 Good afternoon! On behalf of all my wonderful Barnes colleagues, I want to welcome you to this virtual member talk and thank you so much for joining us today. We are incredibly grateful to all of our members for the critical support that you provide to the Barnes. I also want to thank the members of the 1922 Barnes Legacy Society who have made a commitment to the institution's future by including the Barnes and their estate plans. Before we get started, I want to invite you to participate in today's talk in the chat. I'll be in the chat with you. We'll have some time for Q&A at the end. Thank you to everyone sort of saying hello as we kick off here and feel free to post your questions throughout so we'll take a look. We'll get them queued up and ready to go. Our speaker today, Michael Williamson, is a member of the Barnes art team and he has been a teacher of studio art and survey art history at Germantown front school. He completed his BA at Yale University, received an MFA in painting at Bard College. When not at the Barnes Foundation, Michael pursues his painting art practice and exhibits work in the Delaware Valley area. So without further ado, I will turn you over to Michael. Okay. Good afternoon. I'm going to start with a quote and the quote is one that I find that is really interesting and it creates a sense of sort of wonder and magic and it's a quote from a title from a Paul Gaugat painting. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? And I think that this really underscores like sort of the power of art and the power of stories to tell us about sort of lives long ago or even currently. So my talk today is entitled the ballet door in context and I wanted to give sort of a larger understanding of the door sort of beyond the aesthetic qualities that obviously are incredibly important. I'm going to also toggle between reading a little bit and then sort of speaking more extemporaneously. It's my goal in this discussion to examine the door, the ballet door in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, not only as an aesthetic object but also as an expression of the 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 and 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 a vital sort of cultural currency for the American new Negro to claim pride of place alongside equal in artistry to the art of Europe. The idea of equality among the races, political, artistic, and cultural context in 1920s America was a stance that Dr. Barnes boldly staked 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 what he called ancient Negro sculpture. Land Locke, who was also a Central High School graduate, as was Dr. Barnes, Locke went on to graduate from Harvard University. He was a Rhodes scholar and the writer of a manifesto called The Legacy of Ancestral Hearts. Dr. Barnes also enlisted Charles Johnson, who went on to become the first black president of the historically black Fisk University, and then Arthur Fawcett, another Central High School graduate. He was a revered public school teacher, a folklorist, and anthropologist. So, Barnes was really intending, a quote he hear is, to try to have the best private collection of Negro sculpture in the world. Dr. Barnes saw in ancient Negro sculpture old form, syncopated rhythms, and uniting harmonies that he felt were also intrinsic to the American Negro spirituals he loved and he learned of when he was about eight years old. 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 from 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 range from before the 10th century through the 15th century. We now know much of the sculpture dates from the late 19th century and early 20th century. In fact, it's really contemporaneous with the development of sort of post-impressionism in the early moderns. 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 for an inner room. What I've come to discern is to see this door as typical of a greenery door, as I've been looking at other types of doors and what their functions are. What Dr. Barnes seemed to intuitively understand, however, was the aesthetic power of the work, its spiritual depth, and the legacy of all world cultures to create meaning and beauty reflecting their worldview. He also deeply valued the voices of African American scholars of his day, urging them to tell the story of African art. So it's essential to me to grasp the scale of the continent of Africa as this helps us understand the variety and the range of material objects created by the African people. The socio-political effect of colonialism on the continent cannot be ignored. West African indigenous groups whose lands were reconstituted in colonial times, lumped together groups in ways that merged traditions, experiences, and cultures. Groups living by the Atlantic shore or the grassland savanna or the interior forests have different materials available. Most objects are made of wood. The traditions of carving or weaving are handed down generation to generation. Wood and rafia rot, but to the tradition of making and creating go on. The ballet people are descended from the Akan people and you can see sort of on the map on the left, little circle, red circle where it says cout de voire, that's Ivory Coast. They traditionally lived in family compounds with a head chief, the oldest being the oldest son, a revered leader, and then his wife were wives and then other brothers and their wives and lived in the compound and there'd be a sort of a low wall surrounding that compound. There would be a collective granary that holds the wealth, the health, and the spiritual continuity of the community and that major sort of granary would be sort of in the sort of next to the head chief and it's likely that our door is a granary door. The core food crops for the ballet are sorghum