Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head

Abstract

In 1988 the Fowler Museum lent a group of hats to the exhibition Dressing the Head: More than a Matter of Taste at the Gallery of Art, University of Missouri, Kansas City. The guest curator was Mary Jo Arnoldi from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition explored the cultural importance of the head among many African groups through hats and headwear—objects that were both recognizable and accessible to gallery visitors, many of whom had little or no previous interaction with African arts. In February 1994 Doran called Mary Jo in Washington to ask whether she would consider reprising Dressing the Head at the Fowler. Doran explained that the Fowler had a gap in its schedule because objects for its planned exhibition on Haitian Vodou were embargoed in Port-au-Prince. Always delighted to work on any project with Doran, Mary Jo immediately agreed. Never one to let grass grow under his feet, he sent Mary Jo a plane ticket for the following Friday and set this new project in motion.During that first planning meeting Doran began by describing the UMKC exhibition and then he posed the question: “We have two choices: should we reprise the more modest UMKC installation (fifty objects) or make it larger?” At that point David Mayo, the Fowler's exhibition designer, raised his hand to say, “Doran, when have you ever chosen the first option?” Lots of laughter and a few groans! Not surprisingly, the second option won the day. The big reveal was that the turn-around time required for an expanded version of the hat show, now with a publication, would be a mere seven months.When Mary Jo returned to Washington, she asked Christine Mullen Kreamer, who was then at the Museum of Natural History, to be a co-curator and to coauthor the publication. Our time frame was tight. Our list of objects needed to be finalized, the loans secured, and the book essays completed by Labor Day. It was certainly a challenge and we were game. Meeting our deadlines was only made possible by Doran's humor, enthusiasm, and boundless energy; the good will and expertise of the Fowler team; the efforts of the collections and archive staff at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of African Art; and the generosity of our colleagues, who contributed essays and photographs to the endeavor.We began with a core group of African hats featured in the original UMKC presentation and then began adding hats from the Fowler's extensive collection of African headwear and from the collections of the two Smithsonian museums (Fig. 1). As the exhibition stories developed we cast our net more widely, and Doran was the key player in locating and securing the loans of additional hats and headwear from corporate and private collections in the Los Angeles region.During the many hours of meetings, emails, and phone calls, Doran provided critical intellectual input into shaping the themes and our display strategies. If our memories serve us correctly, the title was determined during a team conference call when, after many suggestions were proposed, we came up with Crowning and the Fowler team completed it with Achievements. Doran supported our extending a section of the original exhibition to include hats featuring transnational connections between Africa and the Americas, and he developed a small ancillary installation of painted barbershop signs featuring African hairstyles à la mode. The Fowler hung the barbershop signs around its interior galleria, with Crowning Achievements in an adjacent gallery. We were running full steam ahead, trying to keep pace with Doran as he continually proposed additional objects for the exhibition … Doranworld, we called it! From the initial fifty hats, the final object list topped out at over 125 examples of headwear and related objects (Figs. 2–3).As we worked together on interpretive strategies, what had consistently struck the three of us in our years of working in museums was the many different questions visitors brought to a single object that no one label could satisfy. Doran was wholly supportive of our idea of tackling this dilemma by creating an introductory section entitled Focus on Twelve Hats, mostly from the Fowler and Smithsonian museums, and installing each in an individual four-sided pedestal case toward the beginning of the exhibition (Figs. 2, 3). The section featured some of the more spectacular hats from around the continent, chosen to illustrate a broad array of materials and techniques. Each hat was mounted as it was meant to be worn, and on each side of the case we installed a label addressing one of four themes: PEOPLE: Which group made the hat and where did they live in Africa? OBJECT: Who wore the hat, how was it worn and for what occasion, and was it still being worn? TECHNIQUE: How was each hat made, out of which materials, were the materials locally produced or imported, and what aesthetic or symbolic value did these materials have to their owners? COLLECTION: What was the life history of the object and how and when did this work enter the museum's collections? The order of the four labels was consistent for each case as you moved around the object, and the individual labels included maps to orient the visitor to a specific African country or region. Contextual photographs were used to show the hats being worn or made (Fig. 4). Visitors were encouraged to walk around the cases and to experience the hats from different angles. Watching audiences at several of the venues, we were delighted to see people engaging with the hats and reading each of these labels. Visitor studies at the Fowler, in fact, revealed that once someone understood the consistent placement of the labeling, they purposefully sought out the information they were most eager to explore.Doran masterfully secured the funding for the exhibition and the publication (Fig. 5), and he arranged three additional venues (the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta). Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head opened at the Fowler on February 5, 1995. At a celebratory breakfast at Lares Restaurant the morning after the opening, Doran turned and, with his wry sense of humor and a certain seriousness, asked, “Ok, now that we have done the head, how about an exhibition on feet and footwear?”