia to the Spaniards in the late 15th century, they escaped to North Africa, where they continued their musical traditions. Arab-Andalusian music, then, is a cultural expression that survived exile and displacement. For Niati, it forms an eternal memory of migration, which she herself experienced upon leaving Algeria in the 1970s. By singing these songs in front of No to Torture, she articulated her own experience as a migrant Algerian woman, creating a shared sonic, cultural space in which women of different generations can coexist across time and space.

As seen with No to Torture, Niati often mobilizes poetry and music to “speak back” to Orientalist artworks. She shares this concern of confronting Orientalist visual representations with artists such as Brooklyn-based Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who is currently working on a series of 16 paintings in response to Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,⁷ and with Algiers-based Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya), whose recent work reimagines two paintings of Algerian women by Étienne Dinet (French, 1861–1929).⁸ Niati’s use of sound, however, is distinctive within this context. Her installation To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It from 1991, is composed of three large pastel-colored paintings and three pottery vases depicting floating women’s silhouettes, masks, fish, snakes, and the moon. The title refers both to Algerian folk songs that praise the beauty of a girl who fetches water from the fountain and to the abundance of Orientalist paintings incorporating sensual aesthetics to conceal the physical effort of carrying water. By using thick outlines for a woman’s silhouette in one of the paintings and displaying the paintings next to heavy pottery vases, Niati emphasizes the strain on women’s bodies. The poem that plays through speakers as part of this installation touches on a recurring theme in Niati’s work—the lack of freedom and inability to break free due to either colonial oppression or patriarchal social structures—by evoking a “World where the explosion of Revolution” was “blocked up by the walls built by possessive hands.” Addressing “oppressed spirits,” the persona in the poem evocatively says, “The immobility is the repressed dream of the impossible escape to far horizons.” The poem then introduces the figure of a “deformed Orientalist” who “has traveled desperately searching for peace and newness,” a reference to the many Orientalist artists in Algeria who depicted the land and its people as exotic and erotic. In the lines preceding the introduction of the Orientalist, the poem reads:

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

Unraveling the Orientalist depiction of Algerian women as mysterious, sensual, and erotic, the poem directly addresses the women fetching water, piercing the layers of Orientalist representation that have fixed a romanticized view of them. The display of To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It also includes the shapes of human hands and feet formed of sand on the gallery floor, evoking the actual bodies of the women whom Orientalist art turned into static images, as well as multiple reproductions of the same photograph showing women fetching water, suggesting the recurring labor. 

Integrating sound into her multimedia installations, Niati works against both colonial and local archetypes of Algerian women by merging their abstract painterly depictions with poems or songs. It is not insignificant that Niati frequently recalls marveling as a child at the stories and fables told to her and her sisters by their grandmother and that she firmly attributes the development of her own plastic language to them (fig. 4).⁹ 
The women in her artworks are always heavily abstracted, as if their bodies are at risk of dissolving into smudges of paint or oil pastel. Yet sound makes their physical presence felt: The poems often address the women directly, while the Arab-Andalusian songs locate them within a distinct cultural heritage. These songs also allow Niati to explore her own position as a migrant Algerian woman for whom sound is a way of forging a precarious relationship with the women she depicts, across space and time. Niati’s expressive way of working and the fact that she never corrects the initial marks made on the canvas suggest that her paintings are deeply performative, as if refusing to be fixed as static images that would delineate the terms under which women can be pictured. Free-floating forms and overlapping colors create vibrant spaces in which the sounds of women’s voices slowly emerge.

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In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that she called “Woman in the World.”¹Organizing such dialogues as a prelude to the act of painting was a way for the artist to reject her early training in social anthropology at Stockholm University, where she chafed at the idea that researchers could be neutral observers of communities to which they do not belong. With the permission of participants, Nicodemus taped the events. But she did not use these recordings as tools to empirically document what was shared, as one might do in academic research. Rather, through careful, solitary listening, she began to translate the joy, pain, and mundanity of women’s lives into abstracted figurations. Together these works foregrounded something latent in her earlier compositions: a desire to make the relationship between self and non-self (or “other”) a pictorial and poetic strategy based on affinity instead of an anthropological problem rooted in difference.

By her own account, Nicodemus decided to study social anthropology after being “confronted with everyday racialist attitudes for the first time when migrating to Europe.”²She had moved to Sweden in 1973 after spending her formative years in the Kilimanjaro region. Already fluent in Kichagga, Kiswahili, and English, she picked up Swedish quickly and enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978. Anthropology, she thought at the time, “seemed to offer the intellectual means to better understand human behavior,” especially the baser forms she encountered while living abroad as a Black and African woman.³

Once she began her coursework, however, she discovered that the discipline lacked the possibilities she imagined. Social anthropology was a relatively new offering in Swedish academia, but like all anthropological fields, it had deep roots in ethnography, which had itself emerged from the systems and structures of colonialism. About a decade before Nicodemus arrived, the university attempted to loosen these ideological ties by changing the department’s name from “General and Comparative Ethnography” to “Social Anthropology” and by moving away from curricula designed around the Museum of Ethnography collections.⁴Despite these changes, which might suggest a shift from a collection-based approach to studying culture and society to a people-oriented one, Nicodemus grew increasingly uncomfortable with the role of anthropologist—even as she continued her studies.

Her frustrations prompted her turn to art-making. Nicodemus returned to Tanzania in 1979 to do fieldwork while also providing Kiswahili instruction to, in her words, “Scandinavian aid workers.”⁵While living in an international community of expatriates, she met some women who invited her to attend amateur drawing sessions.⁶Nicodemus abandoned the sessions after a few meetings to make time for more serious artistic pursuits, resolving to have her own solo exhibition as quickly as possible.⁷Nicodemus achieved her goal in 1980, when she debuted her paintings and poems in a one-woman show at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, and preeminent Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro gave the opening remarks.⁸

Reflecting on this period of her life in an interview with Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher in 1992, Nicodemus spoke about why anthropology troubled her so deeply and how her emerging artistic practice resolved some of the issues she identified in the discipline’s methodologies: “Anthropology demanded that I look at human beings in a way that was foreign to me. I had to disassociate myself from the humans I was to study, to deal with them as objects.”⁹By contrast, the work she exhibited at the National Museum “was exactly the opposite of the objectifying approach. I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts, my whole life.”¹⁰These themes included her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and romantic love.

The artist’s comments capture aspects of critiques that had emerged among anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s about the discipline’s operating assumptions and its origins in the enterprise of colonialism.¹¹In brief, these assessments concern anthropology’s historical framework, in which cultures, and by extension peoples, are looked upon as hermetically contained entities that can be studied by supposedly outside, neutral observers and then interpreted for external audiences—often still located in the centers of Western empire. When Nicodemus says she turned herself into a “subject,” she does not mean the position of the anthropologist in relation to the ethnographic “other” as the field’s older conventions might have it; rather, she makes herself the center of the work, exploring her own vulnerabilities. An early example, After the Birth (1980) depicts a female figure curled on her side, a hand resting on—or covering—her face. A sleeping baby, the artist’s infant daughter, lies in front of her. A short poem accompanying the picture reveals the anxieties of a first-time mother both enthralled and overcome by her new responsibility.¹²

While Nicodemus has returned to her own biography throughout her career, she has increasingly framed her experiences vis-à-vis those of other women. Crucially, her paintings can be understood as situating those encounters as a series of mutual exchanges. For instance, she often describes one of her early works Two Black Candles (1983) in terms of a promise she made to acquire the bark cloth on which it is painted. Several years earlier, while pursuing her degree in anthropology, Nicodemus met an elderly woman living alone in one of the Bukoba districts near Lake Victoria.¹³They spoke Kiswahili, and eventually, the woman agreed to trade Nicodemus the bark cloth for some cotton cloth—on the condition that the artist burn two black candles.¹⁴

Why two black candles? Nicodemus does not know exactly, except perhaps for the fact that bark cloth is used in tradition-based burials.¹⁵In the region, the cloth is commonly associated with the Baganda people, whose kingdom in Uganda stretches to the southern border with Tanzania—an area near where this exchange took place.¹⁶Historically, the fabric was produced for various purposes, including for clothing and funeral wrappings. The latter usage, Nicodemus suspects, was the reason the woman had saved it.¹⁷(Incidentally, bark cloth is also the kind of cultural material that earlier generations of Western researchers would have collected for ethnographic museums, such as that in Stockholm.¹⁸)

More than anecdotal backstory, the exchange between the younger and elder women is integral to Two Black Candles. Its two female figures allegorize Nicodemus’s memory of the event—their tapered fingers dripping like wax, their bright white fingernails alight. The geometric and linear patterns of their robes flow into one another the closer they are to the ground, making the figures appear entwined. The soft texture of the bark cloth only heightens the effect. In that respect, the fabric has a dual function: It is the painting’s support, made plain by the untouched background. But it also peeks through the patterning, becoming an integral part of the represented clothes. 

A fluidity of line, in which bodies and body parts appear to meld into one another, marks Nicodemus’s work from this point forward. The resulting interpenetration of forms can be understood as a compositional device as much as a conceptual framework exploring the contours between self and other. Her painting technique is a prime example in this regard. Typically, the artist starts by drawing lines with charcoal, which she then goes over with a brush dipped into a tube of paint.¹⁹She lets the brush empty as she drags it across the surface so that the resulting line skips. Afterward, she paints flat fields of color just up to the edge of these boundaries. Nicodemus’s process leaves caesuras, letting the bark cloth—or, later, the canvas—break through her lines. These lines are not separations or hard boundaries but rather a means of entwining her figures so that one emerges from another. Indeed, Nicodemus’s caesuras might be seen less as negative spaces than as pauses that make room for other kinds of encounters between her subjects, herself among them.

