Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond @ Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles - The House Was Too Small

The House Was Too Small:

Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond

Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles

October 29, 2023 – June 2, 2024

Patrisse Cullors 

Still image from They Are With Us: Oya in the Grove, 2023 

Video directed by Maxwell Addae;

Cinematography by Samudranil Chatterjee

Artist(s) unknown 

Yoruba peoples, Nigeria, Ogo elegba (dance wand), collected prior to 1958; 

Wood, cowrie shells, leather, indigo; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X64.311

The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond. The exhibition brings together over 100 sacred artworks including carved sculpture, vibrant beadwork, dazzling costumes, and other art forms from Nigeria and Benin and across the Yoruba diaspora in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. Together these objects trace continuities and innovations within the religious material culture of the Yoruba Atlantic, a cultural sphere profoundly affected by empire-building, colonialism, the violence of enslavement, international trade networks, and global immigration patterns. In this context, the artworks on view speak to how religions are altered in the diaspora and how individuals are transformed through worship. 

Fowler staff worked with a collective of religious practitioners, academics, activists, and artists to develop this exhibition of masterworks from the Fowler collection. Community advisors also authored a selection of labels for personally meaningful objects. These texts offer uncommon insights gleaned from religious training, scholarly research, artistic vision, and lived experience.

For contemporary Ifa practitioner, artist, and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors, Yoruba religiosity is a mode of personal and collective empowerment. This aspect of her faith is realized in Free Us, a multimedia installation within the exhibition. At the exhibition opening October 28 at 5 pm, Cullors will also premiere Ori Whispers, a visually and spiritually dynamic procession from the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden to the Fowler Museum in a celebration of Black femme Ori strength and power.

The House Was Too Small references a verse from a Yoruba praise poem evoking the mercurial nature of Eshu, a trickster god who features prominently in the pantheon of divinities (orishas or oriśas) of Yoruba religion. An agent of creation and mediation, Eshu is a key protagonist and a guide through the exhibition, appearing at the threshold of each gallery section. Eshu is the element of unpredictability in the world. When you feel you’ve done everything right, you think you’ve fulfilled all the conditions, there is always something you’ve left out and that is the aspect of Eshu that is important. We need to attend to that. So, Eshu is telling us that even when we think we’re perfect, we’ve done everything right, there is something we need to do that hasn’t been done.

—Rowland Abiodun, advisor

The exhibition unfolds over five rooms devoted to objects that visualize and enact core spiritual tenets. The penultimate space contains a series of works by artist and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors. Throughout the installation, sacred objects from West African Yoruba religion are juxtaposed with comparable pieces from Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and Afro-Cuban Lucumí. The interplay of historical and contemporary objects illustrates the legacy and expanding reach of Yoruba religion.

José Rodriguez (b. 1956, United States, New York, Brooklyn) 

Adé (crown) for a devotee of the orichá Ọbàtálá Ògìyan, 1997

Beads, thread, feathers, fabric, wood, shells; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X95.5.1

Artist unknown (Yoruba style, Nigeria) 

Ìlé orí (“house of the head” container), 20th century; 

Cowrie shells, leather, rawhide, burlap, cotton cloth, velvet; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X70.1169A&B

Ori

In traditional Yoruba belief, the head or ori is the site of consciousness, individuality, and spiritual intuition. Two types of objects in the first gallery underscore the importance of both the visible and the inner spiritual heads. Crowns are worn on special occasions by kings and religious practitioners. Beaded veils hang over the eyes, obscuring the wearer’s identity and perhaps shielding their divine nature. Containers frequently encrusted with cowrie shells are known as “house of the head.” They celebrate, protect, and conceal the inner head. Both categories visually reinforce a financial and personal commitment to bettering one’s self.

Tia Detinha, aka Detinha de Xangô 

(Valdete Ribeiro da Silva, b. 1928, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, d. 2014) 

Candomblé Oxóssi doll, ca. 1990s; 

Cloth, metal, beads, feather; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X2015.4.21; Gift of Dr. Julio Casoy

Artist(s) unknown 

Salvador, Bahia Brazil, Candomblé Ibeji (Saints Cosmas and Damian), early 1980s; 

Wood, paint, gesso; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X82.1352; Gift of Mrs. W. Thomas Davis

Orishas

The orisha gallery is the largest, comprised of large tables featuring iconic representations of the paramount deities. Variously described as spirits, personified natural forces, or deified ancestors, orishas are entities that serve as mediators between terrestrial and spiritual realms, and aid people in dealing with everyday realities. Human-like in character and form, orishas are dynamic presences in the lives of worshipers. In some ceremonies, such as an ancestor or egungun masquerade, initiates become vessels for divine embodiment and temporarily personify deities through dress, dance, song, speech, and other actions.

