Has it been duly noted that one of Doran H. Ross's last requests on this globe of sin was for a rum and coke from his home hospice nurse? And that the nurse was a Yoruba from Nigeria who, while happily complying with Mr. Ross's request, would regularly call her mom in London, excitedly telling her all about the Yoruba pop art hanging in Doran's man cave?Unpack that scene of defiance and compliance and you've got the secret of the plot. Doran had charmed the nurse, as he had so many others, with his easy banter and obvious joie de vivre, even at the moment he was exiting his extraordinary life. But then, the Doran I knew was often a key player in making difficult and wonderful things happen: getting funding for exhibitions that many thought too edgy to mount; transforming, with Director Christopher B. Donnan, a basement collection of “Ethnic Arts” (horrible name!) into a world-class Museum of Cultural History, a process which had begun in 1971 under the museum's first director, George Ellis; expanding the range of African Arts contributors from a clubby base of old-boy insiders into an increasingly sophisticated cadre of international artists and scholars; and collaborating with canon-shattering art historian Arnold Rubin in the launching of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.I played a cameo role in several of these scenarios. While I was executive secretary of the African Studies Association (ASA), Doran and Arnold pitched their proposal for ACASA, a request which I was reluctant to approve, fearing it might draw ASA members away from the mother ship. However, these gents convinced me otherwise and proceeded to nurture what quickly became the premier international organization of African art historians.And a few years later, Doran coaxed me into serving as coeditor of African Arts, playing the sidekick in our vigorous efforts to make the journal more relevant to its diverse readership. I retired from African Arts in 2004, while Doran stayed on as a coeditor till 2015. As a clear measure of his commitment to the journal, he went on to publish fifty-two pieces in it, including feature articles; artist portfolios; book, film, and exhibition reviews; First Words; In Memoria; and photo essays.It was at the beginning of our coeditorship that the journal's executive editor, Amy Futa, suggested that Doran's middle initial “H” (provenance unknown) might stand for “Hrothgar” in honor of his Viking ancestry and of the stature and girth he shared with that giant hero of the Beowulf saga. So Hrothgar he became, since like that epic progenitor, everything about Doran was Size XXX.Of all our collaborations, the Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou project is closest to my heart. Like so many other projects whose true dimensions are not at first perceived, this one began over recurring courses of an Italian feast and way too many cocktails (regarding food and drink Doran was both gourmet and gourmand). Picture Doran, Marilyn Houlberg, and me seated in a restaurant on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a cold and rainy Halloween night. Revelers from the 1986 ASA annual meetings are masquerading outside the window as Doran proposes that Marilyn and I co-curate a “Vodou show” for the Fowler Museum. Had any of us foreseen what that immodest proposal would turn out to entail, we might well have ordered several more bottles of wine.Don't get me wrong: the project idea itself was a natural. Marilyn and I were fellow travelers in the Black Atlantic avant la lettre. We both had been hanging around with the same crowd of street touts and oungans (Vodou priests) in Haiti just as a generation earlier we had been revelers in the fabulous Nigerian pop culture of the ‘60s (think Amos Tutuola, Twins 77, and Fela Kuti Ransom). Insofar as the project would have “a look” it would be born out of the common aesthetic we perceived at work on both sides of the Atlantic.Doran knew where we were coming from. He too had begun his own monumental field-work on the pop culture and traditional arts of Ghana and their extensions in the New World. But he also appreciated the disjunction between the lurid Euro-American (read “White”) stereotypes of a phony religion called “voodoo” and the staggering beauty of the sacred arts generated by the all-too-real religion called Vodou. But I suspect he knew something else: how difficult it would be to find funding and venues for a show judged to be about “voodoo” and relished the challenge. And perhaps, as we drained our last glasses, he foresaw one last thing: just how damn much fun the whole enterprise might turn out to be.Our first implementation grant proposal was submitted to NEH in December 1988. Although it was uniformly favored by a peer review panel, it was turned down by some apparatchik in Director Lynne Cheney's office who found the proposal “too celebratory.” A “toned down” revision of the proposal was resubmitted in spring 1989 and again received an enthusiastic approval from another peer review panel. This time, one of La Cheney's minions vetoed the peer reviewers, complaining that our proposal didn't subject Vodou to evaluation on a “comparative humanistic scale of religions.” We were left wondering to what religious phenomena the minion thought Vodou should be compared: The Inquisition? The Salem Witch Hunt? Oral Robert's apparition of a 900 ft. Jesus?If the curators were discouraged, Doran remained charged up and resourceful. Calling in some friendly chips, he got the project a life-sustaining bridge grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. And then Bill Clinton got elected in 1992; Lynne Cheney was out of a job; and a restaffed NEH fully funded our third submission in winter 1993. Skål Hrothgar!Doran's dogged persistence in obtaining funding was only Act One in his role as project director. From those proffered drinks in Madison, he spent the next decade worrying over details of the show and book with the co-curators and the Fowler's fabulous staff. But alas, as we were busy putting an exhibition together in Los Angeles, Haiti was busy falling apart. After a junta of military goons overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country's first popularly elected president, the United States placed a trade embargo on the island, and Haitian civil society began unravelling.So it was with real trepidation that I brought Doran to Haiti for his first field trip in 1994. I needn't have worried. More than merely understanding, he seemed to chunk the aesthetic he encountered as we visited the ounfos (temples) where Marilyn and I had worked. Not a man to move by half measures, Doran negotiated the loan of entire altars, always sensitive to include manbos (priestesses) and oungans in their documentation (Fig. 1). And when not in the temples, he was sneaking off to galleries and ateliers, searching for the most brilliant paintings and sculptures to contextualize the temple arts, his connoisseurship adding a Hi/Lo dimension to the exhibition and its award-winning publication.As they say, tout le reste est l'histoire. The show travelled to seven prestigious museum venues (the exact number predicted by Edner Pierre, whose altar for Gede was borrowed for the exhibition), garnering increasingly glowing reviews. Its grand finale at the American Museum of Natural History was lavishly reviewed by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter and, at its closure in January 1999, the Times named it one of the “10 Best Exhibits of 1998.” At no point in any of its celebrated tour did Doran step forward to share in any of its acclaim. Unlike the first Hrothgar, he was not in the game for fame. He never showed up on other venues’ opening nights, never stood together with the co-curators in front of a camera. His satisfaction was in a project well conceived and well staged (Figs. 2–3), and a denigrated tradition of sacred art recognized for its magnificence.How to sum up a man of such excellent contradictions? Cosmopolitan and provincial. Reared in Fresno but at-home in his beloved West LA man-cave and in the Kumasi atelier of Akan artist “Almighty God,” who was the subject of his final research (Fig. 4). The best of friends and an incorrigible tease (after I broke my nose, he presented me with a self-drafted volume of celebrated quotes about great schnozes from Cyrano de Bergerac to J.J. Gittes). The most refined of connoisseurs, who organized bus tours of LA neon signs for his friends, enhancing their glow with bottles of brandy and boxes of chocolates. And who organized a pilgrimage to the grave of Blinky, the Friendly Hen (Fig. 5), whose macabre and hilarious funeral installation at LACMA was conceived and curated by Jeffrey Valence. For that particular lark he engaged a stretch limo and invited veterans of the Vodou Project: Dave Mayo, its designer; Fran Krystock, its collection manager; Henrietta Cosentino, editor of its prize-winning publication; Betsy Quick, the Fowler director of education and Doran's longtime partner, together of course with Hrothgar and me. We reconstituted ourselves into a sextet self-designated as “The Usual Suspects,” and remained the closest of friends for the rest of Doran's life.