The artist’s initial works for Woman in the World, a set of six paintings titled Tystnaden (The Silence, 1984), suggest that she continued to find conceptual utility in the idea of absence after developing it stylistically in Two Black Candles. The Tystnaden paintings emerged from a lull in the conversation among the participants in Skive, the first of the three gathering locations.²⁰Listening later to the tapes of the group discussion, Nicodemus began to paint on antique linen she had received as a gift from her mother-in-law.²¹Her pictures are not direct translations of the women’s stories, however. As her title suggests, the moments of quiet were just as important to her. The artist saw them as pregnant pauses, conveying what could not or did not need to be said.

Featuring monochromatic silhouettes of female forms, the six compositions that make up Tystnaden evoke but never fully disclose the tenor of the wordless exchanges. The artist describes the silence as having “passed through the conversation like a white thread,” a metaphor that explains the choice of paint color as much as it points to the fine weave of the textile that she left bare in the background.²²The outlines of the figures suggest an array of feelings, with some bodies folding in on themselves and others springing open in balletic leaps and arabesques penchées. Two women are solitary, but the remainder appear in pairs and groups. The swaths of white paint fuse them together so that, in several cases, it is difficult to make out the relationships among the parts. How many dancers, for example, are in the cluster with only seven limbs? Are the pairs of figures merging into one or splitting into two? What intimacies unite them? These questions are perhaps never meant to be answered, but they point to the gender-based affinities that the artist wanted to establish in her work at the time.²³Nicodemus further stresses this sense of commonality—in which one figure appears inextricable from another—in the corresponding poem “Women Silence.”²⁴According to her verse, having to hold secrets and, by extension, one’s tongue are universal undercurrents that unite women, connecting the womb, blood, and milk to the flow of rivers and oceans.

Although the formal resemblance of the figures underscores the shared moment of silence in the gathering, Nicodemus was also keenly aware that not all the women who contributed shared the same life experiences. After all, at every Woman in the World event, the participants came from different generations, class backgrounds, and professions. Several years later, the artist put a sharper point on the project she embarked on in Skive by acknowledging the limits of a feminism that does not account for the circumstances of race and geography:

Here, Nicodemus trenchantly borrows the language of colonial ethnography (“expedition,” “natives,” “study,” “collect”) and of anthropological analysis (“statistics,” “tables”) to reframe her own position and those of her participants. I want to draw a distinction, however, between the way in which she rhetorically presents herself in this passage and the model of the artist as ethnographer, to borrow a helpful formulation from Hal Foster, who used it to describe a slightly later set of practices from the 1990s.²⁶Although her statement can be read as a self-aware critique, anticipating the kind of “othering” that can happen when communities become the subject of an artist’s work, Nicodemus ultimately speaks of an equal interchange in which she too gives and not just collects.

If Nicodemus introduces the idea of reciprocity first through an ironic reversal of roles, in which the African researcher goes to the European indigenes, her framing was in part informed by something that transpired between 1984, when she painted Tystnaden, and 1986, when this statement was published for Woman in the World’s final iteration in Calcutta. “Who owns the knowledge of the Third World women?” Nicodemus inquires above. She also had posed this question as the title of an article she published earlier that year in Economic and Political Weekly, a social sciences journal based in Bombay (today Mumbai).²⁷Her account details the paternalistic attitudes and heavy-handed revisions she witnessed as a jury member and then editor for a planned volume of writings by African women sponsored by a Swedish government aid organization. What she describes, essentially, is the silencing of the contributing authors, whose texts were significantly shortened, reworked, and even retitled without their involvement. For Nicodemus, these interventions were particularly galling because the organization privileged its own agenda over the voices and stylistic choices of the writers—as well as undercut her purview as editor.

Literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” another text from the period, underscores the broader sense of urgency in Nicodemus’s question. Spivak first presented her ideas in 1983 at the conference “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries,” before publishing them in 1988 and again, in revised form, in 1999.²⁸Beyond a general time frame and the complementary formulation of their titles, Nicodemus’s and Spivak’s bodies of work are both concerned with the ways in which the West constructs a notion of the non-Western female “other” through intertwined forms of discursive and economic control that happened first through colonialism and then through global capital. (The latter of the two was a channel for the aid workers and organizations with whom and which Nicodemus crossed paths.) To boil down Spivak’s argument for the purposes of my short essay, the question is less whether the subaltern woman has agency to speak than how institutional, political, and archival structures mute or misinterpret what is said.

Who choses silence, and who is subject to it? Nicodemus’s work proposes different answers over the course of Woman in the World. Notably, while the artist was back in Tanzania for the second iteration of the series in 1985, the problems with the anthology of African women’s writings were coming to a head.²⁹One of the ways that Nicodemus responded was to paint Silenced, a knot of black and brown forms punctuated with features like eyes and extremities. Emerging from this jumble of rounded shapes—heads, shoulders, elbows, knees—is a white hand covering the spot where a mouth should be. By the time she made Silenced, Nicodemus had fully developed the painting process I previously described, in which caesuras are left within and around the lines that form her compositions. In fact, barring Tystnaden, nearly all the works in Woman in the World feature some variation of this technique. That Tystnaden was the exception seems less an aberration than an acknowledgment that the pause, the absence, the silence demand critical acts of interpretation.

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The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, during the peak of the Cold War, drawing inspiration from the principles of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Founded by developing countries opposed to formal alignment with either the United States or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, NAM advocated for national self-determination and resistance against all forms of colonialism and imperialism. Its united front on social and economic policies proved only the beginning, as it also sought to create a united artistic front, an aim resulting in the opening of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” on September 1, 1984, in Titograd (today Podgorica), Yugoslavia. 

Although Yugoslav artists exhibited works at the Alexandria Biennale (Egypt), São Paulo Biennial (Brazil), and New Delhi Triennale (India), and artists from NAM member countries exhibited at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Yugoslavia), the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” was the only art institution established under NAM auspices¹, a fact crucial to grasping the significance of its collection². 

The archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro³, which was founded through the integration of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” and the Republic Cultural Centre after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1995, reveal a transnational network of cultural diplomacy linking fifty-six non-aligned countries to generate a collection of about eight hundred artworks originating from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Though criticized by Yugoslav art historians for collecting “works from faraway exotic places” and “from authoritarian states that support official art,”⁴ the Gallery challenged what its founders viewed as the imperial model that prevailed in many museums in that it acquired its holdings solely through gifts and donations. This essay discusses the transnational model of assembling an art collection by employing NAM networks, countering the imperial model of doing so through colonial violence, looting, or transactional exchange.

Situated in a nineteenth-century castle built by Nicholas I, the last king of Montenegro, and surrounded by a large park complex, the Gallery began collecting, preserving, and exhibiting the art of non-aligned and developing countries in 1984. This effort made Yugoslavia a cultural center, one that attracted artistic productions from North Korea, India, Egypt, Angola, and Cuba, among many other NAM countries (fig. 1).

A European nation situated between the Eastern and Western blocs and in proximity to the African and Asian Mediterranean shores, Yugoslavia proved to be a perfect site for an art space dedicated to the exhibition of the artistic production of NAM countries. Although the rupture with the Soviet Union in 1948 undeniably served as the primary catalyst for a significant transformation in its foreign policy, the Yugoslav Partisans’ resistance against fascism bore symbolic resonance with anti-colonial struggles in the Global South⁶. Not only did the Partisans unite the diverse nationalities within Yugoslavia against local fascist regimes, they also accomplished a remarkable feat in making it the only occupied European nation to liberate itself from Axis occupation⁷. In so doing, they established Yugoslavia’s distinct position beyond the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. Operating in a state of “semiperipherality,” Yugoslavia fostered the emergence of distinct perspectives and, notably, “ambivalence . . . regarding . . . Western modernity”⁸ and hostility toward colonial subjectivity. As sociologist Marina Blagojević contends, “Semiperipherality” is “essentially shaped by the effort to catch up with the core, on [the] one hand, and [on the other] to resist the integration into the core, so as not to lose its cultural characteristics,” an ethos that made Yugoslavia a suitable site for the NAM collection.⁹

The Gallery’s model of collecting and exhibiting artworks helped establish its specific identity as an institution that steered clear of cultural colonialism. In an introduction to an undated Gallery exhibition catalogue, Raif Dizdarević, Yugoslav Federal Secretary of Foreign Affairs, remarks how the institution collected art, “preserving national identity despite colonialism, occupation, foreign domination, despite racism, economic exploitation, removal of cultural treasures,” and all other forms of forced exploitation.¹⁰ In the 1970s, a comparable anti-imperialist model united transnational art projects such as the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Museum of Solidarity) in Santiago, Chile, and the International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut, Lebanon.¹¹ These endeavors fostered transnational solidarity movements and strengthened alliances among countries in the Global South, the same vision NAM pursued through the establishment of the Gallery in Yugoslavia.¹²

The works in the Gallery’s collection, with the exception of objects made by artists in residence in Titograd, were processed and administrated by Yugoslav embassies based in NAM countries before being sent to Yugoslavia and exhibited. Indeed, letters exchanged between non-aligned countries, Yugoslav embassies, and Gallery personnel show that the acquisition process followed a structured pattern: countries would submit lists of artworks they wished to donate, and then the Gallery would systematically incorporate them into the collection. Although the acquisition process varied across the fifty-six countries donating works, it chiefly relied upon art institutions, cultural organizations, and appointed artists acting as liaisons between NAM countries and the Gallery. Notably, no records indicate the rejection of any submitted works, a practice that resulted in not only a heterogeneous collection but also eclectic exhibitions. 