and sweet potatoes. They also have chickens and they have other things and sweet potatoes are pretty much a sort of cash crop and they can use that for trade and sorghum is the core and sorghum when it's threshed is like sand and it pours like sand or like water and when it's threshed, when it's unthreshed, you can cook it easily. It's kind of like a hominy grits and it can be as fluid and sand when it's stored and the granaries are said to resemble the bellies of pregnant women. So the examples that I have here of the granaries are reconstructions of granaries. Now people would probably use brick, cinderblock and have corrugated roof but this is kind of a traditional look of a village and that the work of building the granaries is shared between men and women and it's also very gendered. So the men tend to do sort of a gathering of the wood, the cutting of the wood and this creating of a structured wood and then women will dig to get clay and they'll add cow dung and straw and they will do sort of a clay work so it's kind of divided along gender lines. Of course here all of these are reproductions of people building granaries and so here is a woman who is creating a large granary. You can look at the granary almost as if it's like a coil pot made out of terracotta and it's just very very large and you can see that she's taking sort of roughly made blocks and putting them together on top of a base that has that has mud brick on the bottom and then you can see this close up where you can see the idea of using cow dung and clay and straw may seem unusual. I've done this in South Africa and in Botswana. The cow dung is very dry and it doesn't smell at all. You can use your bare hands to create this and you can see in this picture again a reconstruction is that they're placing a door within sort of the walled structure of a granary and in this case the wood looks like it comes from Home Depot. There's a lock that you could buy at Lowe's and there are metal hinges but again this is a reproduction but you can see sort of how it fits together and this is a more traditional granary and you can see in the granary to the left the carved door so this is why I've come to the conclusion that this is a granary door. It could have been a door for the walled entrance into the compound but it's a little small for that. It could be the door for the chief's house but again it would be pretty narrow for people to try to get through so it seems as if the granary door is the likely thing that it is. So once the granary is built people would use the blood of a sacrificial chicken and anoint the interior and the idea is to ward off evil spirit. In fact the door itself is less a functional door to stop people from going in but it's more a boundary door to ward off evil spirits to ward off curious children and I think we should think about the sort of the actual function of the door because it's a boundary and the boundary exists between those who possess knowledge about what's inside and those who don't. There are boundaries that we experience in all kinds of aspects of our lives, spatial, social and spiritual. The spatial in terms of seating and houses of faith based on gender there might be a rude screen that separates the congregation from the high altar, in the synagogue, the Bhima, the Ark they hold and protect the Torah and then socially there's the red carpet, there's velvet rope. We should look at these doors as boundaries. They're also spiritual and I would like us to think maybe about the door being less of an art object and more of a reliquary, an object that is used in very powerful symbolic ways and perhaps also in rituals. When I was looking at the description and the building of works using a mud brick and wood I was thinking about well in other cultures this happens as well so this is just a little sort of a side example of a sort of Tudor building. It's timber framed with waddle and dob waddle and is the wooden part which is usually made of willow and it's kind of woven together. It fits within the framework of the building and then of course then clay is placed in that. You can see that the structure especially on the right you can see how it's been sort of stuccoed with a mud and then of course it's got a thatched roof and if the thatched roof extends beyond the walls and a little bit beyond the foundation then that will protect the building in the rain and we know that Tudor buildings can last for a long time as would a granary in Côte d'Ivoire. I had the experience of traveling many years ago to South Africa and to Botswana and to actually build some houses in Botswana so these came from my sketchbook so I thought I would share them with you because although Botswana and South Africa are thousands and thousands of miles away from West Africa the building technique in Botswana is almost identical. The buildings they are around in their cauldron dobbles and now they're made mostly of sort of cinder block. So all that to say we're getting to the ballet door that is part of the barn's collection so I wanted to frame it in the context of how it would have functioned in a ballet community. Our door commands pride of place on the second floor hallway opposite Matisse's Bonaire de Viva or Joy of Life. It was acquired in 1922-1923 from the French dealer Paul Guillaume. There's a picture of Paul Guillaume at his desk there along with a number of other African works. These were originally the spoils of colonial conquest. They were purchased, freely given, stolen, bought for a pittance. We don't really know. Côte d'Ivoire after it was the French left in the late 19th century, it was left in the care of merchants, of resident merchants. In 1883 it was a protectorate, a colony in 1893, a territory of France in 1904 and independent in 1960. So the whole history of Côte d'Ivoire and the acquisition of objects is a very curious one, a very interesting one. Now Paul Guillaume is quite the character. He came from very humble beginnings. His father had been a tax collector in Paris and Paul Guillaume began his career as a clerk in an auto garage and the African sculpture was from Côte d'Ivoire, arrived in crates of rubber for rubber tires. So of course there was a sort of rubber trade and Paul Guillaume liked what he saw and he placed these works in the window of the shop. Artists such as Picasso, Andre Duran, Georges Braque, Maurice de Blemink, and Henri Matisse saw these and when Guillaume saw the interest that early moderns had in African sculpture, he opened his own gallery, he displayed the African works along with the works of the early moderns and that was the beginning of his career as a gallerist. And as we know, the Barnes Foundation collection was largely, the African art collection was largely purchased from Paul Guillaume. So our door, our door is carved in a bar relief and bar relief is simply sort of about a quarter of an inch deep, no deeper than about a quarter an inch. And on one side on the lower half is curiously rendered crocodile. It's seen from sort of an aerial view and that's typical of the presentation of the crocodile. The crocodile is bilaterally symmetrical and it slightly is sort of tilted to the right. Simultaneously, I think we could see the crocodiles as two crocodiles back to back in profile. The idea of a profile, the crocodile, stylistically for the ballet people is really unusual. I think this is one of the things that really got Dr. Barnes interested in this, that this is a very unusual presentation of the imagers. I find that the door itself is, and the sort of presentation of a crocodile is boldly and confidently ambiguous. And I think that is something that is really intriguing visually about the door. The body shows rows of triangular scales. The tails are long and curved and have in sized lines infilled with white kaolin. Kaolin is a kind of white clay. It can be used as a marker for your body as well as a coloring for a wooden door. And the red comes from red iron oxide that could have easily been dug and found locally. On the upper half above the crocodile is a mask. And this particular mask is typical of the ballet people. The image appears to be a female figure with braided hair, with antelope horns, a narrow chin, and a small mouth. Noting that under that small mouth is a little bit of a hole, and we're going to see that hole on the other side as well. We've seen other masks and a statuary of a similar form. And these were known as spirit wives. The idea that a man would have sort of one woman who would have been his kind of spiritual sort of partner in life, and he would often sort of carve the image of the spirit wife as sculpture. It would be hidden in his home only to be shown or taken out very rarely. So we see examples of these three-dimensional objects, and here it's carved into the surface. Often these spirit wives were an homage to a really powerful woman or a mother. They were carved by men to honor a woman for her wisdom, for her beauty, and her dance skills. Now above that we see the bird figures perched on top, and they can have a range of meaning. Clairvoyance, love, fertility, power, danger, discipline, prudence, and laughter. The combination of symbols, or what art historians call iconography, is obscured to us. It's symbolic to the maker and the recipient of the door. Generally, again, the granary doors were there to ward off evil spirits and curious children. The surface of the wooden doors bi-colored. It's deep red, rent iron oxide, white from kaolin. And as I said before, both of these kinds of colorings are also used as facial decorations for rituals. The reverse side is also a bar relief in a kind of checkerboard in, again, white kaolin and red iron oxide. The hole that we saw under the chin of the mask on the opposite reverse side sits nearly center of the checkerboard pattern. It's placed within a kind of covered square, like a square within a square, within a square. And this hole would have had a handle fashioned from hide or from rope or raffia that had been woven. To our sensibility, it might seem as if this hole is distracting in terms of from the overall aesthetic of this side. But we also need to remember that the creator of the door was not making art. It was made to conceal and reveal, to conceal and safeguard the grain within to reveal the powerful crocodile symbol. The meaning of the design is open for interpretation. Often the checkerboard pattern with its contrasts of dark and light represent duality. Light and dark, night and day, male and female, opposing forces, good and evil. And the diamond pattern, when it's turned on the side, it almost looks like a harlequin pattern. It references frogs or fertility. So in this door from the museum, we can see that example of sort of fertility. As a greenery door, its function is symbolic of the unity of the family and the jurisdiction of the family compound elder. It's interesting that the barn store features crocodiles and waterfowl. So this kind of brings us to this sort of interpretation of the sort of symbolism and that there are some of the symbols we're just not going to know. But when we see these water symbols, it's fairly apparent that this is probably referencing a kind of creation myth of the ballet people, which I find really fascinating and comes back to the idea of the power of the story, the power of the narrative when we interpret the symbols. So the myth of the ballet people is that their Queen Abla Poku needed to move her people from the area in Ghana to the present day Côte d'Ivoire. And so it was her job to get her people sort of across the Moe River. When they got to the river, the river was so fierce that they weren't able to cross. And so Queen Abla Poku needed to make a sacrifice. And so she sacrificed what was most dear to her, which was her only son. So when she sacrificed her son, we were told in this story that hippopotamus on my lineup and they look like rocks and people are able to walk across river and go to their new home. So the idea that the crocodiles, the birds as water fowl reference water, that there's a foundational notion of water as a threshold. Also the word ballet is actually two words, bow and lay. And ballet means together, it means the sun is dead. So that the very core of the name of the people references that original myth of sacrificing a son so that the people are safe. In this door on the left, you can see that there's sort of a pin lock, which I think is a really fascinating thing. And partly that pin lock is a symbol of the unity of male and female, which seems obviously very appropriate, or a granary door. And to the right of that, you can see a sort of pair of masks, and then between that pair of masks, a tortoise. Now I found this is really interesting that the pairing of two masks together is the double mask represents the marriage of the sun and moon, and it also represents twins, whose birth is always an absolute wonderful and good omen. I found in doing this research that there's one place in the world where there's the highest form of having twins. And the idea is in Nigeria, that Nigeria of all the world has the largest number of twins. So twins are really an important aspect. And Nigeria and Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire share many same sort of traditions and traits. So I'm going to make a little bit of a shift, and that shift is going to sort of move us in a slightly different direction, but I think you'll see why I'm doing this. Because I'm interested in looking at the door in a larger context, and the relationship of African art to European modernism within the Barnes Foundation. And I was curious in doing my research, like who were Dr. Barnes collaborators, how did these people influence Dr. Barnes as a collector and as a thinker? So what I sort of put together is this group of images. So on the upper left is Alan Locke. I mentioned him before. He was a Central Graduate. He went to Harvard, and he was a great writer and a public intellectual. He was really involved in helping to shape this image of the new Negro and the Harlem Renaissance. So Dr. Barnes really wanted to be able to have Alan Locke tell the story of ancient Negro art as a way to support the new movement of Harlem Renaissance. In the picture next to that, there's Violet Demesia and with a friend, George O'Keefe, and they are standing looking in the main gallery at Cezanne's card players. And then next to them is a photograph of George Santayana, who was a philosopher and who also just studied at Harvard and was very influential in Dr. Barnes structuring his approach to education. And then, of course, John Dewey, on the far right, is a very important, again, personal help Dr. Barnes shape his philosophy around education and around talking about art. And then, of course, at the bottom, a little detail of a painting by Picasso, D'Avignon, and then next to that, our painting by Matisse, Bonaire de Viva. Bonaire de Viva was completed in about 1905, 1906. And then Picasso sees that in the apartment of Leo and Gertrude Stein. And a year later, he paints D'Avignon. Both artists vary influence by looking at African sculpture, things that were outside of the tradition of Europe. And then, of course, Paul Guillaume, which I've shown you before. And the last photograph is of a horseman bond, who was the president of Lincoln University. And he is presenting Albert Einstein with an honorary degree. So these are just some of the people and some of the influences on Dr. Barnes as he's developing his idea around the collection and the primacy of African art within the collection. So here we have the exterior of the original building of the Barnes Foundation, designed by Paul Philippe Cray. And then within the entry area, the entry portico, Dr. Barnes did something that was just really extraordinary, starting really in 1925, when the Barnes Foundation opens, is the entrance is framed by African art from the collection. So in this particular instance, he's got the Ballet d'Or imagery interpreted in Enfield tile polychrome clay. So I've got my colleague, Kedra, there, looking there. And then you can see in the center, the original signage for the Barnes Foundation, established 1922 on the gates outside of the Barnes Foundation latches lane. And you can see that Barnes was interested in having the Ballet d'Or really as the first sort of branding for the Barnes Foundation. So how do the contemporary architects, Billy Shed and Todd Williams, take the Parkway building and frame that within the context of African art? They do this in a particularly, I believe, interesting and subtle way. They have a quote from them, which says that they wanted to wrap the building in a cloth of stone. So here we have a photograph of Ghanaian men making kente cloth. So these are looms that can make actually very, very long strips of cloth. They're about six inches wide and sort of unlimited lengths. And they would have had traditionally carved eddles and parts. But now you can see a combination of handmade works and then pieces of rubber and plastic to make the kente cloth. The kente cloth can be worn as a sash and single sash. People may have seen these graduation ceremonies, often sort of African American students like to express their solidarity and heritage by wearing it as a sash. Also the kente cloth can be sewn together to make a larger piece of cloth. So the architects