Objects brought together from across the diaspora bear common emblems, materials, strengths, and struggles associated with their orisha. Each table reflects a theological and aesthetic heritage shared across time, continents, and an ocean: beaded staffs for the divine messenger Eshu, dance wands for the thunder god Shango, and fans for the water goddesses Oshun and Yemoja. Ibeji orishas are traditionally represented as carved wood figures memorializing a lost twin child or twins. The Ibeji table thus features wooden figures from Nigeria alongside mass-produced plastic ones now popular throughout the Yoruba Atlantic. Further adaptation in Brazil has associated Ibeji with Cosmas and Damian, twin physicians and Catholic saints. Despite the African connections, this sculpture shows the deities in Western clothing—a cultural mix like many others engendered in Brazilian society, according to advisor Rowland Abiodun.

Ifa

Ifa is the master of today

Ifa is the master of tomorrow

Ifa is the master of the day after tomorrow

–Yoruba praise poem

Ifa divination is a central component of Yoruba-based worship in Africa and the Americas. This oracular system offers seekers insights into the circumstances of their lives and provides ethical and moral guidance. Diviners or babalawos memorize an expansive set of oracular texts and use a set of ritual tools to determine the appropriate verses that will address a supplicant’s situation.

The ritual tools in this section include carved and well-used wooden trays, bowls, and long narrow tappers made from wood, metal, or ivory. As part of the Fowler’s engagement with practitioners of Ifa, the museum invited three babalawos who live in Southern California—Oluwo’Nla Irawoifa (Amos Dyson), Olowu Fakolade (Jahsun Edmonds), and Awo Falokun Fasegun (aka Earl White)—to utilize tools from the collection. An in-gallery recording of their ritual sessions helps illustrate key elements of the Ifa divination process.

Patrisse Cullors 

They Are With Us, 2023 

Zihuatanejo, Mexico; 

Photograph: Whitney Skauge

Patrisse Cullors, Free Us

Artist, abolitionist, and exhibition advisor Patrisse Cullors created a multipart installation titled Free Us. A longtime practitioner of Ifa, Patrisse Cullors says the installation is for young people looking for spiritual meaning.

I want young people, especially black and brown, to know that there is a tradition beyond the Abrahamaic that may be calling them. Getting to sit on an advisory committee feels historic, powerful. It’s not often that someone occupies roles of Yoruba scholar, artist, initiate, advisor, curator—as a public figure—all of these places that I occupy. It’s a dream come true.

—Patrisse Cullors, advisor

In the first room, a silent video short, They Are With Us, (2023), looks at the beauty and enchantment of orishas. The camera cuts between ocean waves and undulating layers of a rich fabric ensemble worn by Patrisse Cullors. She is wearing a crown adorned with cowrie shells and a beaded veil hangs over her eyes. 

A second room features UnEarthing Altars (2023), four deconstructed altars dedicated to the orishas Osun, Yemaya, Oya, and Obatala. The simplified altars are comprised of objects from the Fowler collection alongside Patrisse Cullors’ personal offerings, including cloth, shells, kola nut, and elaborate crowns fabricated by Kutula Africana, a Los Angeles-based African fashion and design house.

These pieces unveil the resilience of the orishas and the impact Christian supremacy has had on their legacy. Each orisha is given time and creative space to fulfill their destiny, while also battling a system that refuses to acknowledge their existence. Free Us asks the audience to investigate their relationship to Christian supremacy, anti-African bias, and the mirror each orisha places in front of us as we work to fulfill our destiny. 

—Patrisse Cullors, advisor

Artist unknown (Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil) 

Candomblé Egungun masquerade ensemble 

representing an ancestral spirit called Baba Xangô, early 20th century; 

Cloth, beads, cowrie shells, mirrors; 

Fowler Museum at UCLA, X82.1359; Gift of Mrs. W. Thomas Davis

Egun

Adherents throughout the Yoruba Atlantic honor the dead and recognize ancestors as active participants in the everyday world. While bodies are buried in the ground, spirits or souls enter the afterlife as ancestral forces (egun or egungun) who have the power to intercede in the realm of the living. Beyond facilitating remembrance of the dead, the sacred arts in this final gallery reinforce continuing relationships between the living and the deceased.