In the absence of presentation directives, Gallery curators chose to display acquired objects alongside each other, highlighting the collaborative and transnational dynamics inherent in NAM networks. This inclusive approach to collecting and exhibiting is also reflected in the Gallery’s array of objects, which encompasses various time periods and mediums. For example, a photograph of a display of works in the permanent collection captures its wide-ranging nature and scope (fig. 2): two antique Cypriot vessels, one from about the 14th century and the other from 725–600 BCE, shown together in a glass cabinet; a sequence of Indian modernist paintings by, left to right, Brahm Prakash, Rameshwar Broota (born 1941), and Gurcharan Singh (born 1949) on the walls; and a white marble sculpture by Indian artist Awtar Singh (1929–2002) on the floor. 

The Gallery’s permanent collection ranges from archaeological objects from as far back as the seventh century BCE to contemporary works from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Although the collection includes works in a range of mediums and from different time periods, modern and contemporary artworks dominate its holdings. Between 1988 and 1990, for example, the Gallery organized more than one hundred exhibitions featuring art from different countries, regions, and eras.¹³ While it primarily sought to collect and present works from non-aligned countries, it also organized permanent exhibitions, special exhibitions in Yugoslavia and abroad, lectures and conferences, on-site artistic interventions, and publications promoting the artistic production of NAM countries. By activating the space through a range of public-facing activities, the Gallery swiftly became the hub of NAM’s artistic networks as it drew people from all over the world to Yugoslavia. 

By examining three types of collecting by the Gallery—works created on-site, works produced in other non-aligned countries, and works made off-site with NAM’s mission in mind—this essay will reveal how the Gallery expanded NAM’s transnational solidarity networks and challenged the imperial model of collecting by assembling a collection solely through gifts and donations.

Many artists from NAM countries participated in Gallery residencies, creating art on-site and giving lectures about the art of their respective nations, activities that fostered opportunities to network internationally. A white marble sculpture by Zimbabwean sculptor Bernard Matemera (1946–2002) is an excellent example of a work created by an artist in residence. Porodica (Family, 1987) remains central to the collection as it has been greeting Gallery visitors since its unveiling in 1987 (fig. 3).¹⁴ By 1987, Zimbabwe (which gained independence in 1980, making it one of the last African countries to do so) sought to assert its cultural identity and promote its national narrative on the international stage.¹⁵ Therefore, the Gallery’s invitation to a Zimbabwean artist to undertake a residency and the inclusion of his work in the permanent collection symbolizes more than Zimbabwe’s integration into the global anti-colonial discourse. To be sure, it also reaffirms the Gallery’s dedication to supporting artists and exhibiting art from nations actively engaged in decolonization and self-determination.

The Gallery’s collection also includes two sculptures Matemera made on-site using locally sourced stone. In his works, Matemera explores African folklore, myths, and legends, a pursuit that has made his sculptures of interest beyond Africa.¹⁶ One monumental piece exhibited on the Gallery’s front lawn embodies themes and styles Matemera examined across his oeuvre as he carved African histories and myths into his works (fig. 4). 

The captivating painting by Egyptian artist and activist Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) is notable as a piece created in a non-aligned country and later gifted to the Gallery. Seljanka i banane (Peasant Woman and Bananas, 1968) depicts a working-class woman seated in a banana tree plantation, themes Efflatoun explored from the mid-1960s onward (fig. 5).¹⁷ Efflatoun, alongside other Egyptian artists represented in the collection, such as Rabab Nemr (born 1939), Hussein El Gebaly (1934–2014), and Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), made works “that expressed the characters of the Egyptian people and recorded the urban and rural landscapes of the country,” a theme explored across the Gallery’s Egyptian holdings.¹⁸ This particular collection of works comprises eighty-two objects, a large number of which were made by women. Due to the lack of records regarding the selection process, one wonders whether these objects were given because works by women were deemed minor or if the Egyptian regime was intentionally aiming to highlight the artistic contributions of women through the Gallery’s transnational solidarity networks.

A founding NAM member state, Egypt donated the most works to the collection of any nation, solidifying its continuous support of the project and showcasing the steadfast leadership of its fourth president, Hosni Mubarak, who advocated for deeper South-South cooperation at the 7th Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of NAM held in 1983 in New Delhi.¹⁹ In the 7th Summit’s final declaration, under the section “Education and Culture,” it is “recommended that the non-aligned countries should actively collaborate in enriching the content and enlarging the scope of the Gallery of Arts of all non-aligned countries, established by the City Assembly of Titograd, Yugoslavia, and invited the coordinating countries to consider concrete measures in this regard.”²⁰ After receiving an official invitation to collaborate in the formation of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito,” Egypt donated works reminiscent of Efflatoun’s oeuvre, emphasizing the human subject and everyday life, two themes central to NAM, and the collective struggle for equality and peace amid the Cold War.

A work in the collection made off-site by Cypriot artist Hambis Tsangaris (born 1947), founder of the Hambis School of Printmaking, celebrates International Children’s Day and, at the same time, extends NAM’s philosophy of non-alignment, intercommunal peace, and coexistence. Cyprus, a Mediterranean island country and founding member of NAM, played a critical role as a nation that has historically followed a non-aligned foreign policy. For instance, Greek Cypriot authorities saw NAM as a potential source of further international backing for constitutional reforms aimed at mitigating the inter-communal strife between the principal ethnic groups—Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots—an issue central to Tsangaris’s practice.²¹ In Greek and Turkish, the official languages of the Republic of Cyprus, as well as in English, Tsangaris advocates “PEACE IN THE HOMELAND / PEACE IN THE WORLD,” addressing both the intercommunal conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and the broader geopolitical strains stemming from the Cold War (fig. 6). 

In Prvi jun—Međunardni dan djeteta (June 1—International Children’s Day, 1977), Tsangaris captures the essence of folk culture, myth, and tradition by integrating abstracted representations of nature and figures—such as the sun, sea, human figures, birds, and fish—symbolizing connections that unify the island. Tsangaris’s work not only raises questions about the island’s geopolitical reality of being situated between the east-west axis, it also deepens the complexity of solidarity networks within NAM, which in turn lends further significance to the Gallery as a space capable of collecting “art of the world” through gifts and donations.²²

Many western museums, thanks to acquisition practices now looked upon as unethical, contain highly diverse collections, especially given their colonial legacies. At the same moment the Gallery opened in 1984, many such institutions flaunted their eclecticism, as did MoMA in its 1984–85 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, which brought together objects from many different places and times under the loose heading of “affinity.”²³ While the Gallery also staged collisions between works with distinct histories, it resisted trying to find unity in formal affinities between objects and instead looked to the distinct mode of sociability that was responsible for the objects coming into its hands in the first place: gift-giving—though not by wealthy donors, but rather by national peoples participating in a common project of self-determination. Whatever shortcomings this ideal may possess, it represented a self-conscious counter-practice to that of imperial art institutions. 

The post Cultural Diplomacy and the Transnational Networks of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” appeared first on post.

The somewhat offhand archive called Track Changes nests in the permanent, and therefore more premeditated, display of the art collection of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila. The items in this collection are organized according to a loose art-historical diachrony and within broadly conceived tropes of light, province, unease, and passage. Layered around this nucleus of privileged objects are select contemporary artworks and archival materials. The latter comprise Track Changes, which aims to introduce the public to the archives of the Vargas Museum and the University of the Philippines. The clusters of things are rendered equivalent to and contemporaneous with the encounter of the art through a paracuratorial supplement that exists adjacently to the collection; this arrangement enhances a porous scenography that pursues the interdisciplinarity research inscribed in the word “Filipiniana,” which may mean anything, and so everything, or at the very least, something Philippine. And because Track Changes reminds the public that the museum is the custodian of more than just art as validated by an elite and an expert class, it alerts them to the redistribution of the values of the motley “stuff” of which the museum is steward.

In certain ways, the initiation is an insertion into the stable canon of the collection, thus alluding to a “distraction,” to drag or to pull in different directions in Latin and late Middle English, but not altogether a disruption. It is a practical diversion, so to speak, a delay of expectation consisting of vitrines resting on the spindly legs of wooden tables that may easily be moved or stored. The room housing the collection is surrounded by glass, the panes of which are framed by aluminum, and dappled by various illuminations at different times of the day from the outside. Not a typical white cube, it situates the viewer amid art and nature in a kind of wraparound transparency that instills the feeling of being in a museum and, at the same time, experiencing a kind of continuum with external happenstance, be it rain or a riot. Track Changes is both implicit and complicit, receding and advancing within the institution but not seeking a center; in fact, it is at the sides, flush to the glass wall and so invites oblique reading in the way of an annotation or an aside. While sufficiently present, it is neither ubiquitous nor conspicuous: rather, it is intermingled and intermittent though delicately indented.

