Civil Rights Activist Rustin's African Art Collection Makes It's Way To Yale Gallery
MARY E. O'LEARY, NEW HAVEN REGISTER
New Haven: Bayard Rustin, major civil rights activist leader in the nonviolence movement and singer, also was a sophisticated art collector whose important discoveries now are on display in New Haven.
The chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Rustin was hnored posthumously this week at the White House as one of 16 Americans awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
On the second floor of the Yale University Art Gallery, before a wall-size photo of an excavation site, are terra cotta figures standing in an open display meant to simulate the environment of the Sahara Desert.
They represent a small portion of the 243 figures created by artisans in the ancient civilizations of West Africa, somewhere between 1,000 B.C.E. through the first millennium, and donated to the gallery by enterpreneur and philanthropist Joel Grae and his wife, SusAnna Grae, in 2010.
“You’ve got a gem in your midst. I hope the people in New Haven can determine who these people were,” said SusAnna Grae of the figures originally collected by Rustin in the 1950s in Nigeria and Niger and obtained by the Graes through a mutual friend.
“This is a great mystery, but it is also great art,” she said at the gallery Friday.
“This is 3,000 years old,” she said, pointing to the oldest figures from the Nok Civilization. Joel Grae said that civilization goes back even further.
The faces of the male and female figures from Nok are characterized by triangular eyes incised into the clay with elaborate hairstyles and body jewelry for both sexes.
“I’m an old potter, and how these didn’t blow off in the heating process is a miracle. These were hand built and fired in open grass,” SusAnna Grae said.
The other civilizations are the Katsina and Sokoto, who, along with the Nok, are from Nigeria, while the Bura are from Niger.
A mother-and-child figure from Katsina, which is about 2,000 years old, has a more sensitive treatment in the facial expression, SusAnna Grae said. The Sokota figures were “more judgmental,” she said with “an austere village elder kind of feeling to them.” They also have a different style of how they are created by overlaying the slabs of clay to create different layers.
“There are subtle differences between them,” she said, with Egyptian influences apparent.
Rustin had befriended the future presidents of Ghana and Nigeria when those men were studying at Lincoln University near Rustin’s home in Pennsylvania, giving him entre to those countries where he went to study village life, conflict resolution and the apparent peaceful ancient peoples.
“There were no battlements or weapons found,” Joel Grae said of the current excavation being undertaken by German archeologists.
“They found tools for agriculture, but not for weapons,” said Frederick John Lamp the Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation curator of African Art.
Lamp said many African leaders of the independence movements studied at Lincoln, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, who became president of Nigeria.
He said Rustin’s time in Africa, before independence, was part of his civil rights training.
“He was interested in studying local government in Africa. It was all part of his awakening to civil rights and his participation in organizations like SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). He was concerned about how to build a more just government here,” Lamp said.
As for the ancient artists themselves, Lamb said “They were definitely skilled.”
He said many figures had bound beards and carried a crook and whip, like Egyptian leaders. “The pharaoh often was shown with a bound beard,” Lamp said.
Lamp said the Nok art was contemporaneous with the last millennium of the Egyptian kingdoms. Joel Grae said it also was the era of the Great Wall of China and the Mayan civilization, as well as very early Rome.
Joel Grae said some of the jewelry they have in their collection from this period had Roman and Egyptian glass. “They were traders,” he said of the Noks. He said there were beads that came from a quarry in Mali.
Lamp said there was no reference to Sokoto and Katsina by art historians in the major textbook published in 2000, 50 years after Rustin was assembling his collection.
“We didn’t know it existed,” Lamp said of the major contribution Rustin has made to understanding the history of the area and the Graes for donating it to the university for public appreciation.
There are interesting coincidences between Rustin and Lamp, as both grew up in the same part of Pennsylvania. Also, Rustin was Quaker and Lamp was Mennonite, each raised in nonviolent cultures.
SusAnna Grae said they choose Yale for their gift because of Lamp’s scholarly work and his commitment to studying the artwork across different academic disciplines, as well as offering a course to local teachers to pass on the discovery to New Haven schoolchildren.
“Our interest was to let people know about it. Very few people knew anything about this collection. We feel it is quite spectacular and we wanted it to be studied and to be shared with the community. We wanted people to see it, rather than be closed up in our home,” SusAnne Graes said.
Joel Grae said when you go to most museums, it looks like African art only goes back 100 years.
“You don’t have the full picture,” SusAnna Grae said.
“This gives you a very different perspective, especially if you are a person of African descent,” said Joel Grae.
Lamp said the Nok are the oldest art producing culture in Africa south of the Sahara and the pristine condition of Rustin’s collection was important for documentary purposes.
He said it reflected the important relationships Rustin was able to establish in Nigeria as he went to remote villages in that country to which that no one else had access.
“Bayard had an amazing eye for art. He wasn’t just an amazing historical figure who organized the many things that he did. He was a Renaissance man ... way ahead of his time,” SusAnna Grae said.
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