The
“Beauté Congo” exhibit at the Fondation Cartier in Paris was so successful
that it was extended until 2016. Famous men such as Congolese politicians, Barak Obama and Muhammed Ali were the subjects of many works. I rarely saw the image of a woman- even then, they were provocatively dressed or a showcasing a car or pregnant with a male
writer/artist.
Most wall labels indicated the artists were men. This
is not unusual, in any part of the world.
According to the Guerrilla
Girls, in 2012 less than 4% of artists in the modern art section of the
Metropolitan Museum of New York were women. Ken Johnson wrote about this same issue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 51 Contemporary Artists, but Just Three Women
In 2016, in a major art capital like Paris, at an exhibit representing an entire country and spanning a century, I had hoped for more. I asked someone working at the museum if there were any women artists in the exhibit. One assistant said: “There is one downstairs.” Finally, in the basement section all the way at the end, I saw the name: Antoinette Lubaki. She was born in 1895. There were 4 works by her, similar in subject and style to 14 works by her husband, exhibited nearby. So, I considered some of these possibilities:
In 2016, in a major art capital like Paris, at an exhibit representing an entire country and spanning a century, I had hoped for more. I asked someone working at the museum if there were any women artists in the exhibit. One assistant said: “There is one downstairs.” Finally, in the basement section all the way at the end, I saw the name: Antoinette Lubaki. She was born in 1895. There were 4 works by her, similar in subject and style to 14 works by her husband, exhibited nearby. So, I considered some of these possibilities:
1.
No
woman born in the 20th century, in this country of 77 million
people, ever produced anything of artistic value.
2.
The
curatorial team (headed by Andre Magnin), did not make an effort to look for
such a woman. It is noteworthy that of the 11 (mostly white) catalogue contributors,
only two- Nancy Rose Hunt and Dominique Malaquais, are female.
3.
Magnin’s
definition of what constitutes Congolese art is too narrow to include what
women have made.
4.
For
any number of reasons, Congolese women are not supported in making art.
Magnin said, “It is my duty to recount…the
adventure that led me to a deep exploration of Congolese art. I had three aspirations with Beauté Congo.
The first…was to share with a Western public the passion that impelled me to
search all over Congo-Zaire for thirty years. My second aspiration was to tell the story of ninety
years of Congolese art...” One work, whose title translates into “Africa of the Future,” tells an interesting story.
Here we see a
utopian vision of a modern world- where women are mostly
invisible. The few women shown are accompanied by a man, while the men walk
independently or with their friends, driving cars or spaceships. I counted
approximately 57 men and 9 women. This even exceeds the gender imbalance in countries
like India and China, where (according to
the Daily Mail) “there are now as many as 120 or 140 boys for every 100 girls
despite a ban on gender-based abortion.”
Art reflects back to us our desires, values and
beliefs, so what is this painting telling us?
I would have
liked the Fondation Cartier to address why, of the 350 works shown and of the
40 artists represented, only one is a woman (representing 1.1%
of the total works). Rachel Donadio in
the New York Times touched on this: She quoted Pascale
Obolo regarding the “neocolonial and paternalistic attitude of Mr. Magnin.” Ms.
Donadio also informs readers about Michele Magema, a successful Congolese
artist who has exhibited internationally, yet wasn’t included in this show. How
did Magnin, “The world’s foremost expert on African art,” (according to The
Guardian) miss her?
Jenny Stevens, from
The Guardian, interviewed one of the artists in Beauté Congo: Kiripi Katembo. Regarding his photo, he shared: “Women
raise children, look after their husbands, and also go out to work and provide.
Yet men are still seen as the chiefs. When I look at this picture, I think
about all the work women do to serve the economy of Congo and their families,
but they get no respect. They are treated like machines, while men can do what
they like. I also think of my mother, who died last year. She worked in the
market, ran her own business, knitted and worked out in the fields, too. So I
called this image Move Forward as a way of saying thank you to women – because
they are the true power of my country, the people driving it forward.”
A member of the "Guerrilla Girls" (KAHLO) said, “ How can you really tell the
story of a culture when you don’t include all the voices within the culture?
Otherwise, it’s just the history, and the story, of power.” In this exhibit we saw a story of the power of men, and of the power of France in its
former colonies. We also have the story of who finances exhibits in the contemporary
art world. Cartier is
owned by Compagnie Financière Richemont SA, based in Switzerland and headed by
a white South African: Johann Rupert. As of 2014,
Richemont was the second-largest luxury goods company in the world and Rupert was the second richest man in Africa, valued at over 7 billion dollars.
I wanted to find a different story about Congolese women artists and
after searching, I came upon the work of Ugandan born Robinah Nansubuga, who in April 2014 curated
an exhibition in Kinshasa called Women Without Borders. It included 19
artists from central and east Africa, including the DRC. She estimates that “only about 10-20 out of 200 or 300
artists in a university here are women. We wanted to understand why there are
so few, and what challenges are holding them back.”