The initiation into this endeavor is titled The Native Strain: Guillermo Tolentino and Aurelio Alvero. It focuses on the relationship between Jorge B. Vargas (1890–1980), collector and donor of the collection; artist-professor Guillermo Tolentino (1890–1976); and curator-critic Aurelio Alvero (1913–1958). These three figures are related at certain nodes. Vargas collected the stalwart academic sculptor Tolentino, and Alvero helped Vargas set up his collection. Furthermore, the archives of Tolentino are in the University of the Philippines, which administers the Vargas collection and where Vargas was a student in its first law class and later a regent. Relating Tolentino and Alvero to Vargas is particularly intriguing as it gives us a glimpse into the aesthetic and political implications of making art, making nationalisms, and making museums in the interwar, war, and postwar years in the Philippines.

Jorge Vargas aspired to a postwar national culture through an art collection, as stated in the founding papers of the collection. The latter yield references to cultural heritage being vital for a “young Republic” and the logic of art being a kind of “accumulation” that serves as a gauge of a “level of culture.” According to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection, the pieces are viewed as “representative of a national art.” The first catalogue, published in 1943, spells out the aims of the collection: “‘encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in the presentation of their works’ . . . helping ‘Filipinos to know and treasure our cultural heritage’. . . and . . . contributing ‘to the proper presentation of Philippine art.’”¹ Vargas commissioned modernist painter Victorio Edades (1895–1985), who studied architecture and mural-making at the University of Washington in Seattle and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska, to write the first catalogue of his collection; and Alvero completed a catalogue of his own collection titled Art in Tagala (1942/1944).² These efforts may well be the earliest anthologies of art criticism and curatorial writing in the Philippines to the degree that they attempted close readings of works in a collection.

Alvero and Tolentino were nativists who exalted the pre-Hispanic Philippine lifeworld; at the same time, they were decisively (other)worldly, advocates of abstraction and builders of monuments. The term “nativist” is deployed here as a provocation and pertains to the range of articulations that may be considered not-yet or never-to-become colonial (and therefore potentially national or nationalist) or, perhaps, the basis of the exemplary folklore that is the nation, or its afterlife via a new folkloristics in the contemporary. Tolentino was a sculptor of the classical tradition, of the heroic and allegorical kind, and a spiritist who convened séances. He also proffered claims on the Philippine primeval such as its writing system or script, spinning some esoteric codes and wildly transhistorical comparisons.

Jorge Vargas was born into a family that had significant interests in sugar in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. He was a political figure in the Philippines, its first executive secretary, who served the governments of the United States and Japan from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in American bureaucracy with various portfolios including defense and agriculture, Vargas was invested in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of a gamut of things that, from art to ashtrays, included stamps, coins, photographs, books, and documents, inter alia. He was accused of conniving with the Japanese and later convicted, only to be absolved by the postwar government. He donated his collection to the University of the Philippines, which opened the museum in his name in 1987.

Kept in the vitrines of Track Changes are important texts that tend to inflect the trope of the Philippine bildung. Tolentino’s excursus references a deep past, an ancient ethnic and racial community lying beyond the strictly colonial and imperialist civilization. For instance, in Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog (The Language and Script of Tagalog, 1937), he unfolds an almost encyclopedic account of the Philippines through the different systems of knowledge, describing flora, fauna, and people in lofty and idiosyncratic Tagalog, an ethnolinguistic marker of communities around the capital of Manila.³ Tolentino illustrated some of the pages, including the one imagining how the Tower of Babel might have looked from an interplanetary perspective and in the context of the birth of Tagalog as one of the world’s languages.

Alvero, who opened his collection to the public in 1942, was born to intellectuals. His father was the painter and interior decorator Emilio Alvero (1886–1955), and his mother was Rosa Sevilla (1879–1954), founder of the Instituto de Mujeres (1900), the first Filipino-run lay Catholic school for women. He was an accomplished orator and took up law and education simultaneously. He was a poet and taught English, history, and the Tagalog language. He was tried as a Japanese collaborator and imprisoned from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1952. He cofounded the Young Philippines, a fringe nationalist party of the 1930s advocating that “The Political Salvation of the World Lies in Dictatorship Rather than Democracy.” Alvero founded a “quasi-fascist, blue-shirted” organization that was modeled on groups in Germany, Italy, and Spain.⁴ He went by the name of Magtanggul Asa, which in the local language means “Defending Hope,” and wrote prodigiously on Philippine culture. A case deserving closer study is the monograph titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala written in 1954 in Manila, in which he theorizes the rubric of the “non-objective” based on the First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines, which opened in 1953 at the modernist nerve center in postwar Manila, the Philippine Art Gallery. Here, he would realign the idiom of western abstraction twice: first through the term “non-objective” and second through “Tagala,” a reference to the dominant ethnic society in the country that is appropriated presumably as an alternative to the colonial appellation of the archipelago, which is the Philippines, the genealogy of Filipiniana. With Alvero and Tolentino looming in the mindset of Vargas, the absolute and the occult alternate with the self-conscious and the internationalist to conjure the fantasy of the modern. 

Alongside documents related to Vargas, Alvero, and Tolentino, the vitrines also contain visual material from the Japanese occupying forces that portray the Americans as murderous, while promising social stability and prosperity through the banking system, health service, and a market economy under their auspices. Curiously, in their illustrations, which are veritable wartime propaganda, the template is American comics and editorial cartoons, thus indicating a persistence of American popular visuality across colonial cultures.

To discuss Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero as an ensemble is to anticipate a theoretical and historiographic framework of the Philippine modern that considers the aesthetic, artifactual, and discursive implications of the archival material inscribed in or ornamenting the collection. What might be offered here concomitantly is a method that contemplates the postcolonial modern through a paracuratorial visibility. In this regard, the modern is not singularly intuited as a mode of progress or criticality; like the vitrines in Track Changes, this modern is, as alluded to earlier, offhand. For the ethos of Vargas insisted on a certain pleasure in appreciating the distracting collectible, perhaps an elaboration of the desire to belong to an abstract collective.

The term “kawilihan” is key. Kawilihan was the name of Vargas’s residential complex and the site of the collection before its transfer to the university. It roughly translates as fascination, distraction, or absorption. It shapes the time and pursuit of leisure, even of reverie. The complex was imagined as Pleasantville and was part of the development of the suburbs of Manila. It had a garden where Vargas raised vegetables, chickens, and pigs, and ample spaces where he hosted costume parties. Besides being a concept-work, kawilihan was also real estate, the land that bought and preserved the art.

The care and thoughtfulness that sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its distinct institutional framework had Vargas not settled on an intellectual scheme that braided culture and nation, not to mention art and garden. It was a scheme seen within the context of fondness for materials in a collection thriving on heterogeneity and later subjected to analysis in a university museum. Across these interactions, the collection would feed into a life of ferment, speculation, and scholarship. These three impulses of fascination, culture, and university animate the collecting instinct of Vargas and the collection. The phrase “university museum” holds two of modernity’s most consummate bureaucracies: the university and the museum, from which stem the prospects of enlightenment and radical epistemology through knowing and sensing. The alternation between homegrown joy and critical institution is instructive.

The joy derives from kawilihan. It is at once residence, collection, museum. Its root “wili” is also attentiveness, interest, penchant, liking, pleasure, enjoyment. In the early lexicon, it straddles between afección (in Juan de Noceda and Pedro San Lucar), a profound, deep-seated affection on the one hand, and afición (in Pedro San Buenaventura), a habit, inclination, talent, or an enthusiasm on the other. These words gravitate toward “love”; in one Filipino translation of “wili,” it is considered “mataos na pagmamahal,” or a lofty devotion to a beloved.⁵ If kawilihan as a structure of feeling hangs over a particular sensitivity to a precious belonging, then it is a cognate of the ethos of care and inevitably of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the custody of, or of curiosity, the inquisitiveness about things. Because the state of kawilihan or the condition of wili is absorption, love becomes a discursive articulation of the word: the collector, or lover, loses the self, which is absorbed in the collection.

In the Pedro Serrano Laktaw dictionary, the absorbed subject is an “aficionado, apegado, encariñado,” that is, generally attached, and a connoisseur. Such cultivated attachment and connoisseurship are mediated by an object of desire. The example of the lexicographer is intriguingly allegorical and potentially moral: “Hindi mawiwili ang aso, / kundi binibigyan nang buto.”⁶ The dog will not be engaged if not given a bone. Wili, therefore, hinges the subject to the object for it to be distracted.

