 Hello, my name is Michael Williamson and I am part of art team at the Barnes Foundation and today I'd like to focus on the ballet door that is from the ballet people of West Africa. It's my goal in this discussion to examine the ballet door in the context of the Barnes Foundation not only as an aesthetic object but also as an expression of a cultural and spiritual life of the ballet people of West Africa. The door had great significance to Dr. Barnes as an object of aesthetic beauty, as an object imbued with power and mystery. In his writings from the 1920s when he first acquired the bulk of his African sculpture from the French dealer Paul Guillaume, he envisioned ancient Negro sculpture as vital cultural currency for the American New Negro to claim pride of place alongside equal and artistry to the art of Europe. The idea of equality among the races in political, artistic and cultural context in the 1920s America was a stance that Dr. Barnes boldly state his reputation on as a collector and as a largely self-taught art scholar. He engaged the great African American minds of the day to join him in extolling the value of ancient Negro sculpture, a landlock who was a fellow Central High School graduate, Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar, and writer of the Manifesto the Legacy of Ancestral Arts, the sociologist Charles Johnson, who went on to become the first black president of Fisk University and Arthur Fawcett, another Central High School graduate, a revered public school teacher, folklorist and anthropologist. Dr. Barnes intended, quote, to have the best private collection of Negro sculpture in the world. Dr. Barnes saw in ancient Negro sculpture bold form, syncopated rhythms and uniting harmonies that he felt were also intrinsic to the American Negro spirituals he loved so much. Often, during the early years of the Barnes Foundation, Dr. Barnes would host musical recitals of Negro spirituals in the main gallery. Now in close reading of Dr. Barnes' writing for the 1920s regarding African sculpture, we see both his revolutionary vision and the limitations of his somewhat romanticized view of African art. Both Dr. Barnes and Paul Guillaume placed most of the African sculpture in the collection with the dates that ranged from before the 10th century through the 15th century. We now know that much of the African sculpture dates from the late 19th and early 20th century. On the May 1926 cover of Opportunity Journal of Negro Life, the ballet door has the grandiose title, Temple Door of the 16th Century. In African Art in the Barnes Foundation, Susan Mullen Vogel describes it simply as a door from inner room, I found that it is typical of a granary door. So it's really important to sort of take a look at the scale of the African continent and see it in context so that we have an idea of sort of the people and the cultures that created these objects. I would really describe the door more as a reliquary, which is sort of a religious object, a spiritual object, rather than a work of art. The ballet people don't really have or didn't have a concept of what art would be. Everything they made was related to nature. In this slide, you can see the left coup d'etroir and then you can see within on the right side where the various ethnic groups lived. And of course, you can't really look at Africa without examining colonialism and the socio-political divisions that were arbitrary. So there were various groups of people who normally wouldn't be together, but because of the creation of countries that they were kind of put together. So here's an example of some granary doors, grain and granaries. A granary would have whole sorghum, which is kind of a grain. It's almost like, it's a little bit like couscous. And they're made out of clay, and they have grooves that are made of straw. The work of building the granaries is shared by men and women, but much of the work is gendered. The men gather the wood. They build the wood superstructure, and then the women do the mudbrick construction. And this is obviously in current times, so this is for demonstration purposes. And think of it as making a very large pinch pot. And you can see here the placement of a door within the context of the structure. And the door here is plywood, and the woods probably bought from Home Depot as are the lock and the hinges, but these all would have been constructed from wood. And here's an example of a granary with a granary door that has been carved. And this is obviously an older granary. You can see how it functions in the context of the village. And I had the pleasure of traveling to South Africa in Botswana in the 1980s and building some houses. And this is from my sketchbook. And so here we get our ballet door. Based on the second floor of the Barnes Foundation, opposite Matisse's Bonan de Viva. And of course, here's a photograph of Paul Guillaume. Paul Guillaume came from humble beginnings. He was working as a clerk in an auto repair shop, and the objects, the African sculpture were actually included in large crates of rubber that came rubber for tires. And he saw these objects, was really mesmerized by them, placed them in the window of a shop, and then artists like Matisse, Blamink, Brock, Picasso, saw the sculpture and then Paul Guillaume opened his own small gallery and included the early moderns. And we then sort of, this is how kind of early modernist artists are influenced by African sculpture. So our door is really an extraordinary door because it's carved on both sides, which is really unusual. So on this side, you can see a crocodile at the bottom, a mask sort of in the center, and then two water fowl at the top. The door is about 54 inches high, about 20 inches wide, and it's on its own carved stand. And you can see at the bottom on the left, a little pin and a pin at the top of wood and that would have fit into the wall of the granary. The crocodile is seen, it seems from an aerial point of view, which is very typical, but also you can see that line of bilateral symmetry that it also could be seen as two crocodiles sort of almost like back to back. So that's really quite interesting. And then above that is a mask, and that mask is reminiscent of the spirit wives that men would carve of women for their strength, for their beauty, for their intelligence and for their wisdom. And then above that, water fowl. So the idea that the theme here is water is related in many ways to the original creation of the Baolay people. In fact, the queen Ablupoka, when she needed to move her people from what is President Day, Ghana to Côte d'Ivoire, she had to cross the Kamoé River with her people. The water was rushing, they had no way to get across, and so she made a sacrifice. And the sacrifice was her only son. So the word Baolay is actually two words, and it means the son is dead. So she had to make this enormous sacrifice. So the water theme here seems to relate to that original creation myth. And on the reverse side is a grid. The grid is red iron oxide, the dark parts, and the white parts are kaolin, which is a sort of white clay, it's the basis of porcelain. Both of these things could be easily dug up near a river. And you can see that in the center, there's a square that kind of looks like offering, it's a square within a square within a square and a hole. That hole corresponds also to the hole underneath on the other side where the mask of the woman is. And that hole was likely the place where either a leather or a raffia handle would have been placed to be able to open the door. The idea of the grid represents duality, dark, light, male, female, good, bad, that kind of thing. One of the things I did is compared our door with other doors. So the Baolay door from the Brooklyn Museum has a grid pattern, but that grid is shifted so that it's kind of triangles like a harlequin pattern. And that is to symbolize increase represented by frogs, the idea of fertility. And I can also see that that crocodile is quite thin, so we can get a sense of how unusual our crocodile is from looking at some of the other doors. And from the Baolay door from the Metropolitan Museum, it has a pin lock, which represents the unity of male and female. And then it has the same, almost exactly the same image of the woman, the revered woman, the spirit wife, but there are two spirit wife images, and that often represents twins. I found that in Nigeria, it has the highest number of twin births in the world. Twins are seen as good luck. So we get to look at the original building of the Barnes Foundation. We can see that the entry portico is festooned with tile work and field tiles. Dr. Barnes chose the Baolay door symbol as well as other imitations in clay of the original African sculpture as the entranceway to the Barnes Foundation. And then the center, you can see the original sign for the Barnes Foundation. The Baolay door is actually the original sort of marketing kind of symbol of the Barnes. So you can imagine in 1825, when people would walk in to see Impressionists, post-Impressionists and early modern art, that the entranceway, they're greeted, they pass through African art as they look at the rest of the collection. So the architects who designed the Parkway building, Billie Sheehan and Todd Williams, were tasked with reinventing that relationship of African art to the collection. And they talked about the idea of wrapping the building in a fabric of stone. And they were inspired by the rhythms and the patterns of kente cloth. As you enter into the light court, you can see on the floor, a mosaic. And that mosaic is based on a drawing by Billie Sheehan. And it is an interpretation of what's on the right, which is called a liar's cloth. So it's kente cloth that's been sewn together. And it would be something that a chief would wear when he needed to make decisions, sort of almost like a lawyer making decisions, around who's telling the truth and who is lying. So it's literally a liar's cloth. Dr. Barnes really was enamored of this door. Dr. Barnes championed African American culture. He was considered progressive in terms of race and class for his time period. He yearned for America to fully accept the new Negro of the Harlem Renaissance as an equal. He established the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution, challenging the visual status quo in America and in Philadelphia. He was supremely confident in the transformative experience of art. Thanks for watching, and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.