Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): A usually private collection of African-American art went on public display for the first time this week in Washington. And the collectors making the art available are better known than the art itself.
I sat down with them last week.
It started with two friends talking about art. One, Johnnetta Cole, is the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The other, Camille Cosby, an art collector, philanthropist and, as it happens, the wife of comedian Bill Cosby.
Persuaded that there was a connection between the sculptures and paintings that define African art and the quilts, abstracts and carvings that African-Americans had created out of and since slavery, they set out to combine them. The result, an extensive new exhibit titled “Conversations,” combining the Cosbys’ African-American collection and the museum’s African one, works with common themes, ranging from the spiritual to the political.
Many of the American artists, from Romare Bearden to Henry Ossawa Tanner, are well-known. Most of the African artists, from Senegal to South Africa to Nigeria, are not. But, side by side, the works mirror one another, a shared experience of memory and family, of nature, of music.
A massive marble Elizabeth Catlett sculpture commissioned by Bill for Camille features a couple in an embrace, with the faces of their children engraved on the woman’s shoulder.
In its shadow stand two mid-20th century male and female wooden figures from Cote d’Ivoire. Another juxtaposition, a 1978 painting “Benin Head” by American artist David Driskell, and a copper and iron commemorative head of a king from Benin made in the 18th century.
The works are soaring and small, colorful and spare.
Camille and Bill Cosby joined me at the African Art Museum to talk about it all.
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