Criticality informs the second aspect, specifically how the conceptualization of culture and the state, or how the state represents the polity through culture, or the ethical necessity of representativeness for a common image of an ethical community that professes the symbolic birthright of a tradition.⁷ To be more concrete in the Philippine historical context, the trope of the American Commonwealth and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to a collective and expansionist imaginary rooted in colonial history. And the sui generis Vargas was right at the center of these projects and at the same time the collector of the evolving Filipiniana of the Philippines. No other figure in Philippine history rivals his acumen and dexterity in terms of the country’s political and aesthetic education. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote a detailed account of the Vargas collaboration case, opines that the “collaboration question was . . . the brainchild of the Americans who, acting under the pressure of the prevailing war psychosis, dictated to the hapless Filipinos what they should and should not do or think in relation to the incidents and accidents of the war.”⁸

What Track Changes does is to create a relationality between the historiography, which is also the museology, of colonial and modern art and the curatorial supplement that is not programmatic or thematic, but rather contingent and tropic. It insinuates itself from within the institution and beside, or within reach of, the displayed collection to hopefully choreograph, or subtly incite, the frisson of “situated knowledge” across the varia or corpora in the room. In other words, the paracuratorial in this instance coordinates, hints at, a cognitive mapping of things in a tentative totality without lapsing into ideological iconography or art-historical repetition. The “para-” turns out to also be “proto-” in that it reveals symptoms of the museological unconscious of Vargas as well as the apparatus that enabled the collection to cohere and then ramify across temporalities through curatorial activation. The native, the national, and the non-objective suffuse this utterance of the modern—all caught up in contradictions but also pointing to a third moment beyond the dualisms that underlie all stylizations of coloniality and its attendant class-, gender-, race-continuous discriminations. Track Changes proves to be a viable intersectional site that cannot be quickly co-opted by narrow specialization and the positivisms it attracts.

The native, the national, and the non-objective initiate a relay between expressions of the subjectivity that is the Philippine, construed as a figurine and not an identity. The latter dilates across the said three registers in which various imaginaries coalesce to generate particular phases, and plasticities, of modernity: the supposed authenticity of the indigenous (the native), the idealized cultural character of postcolonial autonomy (the national), and the eccentric entitlement to a transcultural and international abstraction (the non-objective) in which all empirical and rational references are banished as if to perform the purity of the native and the melancholic hubris of the national. In a certain way, the Philippine is all of these, condensing in the acquisitive personas of Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero, who communed with the archaic, the multitude, and the dead—all taken by liberal sympathies, cabinets of curiosity of their own. In this sequence of categories, the notion of the modern becomes exceptionally complex, interpellated by the difficult desires of belonging, and not belonging, to the aesthetic polity of the colonial western by sketching out a cognate genealogy of the Kantian sensus communis: the bodies of willful subjects, which include the collector, the collection, and the culture. This can only be the very groundwork of the museum, its curatorial substrate, when it renders the art ambiguously present in its space, “derived from distractive experience” and turned into an “abstraction of bits of the world.”⁹ Modern art critic Richard Shiff brings distraction, abstraction, and the (non)objective together rhythmically: as the art is grasped so does it “draw away” and “draw apart” from how it is sensed as actually existing and how its becoming real is not only poignantly, but also punctually prefigured.¹⁰

To end with another distraction: In 2022, the Philippine government asked the Vargas Museum to temporarily keep and curate the collection of about five hundred pieces from the collection of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, at a time when the couple’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had become president. The items in the collection comprise paintings on canvas, glass, and wood. They are crafted from the tradition of lacquer, egg tempera and copper, and the ornament of gold leaf, among other mediums. These objects are paintings from the late Gothic and Rococo periods in Italy, reverse glass paintings from former Yugoslavia of folk-fantastic style and called “naif” in Southeast Europe, and lacquer vanity cases and religious icons from Russia. The Marcos government was hailed as developmentalist and cosmopolitan but was deposed by a popular uprising in the wake of autocracy and allegedly massive thieving.

While not cohabiting with the display of the collection and Track Changes, the Marcos collection finds its place alongside the Vargas Collection guided by a kindred paracuratorial sensibility. The task of a university museum is to invite a mindful and urgent study of these objects as well as the tricky lives of Vargas and Ferdinand Marcos, both of whom were enmeshed in the history of colonialism, the formation of nation-states, the accumulation of wealth, and the status itself of objects in collections. With their contentious imbrication as the ecology, essential questions may be revisited: What is an object? How does it become property or patrimony? Why is it in the world, why are we around it, and what do we as subjects do about it?

When the initiatory and coincidental Track Changes asks these same questions, digressively and not aggressively or even transgressively, it drags and pulls the museum in different directions, paracuratorially. As the title “Track Changes” suggests, it traces the indicia of amendments to the text, the writing itself of difference—or the difference finally of curatorial writing.

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“In cosmic beauty, there is no place for degrees or locations in time and space: Cosmic beauty is infinite. Words like pretty, ugly, tragic, funny, and useful—the abiding limits in the brief race toward death—on the other hand, are part and parcel of sensual reactions.”¹

With these words, Costa Rican artist Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) describes the crucial difference between an art that leads to the infinite—abstract art, in his case—and a transient art that reflects immediate emotion—a characteristic particularly evident, in his view, in figurative art.² Manuel de la Cruz understood art as a tool to integrate humankind into the universality of the cosmos in order to yield cosmic beauty. The quote above is taken from his lecture “El arte como integración cósmica” (“Art as Cosmic Integration”), which he gave in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1957. In this talk, the artist laid out his theories on the cosmic value of geometric abstraction. Over the course of the 1950s, he not only lectured and wrote on these ideas, he also developed a body of work that reflected his thinking, a line of production that he would extend into the early 1970s.

Also in the 1950s, another artist from Costa Rica embarked on a body of work tied to the transcendent. But unlike Manuel de la Cruz, Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982) did not attempt to integrate universal truth into her art.³ Instead, she professed to accept that it was impossible to access one’s ultimate reality. In the paintings, drawings, and stained-glass works that she produced in the 1950s through the end of her life, landscape and the human figure predominate; her lines and brushstrokes convey a specific way of perceiving the natural environment, humankind, and the spirituality in which both are steeped (fig. 2).For Luisa, the perceptible forms in her surroundings were the elements in which it was possible to experience and even see the transcendent.

In this essay, I will address these artists’ visions of the spiritual and the transcendent and how their work reveals predominant twentieth-century stances on the role of art in the representation and transformation of the spiritual.⁴Manuel de la Cruz exemplifies an artist who understood art and his own work as evidence of the vibrations of an irrefutable universal truth. Art, for him, was a device that when understood in terms of cosmic beauty, transports the human being to an absolute human state. Luisa, on the other hand, held that one cannot know ultimate truth in this lifetime. That said, she expressed no doubt that the natural environment and humankind are imbued in spirituality, an immanent charge so potent that it can change our very perception of things. Her work is not a device for integration, but instead the materialization of a spiritual world enmeshed in daily life.

Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz were part of the generation of pioneering Costa Rican artists who, in the 1930s, introduced the avant-garde to their country.⁵ In the late 1940s, Manuel de la Cruz ventured into abstraction, and in the early 1950s, he moved to Venezuela.⁶ It was in the context of a Venezuelan art scene influenced by Neo-Plasticism, a movement spearheaded by Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944), that Manuel de la Cruz developed his theories.⁷ Early in her painting career, Luisa focused on landscapes and portraits. Starting in the late 1940s, her work grew more hermetic as she looked to the natural landscape of the Costa Rican highlands. At that juncture, her palette darkened, and her images became suggestive of an adverse and unstable environment, one that inspired a degree of abstraction in her depictions of nature. The artist addressed a range of religious and mythical themes, and she almost obsessively fashioned scenes in which nature takes precedence over humankind. Though she pursued her artistic career in Costa Rica, a collection of drawings preserved by the Sáenz-Shelby family suggests that the natural settings and cities she visited in the United States and Europe also influenced her production. Indeed, these places resonate in many of the sketches closely tied to the work she began in the 1950s.

In 1956, Manuel de la Cruz published the essay “El arte abstracto: Realidad de nuestro tiempo” (“Abstract Art: The Reality of Our Times”) in the Costa Rican magazine Brecha. In this text, he states that abstract art is the “reaffirmation of eternal aesthetic truths.”⁸ Abstraction, in other words, was, in his mind, a universal art that transcends geographic boundaries. In his lecture in Maracaibo in 1957, the artist suggested that the components that make up the universe are number, rhythm, order, and balance. He described an eternal cosmos in which any independent form is ultimately tied to a universal whole, where life consists of endless integration and reintegration of energy, and the human spirit and the universe are vibrantly connected.⁹ From this perspective, he argued, art can be seen as “a way to unleash certain reactions we call aesthetic. . . . It is aimed at a certain aspect of the human in an inevitable pursuit of attuned cosmic vibrations [where] the human moment is seen as a bridge to its universal integration.”¹⁰ These “cosmic vibrations” are what is emitted by the harmonic rhythm manifested in the geometric shapes, lines, and colors used in painting, which itself facilitates cosmic integration (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz presented three routes—the spontaneous, the intuitive, and the intellectual—by which art can lead to cosmic integration. Based on these, he outlined categories for an art history in which abstract art from the first half of the twentieth century corresponds to the intellectual route. That said, all three routes are revealed throughout history, and the art at play in each of them is tied to the cosmic eternity that envelops humankind.¹¹Manuel de la Cruz looked to the “inner necessity” declared by Vasily Kandinsky (French, born Russia. 1866–1944) in 1911 in Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) to understand major historical events in the world of the arts and culture. In “El Cuadro Tridimensional” (“The Three-Dimensional Painting”), which he published in 1958, Manuel de la Cruz asserts: “Both during his era and beyond it, Fra Angelico is interesting—and will always be interesting . . . not because he painted angels, but because of how he painted them. He imbued them in that mystical oneness common to all men, even when that zeal is directed to Buddha or Quetzalcoatl. He is interesting, then, because of how he expressed his ‘inner necessity.’”¹²