Nigerian and Brazilian egungun ensembles in this section are staged as floor-length costumes of multicolor fabrics glittering with small mirrors, cowrie shells, and glass beads. Vibrant cloth strips swirl and flare as the wearer embodies their ancestors at a festival for the dead. In the Yoruba-inspired Cuban Lucumí religious tradition, household altars for the dead include staffs adorned with colorful strips of cloth reminiscent of Yoruba egungun costumes. Featuring candles, photographs, and offerings of fresh water and food, these ritual spaces are reminders that the homes of the living also belong to the ancestors.

Related Programs

This exhibition is accompanied by free programming with artists, curators, and spiritual practitioners. As part of a year-long artist residency, artist and activist Patrisse Cullors will co-curate a series of eight Community Conversations that bring together community organizers, artists, and Ifa practitioners to explore the pan-Yoruba concept of ori (head), understood as one’s inner essence and the site of intuition and potentiality. Events will take place at the Fowler Museum, Crenshaw Dairy Mart and other partner sites throughout the city.

The complete fall schedule will be online October 1 at fowler.edu/programs

The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond was organized by the Fowler Museum and curatorial coordinators Erica P. Jones and Patrick A. Polk. The curatorial advisors on the exhibition are Rowland Abíodun (John C. Newton Professor of Art History and Black Studies, Amherst College); Roberto Conduru (Endowed Distinguished Professor of Art History, SMU); Patrisse Cullors (artist, author, abolitionist); Oluwo’Nla Irawoifa, aka Amos Dyson (Ifa Temple Otura Tukaa); Olowu Fakolade, aka Jahsun Edmonds (Ile Ayo Temple); Awo Falokun Fasegun, aka Earl White (Ile Orunmila Afedefeyo); Ysamur Flores-Peña (associate professor, Otis School of Art); Erica P. Jones (senior curator of African arts and manager of curatorial affairs, Fowler Museum); Elizabeth Pérez (associate professor of religion, UCSB); and Patrick A. Polk (senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, Fowler Museum). 

 

FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA

308 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA 90095 

fowler.ucla.edu

Catherine Opie @ Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie: Portraits
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
January 30 - May 22, 2016

CATHERINE OPIE 

Glenn, 2013 

Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. (83.8 x 63.5 cm)

© Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

One of the preeminent artists of her generation, Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio) is known for her evocative photographs of contemporary America. The artist has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Obama’s first inauguration ceremony. Her pictures of the people, places, and events of the past 30 years are documents of the artist’s life as well as of our times. Catherine Opie’s work draws as much from Renaissance painting as from the traditions of street photography, and her most recent body of work most directly engages with old master portraiture. Selected from her own circle of creative friends—visual artists, fashion designers, and writers—her sitters emerge from the darkness as if lit from within. The Hammer Museum will present 12 portraits from this recent series, including Jonathan Franzen, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, Mary Kelly, Matthew Barney, Glenn Ligon, John Baldessari, Kara Walker, Miranda July, Raymond Pettibon, Ron Athey, Ryan McGinness, alongside a new abstract landscape.

Catherine Opie: Biography

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2008, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, a mid-career survey of her work, was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; The Saint Louis Art Museum; the Photographers’ Gallery in London; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Long Beach Museum of Art in California. Catherine Opie was a recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. Her latest book 700 Nimes Road, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, has been published by Prestel. Photographs from this body of work will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles concurrently with her exhibition at the Hammer Museum. She is currently working on an installation for the new Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, to debut the Summer of 2016. Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Photography at UCLA.

This exhibition is organized by chief curator Connie Butler with Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett, curatorial associate.

Concurrently on view from January 23-May 8, 2016, Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road at MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood.

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
http://hammer.ucla.edu/

Simon Henwood, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Simon Henwood

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001

British artist and filmmaker Simon Henwood will exhibit a new 3-D computer-animated video entitled "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" in the Museum's Lobby gallery. Henwood's paintings and mixed-media works explore the complex social and cultural terrain of childhood. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" tells the story of a pumpkin-headed boy whose extreme sensitivity to UV light forces him to remain indoors during the daytime. The exhibition will also re-create a portion of Henwood's studio and will include preliminary sketches for his cartoon as well as gouache paintings of adolescent children. Henwood began his career as a writer and illustrator of children's books. He is the founder of the 'zine, Purr, which features the work of internationally-known artists, writers, and filmmakers; and Alice, an ongoing journal exploring the representation and recycling of childhood in the arts, media, and culture. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" is currently in development as a series for SKY TV, the Fox TV network's sister station in the UK.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Paul Morrison, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Morrison

