LOOKING “BEHIND THE DOOR”
CURATORIAL PERSPECTIVES ON EXHIBITING AN UNKNOWN ARTIFACT

In The Truth About Stories, which we read in our class on “Big Books of American Literature,” Thomas King demonstrates the different functions and impacts of stories told in indigenous cultures: they often lack a straightforward message, easily understood moral, or conclusion. King calls his own favorite tales “saving stories,” because they help him confront and ultimately accept his own failures. They also offer him opportunities for understanding alternative histories.

We offer here some “saving stories” of this door. We do not know its original story. When it was taken from its original location, its story has been lost. It has since been attributed to Olówè of Isè, a story we now question.

King tells his readers that oral and written words, private and public, all matter. In asserting that “stories are all we are,” King plants the seeds of responsibility, holding us accountable not only for the stories we hear and those we tell, but for those we choose to believe. Our questions about the stories we were told about the history of this door compose the story we have chosen to tell here.

Following King, we believe that the stories we have included, left out, or buried are “all these objects are.” As you look at this door, think about the stories it may hold, how they’ve been shaped by the stories that have been told for it and through the processes of colonialism, imperialism and racism by which it was brought here. As the door has been decontextualized and re-contextualized, it has been forever changed.

– Rosa Nanasi Haas ‘18

Professor Scott’s class, “Exhibiting Africa: Art, Artifact and New Articulations,” challenged us to think about the ethics of collecting and displaying African “art” in museums. Objects were sometimes pillaged from their original locations, stolen from sacred temples or sometimes forged for the tourist trade. When our class began choosing pieces for this exhibition, I knew immediately that I wanted to work on the door. I was particularly interested that it had, presumably, been taken from someone’s home. I wanted to call into question its procurement and display: Who owned it? Whose building was it attached to? Did they sell it or was it taken from them? The door was a gift from an alumna, but there were no collection records, no log of who sold it to her, where it had been, what life it might have had before it became the property of the College. In fact, the only information we were given was that the door had been carved by the famed sculptor Olówè of Isè.

The process of preparing this door for exhibition has raised many questions for me about the ethics of display, and about the power we, as contemporary curators, have to question the authenticity of institutional knowledge systems. On what basis had the door been attributed to the most famous Yoruba sculptor? Would we have said nothing about our own concerns if the visiting professor hadn’t questioned the provenance of another object?

We are grateful for this experience of not only researching an African object, this Yoruba door, but also for the process of discovering how “what we know” translates to “what we see” and vice versa. Although our door may not be that of Olówè of Isè, he was a truly influential artist whose work still inspires sculptors today. We also are grateful for the uncelebrated work of this seemingly unknown carver that now is home in the Bryn Mawr College collections.

– Nkechi Ampah ‘—

At first, we were very excited to have an attribution for our artifact. As we continued our research, however, we realized that this door did not look like the rest of Olówè’s work. I wondered in particular what role Bryn Mawr, as a collecting institution, plays in this likely misidentification. When a collector donates an artifact to Bryn Mawr, how does the College know that the claim of authenticity is true? How do curators and those in Special Collections work to verify the “truth” of an object? Is there any way to ever know the truth? In our course on “Exhibiting Africa,” we discussed the ways that individuals and institutions gain cultural capital by collecting objects from other cultures. How do we make sense of the way that Bryn Mawr alums gain status from accumulating such collections, and what status do they give the college? I know that, as students, we are fortunate to have this collection but we realize that the more we know about the objects that were collected, the less we also seem to know about their histories.

– Swati Shastry ‘18