 Welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette and I'm a collections researcher. Today we're going to head up into Room 22, which to my mind is one of the richest at the Barnes, and look at this monumental sculpture in the central vitrine, a seated couple made right around the year 1900 by the Dogon people of West Africa. Before we dive deeply into that, I'd like to take just a moment to consider how it fits into the ensembles or arrangement of art that Albert Barnes had created, because he was always interested in how different objects speak to each other across time and space in terms of their aesthetic or expressive power. And so one of the things that he really admired about this particular sculpture was its very elegant, attenuated, almost architectonic qualities that we can see maybe right away shared with this sculpture made in the late 1940s by Italian artist Mirko or this painting by Mirko's brother Afro, or maybe even these kind of fractured planes in this image by Paul Clay that made reference both to cubism as well as to medieval stained glass. And something that interests me in particular is this triptych. If we were looking at our sculpture and then pivoted 90 degrees to the left is above the wall case. It is a wooden triptych that Barnes actually believed was Gothic but was a forgery made in the late 19th, the early 20th century. And I believe that he purchased it because he had thought that it shared qualities with works of art that he already had in this room to think about kind of the filter with which he was working is fascinating. But here he is just to show you and we can see the pride with which he is leaning on this case in which the seated couple by the Dogon people is surmounted by what may be one of the best metal works of the foundation, this steeplecock made in France perhaps during the 18th century. And then we can see Barnes' little dog, his favorite dog Fidel down here. And so these are things when you visit the Barnes, please don't bring your dog early and against the cases like this. But we can also see I think it's always good to point out how the arrangement is quite nearly as we see it today. His picture I believe is in the 1940s, but he did swap out a couple of things like the sculpture that we've looked at. So we can see him working through it and trying to get an arrangement where everything sort of hums expressively amongst each other. So with that said, let's look more closely at the seated couple again made by the Dogon people. And what we have is a woman on our left hand side, a man on the right. They are schematically, symmetrically depicted with, I know I already used the word elegant or perhaps exquisite is better, these incisions all around them that do give them this sense of architectural stability, I think I might say. And we can see we've got the man over here, his hand is resting on the breast of the woman. You may be able to see that his other hand is resting on his own genitals over here. And so already we get the sense of the importance of procreation, perhaps of the importance of fertility of ancestors. We can see that both of their feet are planted again symmetrically and firmly planted on the ground. If we start to turn around, I think the man's gestures become even more apparent. And then we can start to look as well at the supports on which the stool is resting. Here, let's go around back so we can see these a bit better. These supports down here are called carotid figures or they're shaped as human beings and these are ancestral figures. And then we can see the lost inch pattern decorating the back of their throne. And my very favorite detail here, if we check out their backs, we can see the man has a quiver on his back, testing the role of the male in society to hunt. And then we have the woman has a little baby on her own back. And so we see the complimentary and embedded roles of women and men and their ancestors in Dugan society. So let's look at the front of the sculpture again. And so we've got some clues as to its meaning. So what was its meaning and its function? And the answer is we don't entirely know. But the propositions have to do with the religion of the Dugan people, which is animistic and worshiping of both ancestral spirits as well as other ones like Earth spirits. And so because when these sculptures were originally collected, they were done so without much attention to cultural context, much of the information we have is actually from anthropologists who have worked with the Dugan peoples from about 1930s down to today. And some of the functions that they've described seeing sculptures like this used have been in funeral processions for important women or important men or being placed on an altar for ancestors, for the other spirits or placed on top of a house of an important person at their funeral, sometimes with relics or other sacred material attendant to it. And so whatever the case may be, it was a fine and monumental work of art that attracted the spirits of the next world and mediated between that and the world of the living as a way of ensuring communal well-being. And of course, it's no longer functioning within Dugan society and it is indeed at the barns and Albert barns actually did have specific purposes in mind for his collecting of the sculpture. And one of those was his very emphatic support actually of the Harlem Renaissance, where he worked with intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance such as Elaine Locke and Charles Johnson in terms of the collection and displaying and publication of sculptures like this, both to promulgate them as fine art on an equal plane as same cubist sculpture, any other thing produced at any time or place, but also as an opportunity for young artists and intellectuals from the Black communities to connect to aspects of the cultural heritage that had not been accessible. And so what we're looking at here on the left hand side is a poem in which this Dugan statue features written by County Cullen for a periodical called The New Negro back in the 1920s and on the right hand side a painting by Aaron Douglas, a famous Black artist who'd studied at the barns actually entitled Aspiration Done in the 1930s. And so even out of its specific Dugan context it's interesting how in a new context any works of art at the barns foundation are able to assert new meaning. And so when we look at the Dugan couple today or any of the other paintings, sculptures, metal works in this room, I think it's incredibly important for the foundation to think about where they came from, what they meant, how they worked in their original societies, but now that we're here, what can we do with them today to make our own society better and richer? And so that's it for today's takeout and thank you so much for watching. Thank you for watching and for your support of the Barns Foundation.