The Commodification, Staging, Invention and Artistry of a Colonial-Era African Art Collection

John Mabiala and Maduta, Vili artists from the Loango Coast, created 7 ivory carvings during the 1901 Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York. Members of a large African community living for six months in a performance space called Darkest Africa (where American Exposition visitors were promised an authentic ethnographic experience of “primitive” Africa) Mabiala and Maduta’s carved ivory tusks featuring imagery that testify to the complex intercultural exchanges framing colonial collecting and consumption practices. Darkest Africa was staffed by French entrepreneur Xavier Pene and funded by the Buffalo Society of Natural Science. Pene recruited musicians, performers, carvers, weavers, and priests from a number of communities between Benin and Angola. To set an “authentic” African stage, Pene acquired over 1500 examples of “traditional” African art – furniture, weapons, dress, musical instruments, and other utilitarian objects - subsequently acquired by the Buffalo Museum of Science to form the foundation of their African art collection. This huge collection was displayed in a museum within the village, but also worn, made, and used by African residents during daily private activities and staged public performances. These same objects appear in vignettes carved onto the ivory tusks. Through these carved ivory chronicles of daily private and public life in Africa Village, two artists document African art and culture as commodified, staged, invented and authentically lived in a colonial collecting and performance space, thereby complicating narratives of a historical African art collection.