Manuel de la Cruz expressed that he saw the transition from “primitive” thought to rational thought, and that the final route—the intellectual—was, for him, the one that lays out a path to truth, to “its cosmic reason, its vital, eternal and universal rhythms.”¹³ He argued that it is possible to imbue the work of art with the conditions that enable cosmic integration, and further, that these conditions are present to a large degree in the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky (figs. 4, 5). As he asserted in his 1957 lecture, “Both of them understood that the only way to reach the infinite rhythm is through abstraction, the elimination of any trace of reference, sensuality, or allegory, the total omission of the romantic.”¹⁴

In the context of this lecture and his essays, Manuel de la Cruz’s geometric abstract painting underscores his commitment to the notion of universality. In his Abstracción geométrica nº 8 (Geometric Abstraction No. 8; fig. 6), for example, flat color planes interact with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, as well as with simple geometric shapes. In works like Equilibrio cósmico (Cosmic Balance), slightly curved lines generate a tension between color and form.¹⁵

Unlike Manuel de la Cruz González, Luisa González de Sáenz did not leave a body of writing describing her vision of art. What we have instead are brief interviews, critical reviews of her work over the course of decades, and the testimony of friends and family. In other words, Luisa appears to have been less inclined to describe her process. She seems to have been most interested in how art could become a daily means of expression. When her art was exhibited to the public, what was on display was her perception of the environment, the spiritual, and humanity.¹⁶ In figure 7, for instance, we see a landscape, in all its vastness and spirituality, overpowering the solitary individual and the path they have trodden. The night sky transforms into a flying creature that seems to have emerged from the night itself.

Luisa’s creative work is overwhelmingly figurative. Figuration was for her, as she stated in 1957, “the best form of expression [for me]. Truth is the ultimate pursuit of art and all forms of expression. [Figurative art] is my truth.”¹⁷ She drew on highland landscapes—trees, mist, gusts of wind, and temperature—for that personal expression.¹⁸ The artist believed that the inability of humankind to perceive nature differently was an impediment born of a spirit largely closed to sensory experience.¹⁹ In her mind, society shuts down the possibilities of the gaze available only to an open spirit. Her art, then, gradually came to engage not only what is observed by that spiritual vision, but also what is transformed, via the spiritual, in the human being and nature. As she states in a recording from Carlos Freer’s 1999 documentary Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz (An Evening of Herself: Portrait of Doña Luisa González de Sáenz): “I am not sure if there is such a thing as spiritual change, though that is something we all go through, right? We often evolve, and our spirit is transformed, without even realizing it, right? I gradually became very interested in the human soul, and I saw it as much in nature as in persons themselves.”²⁰

According to Costa Rican writer Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), Luisa had the ability “to materialize the spiritual, to render it visible, to make it our own; [and] to spiritualize matter, to render it impalpable—and that is no less our own.”²¹ She would transfigure observable nature by means of a style characterized by strong brushstrokes or lines that yield an atmosphere so integral, adverse, and shifting that it veers into abstraction as the elements represented blur into one another. This is evident in an illustration she made to accompany the short story “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático” (“María de la Soledad: Episode in the Life of Doctor Lunatic”), which was written by her brother Mario González Feo (fig. 8). In this drawing, she has referenced two sentences uttered by the main character in the story: “How I wish I could feel the vital force of that transfigured evening. Because the whole evening was transfigured!”²² Also relevant is the passage that precedes these sentences: “There are things and persons that are transfigured at a given moment by dint of the extraordinary force we call mystery. They are still themselves, but it is as if an inner light, an inward flame . . . lit them up and gave them an interior transparency—that is transfiguration.”²³ The image shows a figure in a desolate landscape; her body is part of the natural space in general, but mostly it forms the rays of a “light” in the sky. We can distinguish between the terrain on which the figure stands and the sky, and we can sense the tension between that source of light and the figure. At the same time, the quality of the line gives these elements—figure, sky, light—a sense of mobility and adversity.

The idea that spiritual observation and expression are individual runs through the artist’s life and work: the soul is inevitably and innately alone, even when in the company of others.²⁴ Most of the human figures that cross Luisa’s landscapes do so alone; when there is more than one figure, they do not seem to notice one another. Her work, on the other hand, is steeped not only in spiritual transformation and solitary pilgrimage, but also in acceptance of the impossibility of seeing the true face of transcendence or of life after death.

Luisa was fond of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (Persian, 1048–1131), and she made several drawings inspired by it. The Rubaiyat values taking immediate pleasure in life, since human knowledge is categorically incapable of answering the fundamental questions faced by humanity, such as the reason for life and death. Luisa’s drawing of quatrain 68, for example, reflects these ideas (fig. 9): “We are no other than a moving row / Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go / Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held / In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”²⁵ Here, once again, the artist has used light to transfigure space. With the force of her line, she makes us feel that we are witness to an inevitable transformation or transience, one that will affect both humankind and nature. In another sketch (fig. 10), she has transcribed a passage from quatrain 32, which discusses those places of knowledge inaccessible to humankind: “There was the Door to which I found no Key; / There was the Veil through which I could not see.”²⁶

The representation here is more somber than in the other works discussed. A path in a desolate nighttime setting leads to a door, behind which lies the transcendental to which humans have no access. The faces and bodies of the three lantern-lit figures walking toward that door are covered. These figures do not have the key to that space of knowledge—to be sure, no one does.

It is entirely possible that Luisa’s art was influenced by literary and philosophical sources other than the Rubaiyat, though we cannot know for certain which ones. As previously mentioned, the artist did not make this information public. By attempting to reconstruct in part how the artist seems to have understood her work, we can say that she was conscious of a spiritual world that the human soul was capable of perceiving both in the soul itself and in the natural environment in which the soul unfolds. This interaction leads to a constant but solitary transformation of the soul and of nature in an individual spiritual experience that continues throughout existence. That sensibility is patent in Luisa’s work—as is the interaction between and mutual transformation of the individual and the environment. At the same time, she seems to have understood the limit of that experience; as is evident in her work, any other aspect of the transcendent, especially anything related to life after death, is shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

Manuel de la Cruz, on the other hand, made the points of reference for his artistic agenda known. These influences range from a Hegelian notion of history and trust in science to the aesthetic and spiritual theories of modern abstract artists who were, in turn, influenced by the Theosophical Society, which had its own stance on scientific advancement.²⁷ Similar ideas are at play in Manuel de la Cruz’s writings and Mondrian’s essays. For the Dutch artist, “Art—although an end in itself, like religion—is the means through which we can know the universal and contemplate it in plastic form.”²⁸ Manuel de la Cruz, like Kandinsky, asserted that he was living at a watershed moment in history, a time when truths were revealed; art could help, he argued, to manifest that revelation.²⁹ With Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian himself foresaw a new culture “of the mature individual; once matured, the individual will be open to the universal and will tend more and more to unite with it.”³⁰

Through influences such as these, Manuel de la Cruz developed his own vision of a macro-history. He was interested in deciphering the mystery of time and the relative truth regarding the role of humankind in the cosmos—concerns he shared with esotericism.³¹ And these concerns also informed his conception of Neo-Plasticism. In his writings, he follows a narrative akin to that of a number of esoteric traditions in which “all things originate in one and all things in turn flow and return to one.”³² It is within this conceptual framework that Manuel de la Cruz forged his vision of art history. In his view, this history advanced toward cosmic truth and the repudiation of a certain sensual and superficial individualism whose final champion was Romanticism.³³

In closing, we might read Luisa’s art in the context of the historical progress posited by Manuel de la Cruz. Some strains of Romantic thinking resonate in her work, at least in terms of an aesthetic that expresses the spirituality innate to nature. Think of William Blake (English, 1757–1827) and Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), for instance.³⁴ The Romantics, like Luisa González de Sáenz, understood that the spiritual can be captured in its environment through the subjective, that is, through a personal vision. True knowledge—or the knowledge to which the individual can gain access—exists only in the subjective,³⁵ an idea that aligns with Luisa’s perception of the possibility of seeing the world through the opening of the soul.

How to understand humankind in our environment and the universal principles that govern us were concerns shared by Manuel de la Cruz and Luisa. Their distinctive artistic and, perhaps, personal experiences led them to contrasting sets—or fabrics—of beliefs, practices, and systems as well as strategies. Manuel de la Cruz’s work engages the control and understanding of truths that can be materialized in an object, and Luisa’s the veiled nature of the spiritual that is, nonetheless, experienced and, therefore, potentially materialized in the object.

I am grateful to Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López, and Leonardo Santamaría Montero for their comments on early drafts of this text. I would like to thank Sofía Vindas Solano and the Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural for the information they provided on Luisa González de Sáenz and for access to primary sources relevant to her life and work. Lastly, I thank the Museo de Arte Costarricense and the Museos del Banco Central for allowing me to reproduce works from their collections.