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001

British artist Paul Morrison will create a mural for the UCLA Hammer Museum's lobby wall. Using botanical guides, children's storybooks, and cartoons as his inspiration and source material, Paul Morrison creates large-scale monochrome landscapes that have been described as "Disney without the characters." Not unlike Alice's psychedelic-tinged Wonderland, many of Morrison's hypnotic fantasy environments seem to pivot between innocence and malevolence in the blink of an eye. Paul Morrison alters our sense of scale, perspective, and positive-negative space to create visually striking compositions. Spiky brush and trees often obscure the view beyond the immediate foreground. Dandelion plants and other flora are enlarged to many times their normal size. Referencing Pop art and Op art as well as neo-romantic bookplate illustrations and the graphic art of Aubrey Beardsley, Morrison's Pop-naturalist landscapes flirt with abstraction in jarring and unexpectedly seductive ways.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Pentti Monkkonen, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Pentti Monkkonen

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 21, 2001

L.A.-based artist Pentti Monkkonen will exhibit a new sculpture in the UCLA Hammer Museum's Vault Gallery. Monkkonen's buoyantly off-kilter sculptures are absurdist versions of the sorts of miniature amusement park rides that are often seen outside of grocery stores. For his Hammer Project installation, Monkkonen will create a chateau. Pentti Monkkonen received his B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Hammer Projects create exhibition opportunities for emerging or under-recognized artists as well as present international contemporary artists who are not well-known to the general audience in Los Angeles.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

February 6 - April 2, 2000

The exhibition "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking," organized by artist Julie Ault, presents a dynamic visual dialogue between two artists of different generations. Both Sister Corita Kent and Donald Moffett have engaged bold graphic design and montage techniques to form compositions that communicate their ideas and social convictions.

For Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), later known simply as Corita, distribution as a populist principle was key in determining her medium of expression. She learned printmaking in order to reproduce affordable images in large volume. Hailed the "modern nun" on the cover of "Newsweek" Magazine in 1966, Sister Corita embraced the new freedoms engendered by the Vatican Council II in her art and in her capacity as teacher and chair of the art department at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Using her art as a platform in the 1960s, Sister Corita Kent turned her attention to issues ranging from conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church; advertising and market culture; U.S. imperialism abroad in Vietnam; and racism at home. By 1969, suffering from frequent censure from local Church officials, among other factors, she left the order and her religious community and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Her serigraphs included in "Power Up" span the 1960s and include examples from the Grunwald Center's extensive collection of serigraphs bequeathed to the Center by Corita herself.

As artist, designer and activist, Donald Moffett (b.1955) has broadly contributed to the gay liberation and AIDS-activist movements. Moffett's art is conceptually driven and includes photographs, paintings, sculpture, postcards and posters. A member of the collective "Gran Fury" from 1987-1993, Moffett worked individually and collaboratively on graphic campaigns designed to communicate the seriousness of the AIDS crisis. Moffett made a series of images in the form of disarmingly simple photo-text montages for the "Age of AIDS" column in "The Village Voice," a New York weekly newspaper. These temporal pieces relied on metaphor and expressed commentary in visual shorthand form, often with complex implications and wicked humor. These works are featured in "Power Up," alongside Moffett's mixed media works addressing public morality as interpreted and legislated by conservative religious and political institutions. The serigraphs of Sister Corita Kent and the mixed-media works of New York-based Moffett are juxtaposed in "Power Up" to show both artists and their works in a new context.

Beginning with her work with "Group Material" (1979-1996), a collective which organized exhibitions and public projects that explored interrelationships between politics and aesthetics, Julie Ault takes on the role of curator as part of her artistic practice. Julie Ault has said "I view an exhibition akin to an artwork in which every conceptual and concrete aspect requires attention and involves choice, not convention. An exhibition is not simply a frame for presenting artworks or artifacts; from its overall structure to its every detail an exhibition is content itself."

Julie Ault's lively exhibition design for "Power Up" derives from the formal features and aesthetic strategies of Corita's and Moffett's artworks. Ault's installation of "Power Up" includes the construction of displays and seating, overlaid in news articles or quotations to illustrate the context in which the artists created their work. Ault's exhibition deepens the rich legacy and interplay of art, design and social relevance.

Also on view in the exhibition are Baylis Glascock's film "Corita Kent: On Teaching and Celebration" and "Target City Hall," a video produced by DIVA TV in 1989 about one demonstration organized by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).

The "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking" exhibition is an expanded version of a project Ault originally organized for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1997.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu