The catalogues for two collaborative exhibitions of African textiles on view in the fall of 2009—one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University—bear striking similarities, at least in outward appearances. Comparable in length, they each feature essays and a selection of illustrated artworks with accompanying page-length captions. They also draw on similar phrases, such as “Poetics of Cloth,” which is both the title of the Grey Art Gallery catalogue and of Alisa LaGamma’s essay in the one accompanying the Met’s exhibition. There is even an overlap in the contemporary textile artists discussed in each, including El Anatsui (Ghana), Grace Ndiritu (Kenya), Rachid Koraichi (Algeria), and Sokari Douglas Camp (Nigeria). However, in their approach to the subject of African textiles, the two catalogues are quite different, with the Met one taking a largely historical perspective, and the one from the Grey Art Gallery being more firmly grounded in the current moment.

The historic emphasis of the Met publication comes mainly from its catalogue of sixteen textiles, including twelve from the British Museum, that range in date from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Each of the cloths are lavishly illustrated in high quality, full-page color, and accompanied by essays and captions written by co-editors LaGamma and Christine Guintini. Several of the cloths were never previously published, making this catalogue immensely useful for research and pedagogy.

Textile conservationist Guintini does an excellent job of describing the structural complexities of the sixteen catalogued textiles and the techniques involved in making them. She begins her essay with a detailed breakdown of the various West African loom types, using helpful field photographs and diagrams wherever necessary to illustrate her points. She then meticulously analyzes the twelve cataloged textiles in question, grouping them either as “woven structures” or examples of "surface design.” In her description of a Gambian tie-dye she writes: “the areas bound by string or cordage resist the dye, while the uncovered parts receive the dye. This handwoven, narrow-band cloth was apparently loosely bound, since the dye seeped through the entire cloth—although to a greater or lesser extent, respectively, in the unbound and bound areas—creating a muted overall tonality” (33). Guintini’s well-informed and detailed attention to the specifics of technique and process is useful for those wanting to understand the underlying structure of West African textile design.

To complement Guintini’s technical focus, LaGamma, Associate Curator of African Art at the Met, focuses her essay, and her contributions to the photo captions, on a broad range of issues related to African textiles, including the underlying aesthetic principles, their use as expressions of identity, and their place in history. In her essay, she discusses some of these issues in relation to the twelve historic examples, although she mostly does so through the eyes of contemporary African artists in whose work she sees a continuation of the aesthetic and technical virtuosity of past African textiles. For example, in a section on indigo dying, she notes that the cloths with vertical stripes featured as backdrops in Malick Sidibé’s recent studio photographs evoke the aesthetic of locally indigo-dyed or woven fabric. Elsewhere in the same section, she argues that the indigo-resist panels by Algerian artist Koraichi, with their script-like motifs inspired by ancient Sufi poetry, are a renewal of a history of indigo trade going back to the time of the ancient Phoenicians. In a section titled “Kente,” she talks mainly about Atta Kwami’s Kente-inspired paintings, and El Anatsui’s wall-hanging, described as a “twenty first century tribute to kente.”

While it is interesting to explore the significance of African textiles through the lens of contemporary African artists and their work, such an approach has its consequences. It ignores the significance of textiles both as historic documents and as aesthetic works of art in their own right. As a result, I sense a disconnect between LaGamma’s essay and the twelve historic textiles featured in the catalogue.

Indeed, there are many sources that could have provided a historical context for these works. I refer to the important work by Richard Roberts on the pre-colonial history of West African indigo production (Richard Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy of the Middle Niger Valley, 1700–1914, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), Judith Byfield’s pivotal study of the impact of colonialism on Yoruba Adire (Judith Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890–1940, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), and Colleen Kriger’s major study of pre-colonial textile trade and its influence on Hausa robe production (Colleen Kriger, Cloth in West African History, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006). Other sources could have been used to highlight the exceptional quality of the catalogued pieces, such as the British Museum’s tunic with Islamic script and geometric shapes drawn over its entire surface. Not only is this rare garment visually stunning, but it says a lot about the history of Islam in the region from where it was collected.

LaGamma provides interesting information on the history of the collecting of African textiles: “Many of these [textiles] were collected during the nineteenth century, some by colonial officials and others by European textile industrialists, and are among the earliest examples of major textile traditions to be preserved—providing an opportunity for us to consider this form of expression in the broadest possible historical perspective” (10). One of them was Charles Beving, Sr., a major player in Manchester’s cotton printing industry in the late nineteenth century. The Met catalogue features four of the two hundred cloths he collected in 1900 that were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1934. Like so many of his contemporaries in the Manchester cloth business, Beving was driven to collect in order to familiarize, and eventually imitate, the African cloth aesthetic so that his industry could better meet the aesthetic preferences of their African-cloth consumers. Beving not only collected far and wide in West Africa, but with a keen eye for quality. From Ghana, he acquired a stunning, and very labor intensive, Ewe Kente cloth (featured on the cover of the catalogue); from Senegal, a delicately embellished indigo tie-dyed wrapper; and from the Igbo village of Akwete in Nigeria, a cloth whose British-inspired weft-float pattern would suggest that some African weavers were also imitating European ones.