Spanish

“La belleza cósmica no admite gradaciones o localizaciones geográficas o cronológicas, es infinita, mientras que las reacciones sensuales llevan aparejados los términos de bonito, feo, trágico, humorístico, útil, límites constantes en su fugaz carrera hacia la muerte”.³⁶

Con estas palabras, el artista costarricense Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) determinaba la diferencia crucial entre un arte que conducía al infinito, ejemplificado en su caso por la abstracción, y un arte transitorio que respondía a emociones inmediatas, características que son más evidentes en el arte figurativo.³⁷ El artista conceptualizó el arte como una herramienta que generaba la integración del ser humano en la universalidad del cosmos, lo que daría como resultado la belleza cósmica. Esta cita forma parte de la conferencia impartida por Manuel de la Cruz en Maracaibo, Venezuela, en 1957, titulada “El arte como integración cósmica”, en la cual propuso sus teorías sobre el valor cósmico del arte abstracto geométrico. A lo largo de la década de 1950, el artista también dictará otras conferencias y escribirá ensayos al respecto, además de iniciar una producción de obras que reflejan sus preceptos teóricos y que culminaría a inicios de los años setenta.

En la misma década de 1950, otra artista costarricense iniciará una producción también vinculada a lo trascendente, pero, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz, no había en su trabajo una intención de integración en esa verdad universal, sino una aceptación de la imposibilidad de acceder a la realidad última del ser. Me refiero a Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982), cuyas pinturas, dibujos y vitrales se enfocaron, a partir de los años cincuenta y hasta el final de sus días, en un estilo donde el paisaje y la figura humana predominan, y las formas de expresión en la línea y la pincelada plasmaban una manera de percibir el entorno natural, el ser humano, y los aspectos espirituales imbuidos en ambos (fig. 2).³⁸ Luisa trató las formas perceptibles proporcionadas por su entorno como los elementos en los que era posible sentir y ver lo trascendente.

En este ensayo me concentro en las propuestas sobre lo espiritual y lo trascendente propias de estos artistas, y en cómo sus obras revelan posturas predominantes en el siglo XX sobre el papel del arte en la representación y transformación de lo espiritual.³⁹ En el caso de Manuel de la Cruz, veremos un entendimiento del arte y de su propia producción en cuanto componentes que evidencian las vibraciones adecuadas de una verdad universal irrefutable. El arte se convierte, además, en un artefacto que al ser comprendido bajo conceptos como la belleza cósmica, acerca al ser humano a su estado absoluto. En contraste, la obra de Luisa no acepta que el ser humano pueda conocer, en esta vida, una verdad última y, sin embargo, la artista tiene claro que el entorno natural y las personas están permeados de una carga espiritual, una cualidad inmanente tal, que lo vuelve capaz de modificar la percepción de las cosas. Su obra no es un artefacto para la integración, sino la materialización de un mundo espiritual imbuido de la cotidianeidad que nos rodea.

Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sénz pertenecieron a la generación costarricense de artistas de los años treinta, fundamental para la introducción de las vanguardias artísticas al país.⁴⁰ Hacia finales de la década de 1940, Manuel de la Cruz inició su incursión en el arte abstracto.⁴¹ A inicios de los años cincuenta arribó a Venezuela y ahí, influido por el ambiente artístico del país y por el neoplasticismo, movimiento ampliamente divulgado por Piet Mondrian (neerlandés, 1872–1944), desarrolló sus teorías artísticas.⁴² Luisa comenzó su carrera artística con pinturas de paisajes y el arte del retrato. Desde finales de los años cuarenta empezó a generar obras más herméticas, sirviéndose principalmente del paisaje natural de las zonas de altura. Su paleta de colores se volvió oscura y su estética sugería un escenario pictórico adverso y en movimiento, cuyo resultado plástico indica una cierta abstracción de los elementos naturales. La artista trató disímiles temas religiosos y míticos, y forjó, de manera casi obsesiva, escenas donde la naturaleza imperaba sobre los seres humanos. Si bien desarrolló su carrera artística en Costa Rica, podemos constatar, gracias a la colección de dibujos preservada por la familia Sáenz-Shelby, que los entornos naturales y ciudades que visitó en sus viajes a Estados Unidos y a Europa influyeron en ella, llevándola a realizar una gran cantidad de bocetos de esa temática que guardan una estrecha relación con la producción iniciada en la década de 1950.

En 1956, Manuel de la Cruz publica en la revista costarricense Brecha el ensayo “El arte abstracto: realidad de nuestro tiempo”. El artista entiende el arte abstracto como la “reafirmación de las eternas verdades estéticas”,⁴³ un arte universal que trasciende geografías. En la ya mencionada conferencia de 1957 en Maracaibo, el artista propone que el universo está comprendido en el número, el ritmo, el orden y el equilibrio; un cosmos eterno donde toda forma independiente al final está sujeta a una totalidad universal. La vida consiste en infinitas integraciones y reintegraciones de energía, y el espíritu humano se concibe como una conexión vibrante con este todo universal.⁴⁴ El arte es, en este contexto, “una manera de provocar determinadas reacciones que llamamos estéticas . . . [que] se dirigen a determinada porción de lo humano en inevitable búsqueda de vibraciones cósmicas afines, tomando el momento humano como puente hacia su integración universal”.⁴⁵ Estas ‘vibraciones cósmicas’ son lo emitido por el ritmo armónico que se expresa en las formas geométricas, líneas y colores empleados en la pintura, lo que posibilita el proceso de integración cósmica (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz también establece tres vías artísticas para la integración: la espontánea, la intuitiva y la intelectual; y con ellas compone clasificaciones para una historia del arte, siendo el arte abstracto de la primera mitad del siglo XX la principal vía intelectual. Las vías se muestran a lo largo de la historia, y el arte contenido en ellas son referentes de la eternidad cósmica en la que estamos comprendidos.⁴⁶ Manuel de la Cruz emplea la “necesidad interior”, proclamada por Vasily Kandinsky (Francés, nacido en Rusia, 1866–1944) en 1911 en Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (De lo espiritual en el arte, y la pintura en particular), para entender grandes acontecimientos históricos en el mundo de las artes y de la cultura. En su ensayo “El Cuadro Tridimensional”, publicado en 1958, Manuel de la Cruz nos dice que: “Fra Angelico interesa e interesará siempre, en su época o fuera de ella . . . no porque pintó ángeles, sino el cómo los pintó imbuyéndoles esa unión mística que es común a todos los hombres aún [sic] cuando ese fervor se canalice hacia Buda o Quezlcoatl [sic], vale decir, cómo manifestó su “necesidad interior.”⁴⁷

Manuel de la Cruz ve entonces la transición de un pensamiento primitivo a un pensamiento racional, y es en la última vía donde se puede plantear un camino hacia la verdad, “su razón cósmica, sus ritmos vitales, eternos y universales”.⁴⁸ El artista propone que a la obra de arte se le pueden suministrar las condiciones necesarias para alcanzar la integración cósmica. Esas condiciones están en gran medida representadas por Mondrian y Kandinsky (Figs. 4–5), ya que “ambos comprendieron que sólo por la abstracción, la eliminación de la referencia, de lo sensual y alegórico, el olvido en fin de todo lo romántico, es que podía llegarse al ritmo infinito”.⁴⁹

Cuando observamos la pintura abstracto-geométrica de Manuel de la Cruz en el contexto de estos ensayos, advertimos el compromiso con la noción de universalidad. En su cuadro Abstracción Geométrica Nº 8 (fig. 6), por ejemplo, encontramos plastas planas de color que interactúan con líneas horizontales, verticales y diagonales, además de sencillas formas geométricas. El artista también se sirvió de leves curvaturas de la línea que generaban tensión entre los colores y las formas seleccionadas, tal y como puede verse en Equilibrio cósmico.⁵⁰

Luisa González de Sáenz, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz González, no dejó escritos sistemáticos sobre su modo de visualizar el arte. Lo que conocemos de ella son breves entrevistas que le realizaron, comentarios a sus obras de críticos de arte a lo largo de los años, así como los testimonios de familiares y amigos de la artista. En otras palabras, Luisa sería reservada respecto de los procesos existentes detrás de su obra. El interés se dirigía en cambio a cómo el arte se convertía en un medio diario de expresión: cuando este era expuesto al público, lo que se mostraba era su percepción sobre el entorno, lo espiritual y la humanidad.⁵¹ En la Figura 7 vemos, por ejemplo, el potencial que le dio la artista al paisaje, su inmensidad y su espiritualidad, con respecto al solitario individuo, de quien Luisa nos deja conocer el camino que ha recorrido. El cielo nocturno se transforma en lo que podemos dilucidar, es una criatura voladora en movimiento, como si estuviese atravesando o surgiendo de la noche misma.

