2007.08.06: August 6, 2007: Headlines: Museums: Art: COS - Niger: COS - Mali: COS - Burkina Faso: Tuareg: COS - Liberia: Mercury News: As a traveler in North Africa during and after his Peace Corps days, RPCV Tom Seligman met and made friendships with Tuareg that continue to this day - and his respect for them and their culture is deep
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2007.08.06: August 6, 2007: Headlines: Museums: Art: COS - Niger: COS - Mali: COS - Burkina Faso: Tuareg: COS - Liberia: Mercury News: As a traveler in North Africa during and after his Peace Corps days, RPCV Tom Seligman met and made friendships with Tuareg that continue to this day - and his respect for them and their culture is deep
As a traveler in North Africa during and after his Peace Corps days, RPCV Tom Seligman met and made friendships with Tuareg that continue to this day - and his respect for them and their culture is deep
Seligman sees the commonalities between them and those who will see this exhibit. "The Tuareg are just like us, except they live in this really inhospitable desert where it's tough to make a go. We do have different life trajectories, but we have a lot to learn from them," Seligman said. A well-known Tuareg leader, Seligman recounted, talks about being Tuareg as a state of mind, a kind of behavior. "What he is really saying is that if you go through to deeper emotions and think about a more meaningful reality, then we are the same. And we can be with each other and we can be friends."
As a traveler in North Africa during and after his Peace Corps days, RPCV Tom Seligman met and made friendships with Tuareg that continue to this day - and his respect for them and their culture is deep
Art from Africa's desert
By Sara Wykes
Special to the Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/05/2007 01:57:37 AM PDT
Caption: Tom Seligman, Director of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, poses in front of a Tuareg tent. Chronicle photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice
When Stanford's Cantor Arts Center director Tom Seligman describes his first steps on African soil, as a young Peace Corps volunteer, his words whap the senses.
"We arrived in the middle of the night - 200 volunteers packed in a 707, and it was like somebody took three blankets soaked in water, put them over you and threw you in an oven," he said.
Thankfully, Seligman has not attempted to re-create those first moments, but what he has done, in the Cantor exhibit "Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World," is to evoke the life of one group of North African people with a sense of place. The exhibit is a carefully pieced quilt of objects, for this is a fully explored tableau of the those people and their lives built from their workday clothes, tools, tents and saddles.
The Tuareg are nomadic tribes who roamed the Sahara, crisscrossing the borders of several North African countries - Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkino Faso - long before the borders of those countries were drawn on maps.
The tribes made a name for themselves as sophisticated traders and skilled artisans. Their mystique developed as outsiders marveled at their striking white camels, their highly-developed music and dance and speech, and a natural elegance enhanced further by the indigo-dyed wraps that covered the men's faces except for the eyes.
Seligman's goal was to create an exhibition that would be more than objects hung on walls and displayed in cases.
His approach springs from his willingness to include a multidimensional vision of a people that comes from a first-hand knowledge of the Tuareg.
So, for this exhibit, the Cantor galleries offer a detailed and sensually diverse collection: documentary photographs, a video of a three-day wedding ceremony, Tuareg designs and shapes as adapted by contemporary designers, a powerful set of Tuareg swords and knives. There also is a life-size diorama of a market-day sale, with a blanket filled edge to edge with the silver work admired by many scholars and collectors for its geometric beauty. Alongside are mannequins dressed in actual clothing worn by the artisan couple whose work is displayed.
In the Tuareg tradition, jewelry is an important part of those possessions considered empowering and necessary. In her essay in the exhibit's accompanying book, art historian and co-editor Kristyne Loughran describes "the very clear ideas about how they should look and present themselves." The Tuareg move slowly, she said, and as they do, their garments "sway gently around them." The jewelry, she adds, must also move and shine to accomplish its social purpose.
The exhibit includes stand-alone displays of jewelry - amulets in particular - dating back centuries. Its presence as part of women's and men's adornments is as essential as is another crafted Tuareg item, their nomadic homes built of mats or goatskin.
Along one gallery wall, for instance, is a tent pitched as if ready for its residents to return. The tent has a long, narrow opening that offers its dark interior as cool comfort.
The structure is supported by carved tent poles. Woven reed mats act as windscreens that are easily moved if the wind changes directions. Tucked around the tent are leather bags and cushions with geometric patterns that dazzle in their intricacy and brilliant colors.
For three decades, historians, anthropologist and other collaborators in America, Europe and Africa have studied the Tuareg, gathering their history and tracking their evolution as citizens of a modernized and globalized world.
The Cantor joined with the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, in addition to colleagues at other museums, to design the exhibit and produce a book that is much more than an exhibition catalog. Filled with photographs, maps and essays, the book is the first scholarly work published in English to focus on the Tuareg.
As a traveler in North Africa during and after his Peace Corps days, Seligman met and made friendships with Tuareg that continue to this day - and his respect for them and their culture is deep.
And he sees the commonalities between them and those who will see this exhibit. "The Tuareg are just like us, except they live in this really inhospitable desert where it's tough to make a go. We do have different life trajectories, but we have a lot to learn from them," Seligman said.
A well-known Tuareg leader, Seligman recounted, talks about being Tuareg as a state of mind, a kind of behavior. "What he is really saying is that if you go through to deeper emotions and think about a more meaningful reality, then we are the same. And we can be with each other and we can be friends."
The show runs through Sept. 2. Art of Being Tuareg:
Sahara Nomads in a Modern World
By Sara Wykes
Where: Cantor Arts Center, Lomita Drive and Museum Way, Stanford
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays; open until 8 p.m. Thursdays
Tickets: Admission is free.
Information: (650) 725-0464 or http://museum.stanford.edu.
Silver working demonstrations
By Sara Wykes
Tuareg brothers Salah and Ousman Saidi will be at the Cantor Center to demonstrate silver working. They will be demonstrate their techniques in the exhibition gallery and, when using a torch, in the courtyard.
Where: Cantor Arts Center, Lomita Drive and Museum Way, Stanford.
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (except for breaks), Aug. 16-19; Aug. 22-26 and Aug. 29-Sept. 1.
Tickets: Admission is free.
Links to Related Topics (Tags):
Headlines: August, 2007; Museums; Art; Peace Corps Niger; Directory of Niger RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Niger RPCVs; Peace Corps Mali; Directory of Mali RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Mali RPCVs; Peace Corps Burkina Faso; Directory of Burkina Faso RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Burkina Faso RPCVs; Peace Corps Liberia; Directory of Liberia RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Liberia RPCVs
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Story Source: Mercury News
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Museums; Art; COS - Niger; COS - Mali; COS - Burkina Faso; Tuareg; COS - Liberia
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