Museum layover in Dallas, Texas
On the day the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, I was in Dallas, Texas on a four-hour layover. Awaiting the flight to Indianapolis, I caught a cab to the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) located downtown. The driver asked me where I was from. I told him. Then I asked the same question of my driver through my surgical mask. I also wanted to know if he spoke Hausa, having picked up on his African accent. He was from Lagos, Nigeria — where many speak Hausa — but he did not. Hausa was the language I spoke when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa from 1992-94.
“The Gift of Life” by Miguel Covarrubias
I haven’t been back since. Since my service, the danger of kidnapping by Islamic insurgent groups — among them Boko Haram, notorious for its repeated kidnappings of Nigerian schoolgirls — has steadily increased in the country that I called home for two years. (In Hausa Boko Haram translates, roughly, to Western knowledge is forbidden.) Accordingly, the Peace Corps evacuated its volunteers from the country in 2011 and has yet to return.
My first stop in the museum was the Keir Collection of Islamic Art gallery. It’s part of the DMA’s larger Keir Initiative spearheaded by former director Max Anderson, also director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art from 2006-2011, who wanted to make the museum a center of collecting Islamic art. I took note of the paintings from Persia (modern-day Iran) that depicted people and animals, which the stricter interpretations of Islam forbid. One drawing on display under the heading “For Private contemplation only” dating from around 1850, featured a contorting female acrobat, showing the ripe red flesh of her buttocks. The wall text indicated that the drawing hung in the Qajar Palace (presumably in one of the more private spaces) in present day Tehran. It’s not the kind of thing you might expect to see these days in Afghanistan’s presidential palace now under control of the Taliban.
I also took note of the open-faced hand-copied Qur’ans dating from the 1500s featuring with their flourishes of Arabic script. As the didactic text above one of the Qur’an pointed out, the development of the Arabic language, Islamic architecture, and Islamic art are all intimately linked to the book that serves as holy text for 1.8 billion Muslims. Think of the flowing Arabic calligraphy that decorates so many mosques around the planet. The works on view, ranging from ancient pottery to modern photography — from a wide swath of the Islamic world — also incorporate secular influences from Europe and elsewhere. In the collection’s Persian miniature paintings, the influence of Chinese painting via the Silk Road is evident in the stylized depictions of faces and the incorporation of text on canvases. It was through the trade contacts of the Silk Road that Europe first encountered the gifts of Islamic civilization; its art, its architecture, and its vast intellectual knowledge.
Qur’arans — part of the Keir Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art
Much more explicitly, the concurrent exhibition My|gration, demonstrates how much works of art mirror the diversity of the societies in which they were created. “In response to community input,” reads the wall text, “This exhibition highlights the contributions of artists who immigrated to the United States, examines how the movement of peoples is expressed through art, and illuminates ways cross-cultural connections inform artistic production.” But to find such a display in a museum in the heart of Texas took me a little by surprise, as Governor Greg Abbott and the Trump supporters in the state legislature — for whom the phrase “cross cultural connections” must sound a lot like critical race theory — are doing everything they can to turn Texas into Bubbastan.
The wall text in My/gration in most cases was a lot more political than the actual art.
Take German-born Fred Darge’s painting “Survival of the Fittest”. The detailed study of the desert floor shows a roadrunner distracted by a snake while chasing its grasshopper prey near a prickly pear cactus and a cow skull. Likewise, Harry Carnohan’s “West Texas Landscape”, with its portrait of a drought-stricken stretch of farmland, could just as easily fit in an exhibition featuring the paintings of American Regionalists. Not so Octavio Medellín’s 1975 sculpture “The Struggle,” however, which speaks of something a little more universal. You see here, carved out of a block of red sandstone, an amalgam of a man, woman, and child. The bulky connected forms reminded me of all sorts of indigenous sculpture from Mexico, and from Central and South America. The Detroit Museum of Art’s curator Mark Castro, speaking on SoundCloud, notes the small child reaching up to the two larger figures, perhaps longing for attention. Medellin, according to Castro, carved this work after an extended stay in the Yucatan with his family, where he sought inspiration for his art from the native cultures that made that area their home. Castro also notes that Medellín himself had spoken about how the work is meant to capture “the tension in a single family unit.”
The work speaks to me about the more difficult aspects of intimacy; about the difficult balancing act of maintaining your individuality in the face of family pressures. But I also think about how Medellín’s work transcends borders in its amalgamation of contemporary conceptual content and Latin American indigenous art.
“The Struggle” by Octavio Medellín
While the focus of the My/gration is often on Southwestern subjects, it’s not limited to them. Kara Walker’s grayscale etchching “No World” from her 2010 series “An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters” focuses its attention on the transatlantic slave trade with its dreamlike imagery. A pair of hands reaches up from the sea to grab a sailboat while a naked woman swims in the foreground — perhaps a woman who had been thrown overboard from a slave ship. On the horizon you can see some sort of conflagration rising up in the form of white and black smoke. I couldn’t help think of the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism while walking through the DMA’s African collection, with its predictable mix of masks and other items used in ritual animistic celebrations. A placard at the entrance of the gallery titled “African Art in Context” explained that the work under and behind glass was never meant to be seen in a museum.
True enough.
“Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire,” writes Dan Hicks in his 2020 book The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. “They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.” How much of this theft dynamic is at play specifically at the DMA I do not know exactly— aside from the fact that the DMA houses one of the stolen Benin bronzes that Hicks describes in his book. But the bigger issue, I think, is that no amount of didactic text could drag the DMA’s current configuration of its African galleries into the 21st century. Just like when walking through the African galleries at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, you would never know that sub-Saharan Africa has large urban centers and thriving sophisticated art scenes. It’s a problem that the exhibition Moth to Cloth: Silk in Africa, which is drawn from the DMA’s permanent collection of cloth from Ghana, Nigeria and Madagascar, goes no way towards rectifying.
After a very quick tour of the DMA’s permanent collection (I should mention somewhere that the admission to the DMA is free unlike at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields) I had to get back to the airport. But I did have some time to ponder Miguel Covarrubias’ glass-tiled mural “The Gift of Life” (1954) while waiting for my Uber ride. The mural sits outside the museum’s main entrance and depicts, a spirit form shooting out from a rainbow against the backdrop of an interstellar field. Life on earth surely is some kind of miracle, whatever religion, or non-religion, you subscribe to.
My Uber driver was quiet on the way back, but that was probably because I was quiet. When he finally got a conversation going, I told him I was from Indianapolis, and it was my first and only time in Dallas. He told me, as we drove by the urban landscape that was so similar to Indianapolis, that he and his wife were considering moving to the city and asked me what the real estate market was like in the city. I told him that the market in Indy was a seller’s market, like elsewhere in the country, but it was particularly hot in the city’s ring neighborhoods. Indy had a lot to recommend it, I told him, with ample entertainment choices and a pretty decent job market.
It occurred to me as I spoke how privileged I was to live in a city that wasn’t entirely ruled by the Taliban or Boko Haram or by fanatical Trump supporters (yet) and to be able to watch my daughter grow up and make her own way in the world. It’s a privilege to be able to write about art. It’s a privilege to not worry about being shot everyday when I wake up in the morning or to go to bed hungry — kwanta da yunwa, as they say in Hausa. As we approached the airport, the driver said that he and his wife were looking for a sign as to whether they should move or not. “The Lord will provide,” he said.