Luisa encontró una base para la creación en el arte figurativo, al cual consideraba su “mejor forma de expresión, y como en arte y en toda manifestación se debe buscar la verdad, ésta es mi verdad”.⁵² El paisaje de altura, entre otros, le suministró esos componentes para una expresión personal, tales como la forma de los árboles, la niebla, la fuerza del viento y la temperatura.La artista sentía que la imposibilidad de percibir la naturaleza de forma distinta por parte de las personas era un impedimento causado por la falta de apertura del espíritu a otro tipo de sensaciones.⁵³ La sociedad no se permitía explorar las posibilidades de la mirada que únicamente un espíritu abierto podía proveer. En este sentido, la obra de Luisa se involucró gradualmente no sólo en lo que se observa a partir de esta mirada espiritual, sino también en lo que se transforma espiritualmente en el ser humano y en la naturaleza. Como la artista comenta en una grabación que aparece en el documental de Carlos Freer, Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz, realizado en 1999: “No sé si hay un cambio espiritual, que generalmente todos tenemos, ¿verdad? Hay ciertas evoluciones que sin darse uno mucho cuenta va[n] transformando el espíritu, ¿verdad? Me fui interesando tanto, y ver en la naturaleza tanto [como] en las mismas personas, el alma humana.”⁵⁴

Luisa poseía la capacidad, de acuerdo con el escritor costarricense Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), de “materializar lo espiritual, hasta hacerlo visible y nuestro; espiritualizar lo material hasta hacerlo impalpable, que es también hacerlo nuestro.”⁵⁵ La artista ofrecía una especie de transfiguración de la naturaleza observada, a través de un estilo en el que tanto la pincelada como la línea de dibujo eran fuertes y generaban una atmósfera integrada, adversa y en movimiento, al punto de generar cierta abstracción y falta de claridad entre los elementos representados. Esto se puede advertir en una ilustración que realiza para el cuento “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático”, escrito por su hermano Mario González Feo (fig.8). El dibujo refiere a dos líneas del personaje principal: “ojalá pudiera sentir ahora la fuerza vital de aquella tarde transfigurada. ¡Porque toda la tarde estaba transfigurada!”.⁵⁶ El texto que precede estas oraciones resulta a su vez valioso: “hay cosas y personas que en un momento dado, por la fuerza extraordinaria de lo que llamamos misterio, se transfiguran. Siguen siendo ellas pero una como luz interior, una llama interna . . . les da iluminación, transparencia interior: eso es, transfiguración”.⁵⁷ La imagen muestra una figura situada en un paisaje desolado y su cuerpo se está integrando con el espacio natural, específicamente con los rayos de la “luz” que está en el cielo. Podemos distinguir entre el terreno sobre el que está la figura y el cielo, y también la tensión entre esta fuente lumínica y la figura. Al mismo tiempo, el trazo posibilita la sensación de movilidad y adversidad en cada uno de los elementos mencionados.

La observación y la expresión de lo espiritualmente percibido son actos individuales. Esto daba pie a un pensamiento recurrente en la obra y en la vida de la artista: la inevitable e inherente soledad del alma, que no es posible eliminar aun estando en compañía de otros.⁵⁸ Nos encontramos con paisajes donde la gran mayoría de las figuras humanas transitan en soledad, y si es que hay varios personajes, estos no se percatan los unos de los otros.Por otro lado, aunado a las transformaciones espirituales y el peregrinaje solitario, la aceptación de la imposibilidad de conocer la verdadera cara de la trascendencia, de una vida después de la muerte, permeó su obra.

Luisa profesaba, por ejemplo, un gran cariño por los Rubaiyat, cuartetos atribuidos a Omar Khayyam (persa, 1048–1131), y realizó dibujos referentes a algunos de sus pasajes. En los Rubaiyat es valioso el goce inmediato de la vida, ya que no hay conocimiento humano capaz de darnos las respuestas a las preguntas fundamentales de la humanidad: los motivos detrás de la vida y la muerte. Un dibujo de Luisa, donde se ilustra el cuarteto LXVIII de los Rubaiyat,refleja estas ideas (fig. 9): “No somos más que una hilera en movimiento / De sombras mágicas que van y vienen / En torno a la linterna iluminada por el sol / Y sostenida a medianoche por el Maestro del Espectáculo”.⁵⁹ La artista vuelve a emplear la luz como elemento que transfigura el espacio. Debido a la fuerza del trazo, la artista posibilita la sensación de que nos hallamos ante la inevitable transformación, o transitoriedad, tanto de los individuos como de la naturaleza. Contamos también con un boceto en el que está anotado un fragmento del cuarteto XXXII (fig. 10) sobre aquellos sitios del conocimiento a los cuales el ser humano no puede ingresar: “¡De esa puerta la llave no encontré yo jamás; ese velo ocultaba lo que existe detrás…!”.⁶⁰ A diferencia de otros ejemplos que hemos expuesto, el tema se representa en un estilo más sobrio. Ante un espacio nocturno y desolado se encuentra un camino que se dirige a una puerta, la cual resguarda aquello trascendente a lo que el ser humano no puede acceder. Los tres personajes caminan hacia la puerta, iluminados sólo por sus lámparas, con sus rostros y cuerpos cubiertos. Ni dichos personajes ni nadie posee la llave que permite ingresar a dicho espacio del saber.

El uso de los Rubaiyat nos permite suponer que varios elementos de la obra de Luisa se vieron influidos por referencias literarias o filosóficas, aunque no sea fácil establecer cuáles fueron. Y es que, como ha sido señalado antes, no hizo pública esta información. Al reconstruir parte de la forma en que Luisa entendió su obra, podríamos decir que la artista estaba consciente de un mundo espiritual que el alma humana era capaz de percibir, tanto en ella misma como en el entorno natural en el que se desenvolvía. Esta interacción provoca la transformación constante del alma y de la naturaleza, y dicho proceso espiritual constituía una experiencia individual que se vivía, a lo largo de la existencia, en soledad. Luisa expresó su sentir por vía de una obra donde se pudiese visualizar precisamente esta interacción y transformación entre el individuo y su entorno. Al mismo tiempo, estaba consciente de que ese era el límite de su experiencia y que cualquier otro aspecto sobre lo trascendente, en especial lo concerniente a la vida después de la muerte, quedaba resguardado en el misterio.

Manuel de la Cruz, en cambio, se interesó en que supiéramos cuáles eran las referencias de su programa artístico: desde una especie de espíritu hegeliano sobre la historia y una fidelidad a la ciencia hasta las teorías estéticas y espirituales de artistas abstractos modernos que, dicho sea de paso, estaban influenciados por la Sociedad Teosófica, la cual proporcionaba su propia postura sobre los avances científicos.⁶¹ Cuando comparamos los escritos de Manuel de la Cruz con los ensayos de Mondrian, por ejemplo, encontramos propuestas similares entre sí. Para el artista neerlandés, “el arte –aunque sea un fin en sí mismo, como la religión– es el medio a través del cual podemos conocer lo universal y contemplarlo de forma plástica”.⁶² Manuel de la Cruz replicó, además, un sentir similar al de Kandinsky: decía estar viviendo en un momento decisivo de la historia, en el cual las verdades se estaban revelando y su arte podía ayudar a manifestar dicha revelación.⁶³ El mismo Mondrian con el neoplasticismo profetizaba el desarrollo paralelo de una nueva cultura, que sería “aquella del individuo maduro; una vez maduro, el individuo estará abierto a lo universal y tenderá más y más a unirse con ello”.⁶⁴

Con este tipo de referentes Manuel de la Cruz generó su propia versión de una macrohistoria, manifiesta en esa preocupación común con el esoterismo por descifrar el misterio del tiempo y la verdad relativa al papel del ser humano en el cosmos.⁶⁵ Su concepción del arte neoplástico no está exenta de esto, ya que como leemos en sus escritos, se sigue una narrativa similar a la de varias tradiciones esotéricas, donde “todas las cosas se originan en uno y todas las cosas a su vez fluyen y vuelven a uno”.⁶⁶ Es en este contexto que Manuel de la Cruz forjó una visión peculiar del progreso en la historia del arte, en la que, a través de las épocas, hay una cercanía a la verdad cósmica y un rechazo ante cierto individualismo, sensual y superficial, cuyo último gran campeón fue el Romanticismo.⁶⁷

Podríamos finalizar con una lectura de la obra de Luisa en el contexto de este supuesto progreso sugerido por Manuel de la Cruz. Su producción artística guarda un cierto eco con algunas líneas de pensamiento del Romanticismo, por lo menos en lo que refiere a una cierta estética donde se expresaba lo espiritual inherente a la naturaleza, como lo sería en el caso de William Blake (inglés, 1757–1827) o de Caspar David Friedrich (alemán, 1774–1840).⁶⁸ Los románticos, al igual que Luisa González de Sáenz, entendieron que la forma de preservar lo espiritual en su entorno se produce a través de lo subjetivo, esto es, una visión personal de lo espiritual. Es en lo subjetivo, de hecho, que el verdadero conocimiento existe, y al que en verdad el individuo puede acudir.⁶⁹ Esta idea se alinea con la percepción que tuvo Luisa sobre la posibilidad de ver el mundo a partir de la apertura del alma.

Tanto Manuel como Luisa tuvieron inquietudes sobre cómo comprender al ser humano en su entorno y sobre los principios universales que nos gobiernan. Los problemas artísticos y, en todo caso, personales que surgieron, los llevaron a un entramado de creencias, prácticas y sistemas, y a soluciones plásticas contrastantes. Las obras artísticas de ambos responden, para el primero, al control y entendimiento de las verdades que se pueden materializar en un objeto y, para la segunda, a la veladura inherente a aquello espiritual que, sin embargo, es experimentado y, por lo tanto, también se puede materializar en el objeto.

Agradezco a Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López y Leonardo Santamaría Montero, por sus comentarios y críticas al revisar los primeros bocetos de este texto. Quiero también agradecer a Sofía Vindas Solano y al Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural por su apoyo en proporcionarme información y acceso a diversas fuentes relativas a Luisa González de Sáenz. Finalmente, va mi agradecimiento al Museo de Arte Costarricense y a los Museos del Banco Central por el permiso de reproducción de sus obras.

The post The Cosmos and the Spiritual: A Fabric of Beliefs in the Work of Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz / El cosmos y lo espiritual: un entramado de creencias en las obras de Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sáenz appeared first on post.

“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

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