Explore an exquisite collection of African diasporic art at the African American Museum Philadelphia, curated by famed actor CCH Pounder and her late husband Boubacar Koné.
Nigerian born artist Luke Agada’s ”Sacred Balcony of Faith” at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, from the CCH Pounder-Koné Collection. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
Famed television and film actor CCH Pounder and her late husband, Boubacar Koné, amassed a collection of more than 500 contemporary works by African diasporic artists.
A selection of 40 of those works are currently on display at the African American Museum Philadelphia.
Pounder, who is featured in series such as “ER” and “The Shield,” has previously loaned her artwork collection to museums, such as the Charles Wright Museum in Detroit and the Dusable Black History Museum in Chicago.
Last summer, she invited AAMP’s vice president of curatorial services, Dejay Ducket, to her New Orleans home to plan an exhibition in Philadelphia.
“It was a feast for the eyes as we walked through. The biggest problem that I had with it was trying to narrow down what we might bring to Philadelphia,” Ducket said. “To live with artwork on that scale and that beauty — just being in that space was just amazing. You can’t leave uninspired.”
The exhibit “Shared Vision” focuses on figural works, paintings and mixed-media works that center the Black body as a landscape of tension where the artists explore ideas of history, identity and relationships.
Among the pieces are two of Jamaican artist Greg Bailey’s paintings of a pair of Black women wearing the traditional barrister wigs of British court proceedings. The Jamaican women embody a legal system imposed upon them by British colonizers. The exhibit also features the work of Elizabeth Colomba, a French artist based in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, who painted “Ceres,” showing a woman reading a book at a table in a scene cluttered with myriad symbols pointing to both African and European heritages.
“Historically, portraits of figurative works both real and imagined signal the power importance or virtue in their subjects,” Ducket said. “When you walk into a museum, particularly a Black museum, and experience portraits like these their power radiates over you and tells the viewer their story.”
Several artists abstracted their figures, such as Luke Agada, a Chicago-based Nigerian artist, who painted a portrait of a woman holding an infant in a photorealistic style. The woman’s head had been replaced by a bicycle wheel.
The artist said his jarring use of surreal imagery is meant to reflect “the ambiguity of identity within the postcolonial framework.”
Pounder said she reads the bicycle wheel more literally.
“For me, it was like the wheels are turning in terms of, ‘How do I create this new life?’” she said. “She’s holding a baby, thinking of all the things that are now required.”
Pounder said one of her favorites pieces that is on display at AAM is by Alex Peter Idoko, a Nigerian artist who uses fire instead of pigment. “Deep Calls to the Deep” is a detailed split-screen image of a young woman mirroring herself, which the artist rendered with charcoal and precise heating tools.
“The detail that he gets out of making the fire as tiny and as pointed as possible,” Pounder marveled at the surface of the piece. “Like a thin paint brush.”
Pounder said her attraction to portraiture can be traced to her youth, growing up in England and taking excursions to points around Europe, where museums rarely featured images of Black people. At the Louvre in Paris, for example, she saw small portraits hung very high, well out of reach for close inspection.
“I remember at the very top of the Louvre, tiny 20-inch-by 30-inch portraits of Arabs and ‘exotics’ were up there, and the Mona Lisa and all the other fabulous people were down below,” Pounder said. “I thought, ‘How do you get those people down here?’ That’s probably where my thinking was when I started.”
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