Another collector, Henry Cristy, was a self-proclaimed British ethnologist interested in African material culture. In 1865, Christy bequeathed two exquisitely made indigo-dyed textiles to the British Museum. One is a stunning man’s robe from Liberia made of narrow woven strips of alternating light and dark indigo blue, and a bodice that features Islamic-inspired geometric patterns embroidered with indigenous white cotton and red wool that was likely imported from abroad. The other is a locally woven strip weave that the artist dyed with indigo by crushing the cloth into a ball and tying it tightly before dipping it in the indigo dye to create a kaleidoscopic effect. Besides being the earliest cloth from sub-Saharan Africa in the British Museum’s collection, it is an important prototype for the so-called urban-based resist dying that one now finds throughout West Africa.

The significance of the traditions these textiles represent in the contemporary world is a theme that resonates with the contemporary focus of the Grey Art Gallery catalogue. At its core, the latter showcases sixteen contemporary African artists, who create, use, or evoke textiles in their work. In the case of some of the artists, such as Yinka Shonibare or Nike Okundaye, the textile references are obvious, while for others, such as Viye Diba or Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, they are merely implied. To contextualize this varied grouping of artists, the catalogue draws on numerous voices, nine in total; their range of knowledge and expertise add a well-informed and interdisciplinary perspective to the subject of contemporary African textiles.

John Picton, a leading expert on African textiles, contributes the first of the catalogue’s three essays. Titled “Seeing and Wearing: Textile in West Africa,” it is an expanded version of an article he published in Black Arts in 2004. In it, he makes the important point that there is indeed no single history of African textiles. As his evidence, he paints a broad yet nuanced picture of the varying histories, technologies, and aesthetics of African textiles as they have evolved and changed over time. Africans have long had a propensity for weaving imported threads—silks in the first half of the nineteenth century and lurex in the second half of the twentieth—into their traditional strip weaves in ways that essentially make them their own. Innovation can also be seen in the Yoruba Kampala, a wax resist that replaced the more traditional Adire, as well as Bogolan, the modern reincarnation of Bamana Bogolanfini. Factory printed cloths, first introduced by way of Europe, and more recently locally manufactured, respond to local modes of speech and symbolic systems by depicting images that evoke local proverbs and even imitate indigenous cloth designs. In a section titled “Textiles and Dress,” Picton emphasizes the varied ways in which Africans use cloth to dress their bodies, noting that Africans not only make maximum use of the cloth, but drape or wrap cloth around the body in ways that enhance movement. In its focus on the various methods by which African textile artists have evolved from or reinvented tradition, Picton’s essay lays an excellent foundation for the catalogue’s contemporary focus.

Poet Kofi Anyidoho adds a conceptual and interdisciplinary perspective in his essay on Kente titled, “Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song.” Known for sounding bells and other percussive instruments when reading his poetry, Anyidoho takes a similar multidimensional view on Kente by exploring the relationship it has to oral tradition and music. He notes the proverbial meanings of Kente design, and its varied uses as dress codes as expressed in song text. From his weaver uncle, he learned that many Ewe master weavers are also master drummers, and that singers often practice their songs to the rhythmic sounds of the weaving process as they work at the loom.

Building on the more general information Picton and Anyidoho present in their essays, the lengthy photo captions provide specific information about the intentions and influences of the artists who created the works, along with appropriate, well-researched information about the textiles and clothing the works address. It helps considerably that specialists were called on to write the labels. For example, Doran Ross authored the caption for the Asante Kente woven by contemporary weaver Samuel Cophie, an artist with whom he has worked closely; and Janet Goldner contextualizes the unusual quilt-like fabric made by one of the Malian artists from the Groupe Bogolan Kasobane that she herself has documented. Jennifer S. Brown and catalogue editor Lynn Gumpert offer their own perspectives as scholars of contemporary art.

Gumpert uses her essay to talk about the issues and obstacles she confronted while curating her first exhibition of contemporary African art. As director of the Grey Art Gallery and a contemporary art specialist, Gumpert has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, though none devoted entirely to African artists prior to Poetics of Cloth. The experience brought her in touch with many of the problematic issues one faces when curating such an exhibition, such as trying not to force African art into a Western art frame, both acknowledging and averting the colonial-rooted perceptions that African art carries, and avoiding over-generalizations about art from a continent as large and multicultural as Africa. Though the essay says very little about contemporary African textiles per se, its thorough, well-documented attention to the issues related to exhibiting contemporary African art makes it an excellent read on the subject, and one that I would most certainly recommend for any contemporary African art course.

Of the two catalogues reviewed here, The Poetics of Cloth from the Grey Art Gallery is the more successful, particularly in its thorough and innovative approach to the contemporary. On this subject, it not only draws on a broad range of experts in the field, but it also offers a variety of perspectives—historical, cultural, interdisciplinary, and curatorial—making it an essential resource for the study of contemporary African textile arts.