tell us that they were inspired by kente cloth, the rhythms of kente cloth. And you can see here the horizontal bands on the exterior of the building of the kente cloth. And then within the larger rectangular spaces, the stone spaces, there are variations on that kind of stone texture. And when you enter into the Annenberg light cord, you'll cross a mosaic on the floor. The mosaic was drawn by Billy Sheehan and then interpreted by a mosaic artist. And it is based on the kente cloth, which is called the Liars cloth, L-I-A-R apostrophe S, liar, as in someone who's not telling the truth. The idea was that the Liars cloth would be worn by the chief in the family compound when he had to make some sort of distinction between who's telling the truth and who's lying. And then of course in the main gallery, when you enter in the original building, the plaster frieze and his interpretation of African sculpture and masks that were within the collection and also real sort of masks that they used. And the architects in the Parkway building chose Cuba cloth as the motif. And even in the light cord in the Florence Knoll seating arrangements, the artists from Senegal made the patterns for the textiles. And then when you're exiting the building, you'll see sort of a large bronze wall and it's etched with the image from the ballet door. So the architects used subtle textile patterns as well as the original ballet door image as they tried to make the image modern. The word that continues to resurface for me and assessing Barnes as a collector and his particular attachment to the ballet door is prescient. The idea of having or showing knowledge of events before they take place. He was one of the first collectors in America to pair African art with the early moderns. He disliked the notion that African art, Native American art and material culture from non-Western cultures were relegated to ethnographic museums. He chose as his brand the ballet door at the inception of the foundation. I think that's pretty extraordinary. When Dr. Barnes made his second trip in 1912 to Paris and he met Leo and Gertrude Stein, he saw an extraordinary painting in their apartments and the Matisse's Bonaire de Viva. And he was startled by the painting because of its vivid colors, its crude painting, its being curvilinear ambiguous forms. But he was simultaneously attracted and sort of repulsed by the painting. But he also recognized its position in art history. The image clearly rumated in his head for years and then in 1923 he was able to purchase that painting. So my argument is the painting didn't change. Dr. Barnes was transformed by it. Barnes championed African American culture and for his time was considered progressive in terms of race and class. 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 Philadelphia and I dare say in America. He was extremely confident in the transformational experience of art. By the way on that image of Dr. Barnes on the left at the bottom there's a sort of furry like sort of black and white image and I believe that is Dr. Barnes dog Fidel who traveled with him sort of everywhere. So I love this photograph because Dr. Barnes clearly felt such a passion around the ballet door and about the centrality of African art within the collection of the Barnes. That's it. Thank you. Thank you so much Michael. That was fascinating. Just as you're concluding with that photograph I was thinking how I'm always so struck by the archival photos of Dr. Barnes touching. He's got that grip there. He's got that grip. The other thing about the door that's really interesting is it's so very pristine. I mean it doesn't show the sense of where that you would have an ador to a chief's house or to the family compound. So the granary seems like the logical place for it and also I want to mention that there are pins at the top and the bottom. You can see that they fit into the door stand and those pins would have been made to fit within the clay and dung door walls around the around the granary. So just a little technical thing. Yeah so we got a number of questions throughout the presentation that I've compiled and I tried to sort of mark in my own notes whether you would later address that. So but I just I may not have I may be asking questions that you may repeat a little bit. So one of the questions that we got is did each family within the ballet people have its own granary or were they shared? Oh that's a great question. So let's see I had a diagram of the family compounds. They are there might have been 10 to 15 families living within a family compound. The walls are about four feet high so I mean you can see obviously into the family compound the floor of the compound gets swept every morning so it's nice and neat and they would have had their own granaries. They could they had the option of having their own granaries which would have been smaller and then of course they had the large granary that was the granary for the entire community and that represented the community wealth. So I think I answered that question yeah so there are multiple granaries within one compound. We're just as you're answering that I think I just saw a question pop up on how did they get the grains in and out? Oh there let's see there was a photograph earlier on I don't want to go back to it but there is a ladder and the ladder is made from a piece of wood that is a it's kind of a Y shape it almost looks like a slingshot like a giant slingshot that's what it looks like it could have a Y at the top and then their notches leading that so that you can climb up into it so they I don't know how they got things out but I know how they got through that door. Well great yeah okay so we had a few questions on the colors and I do know this is something you did address so I'll just kind of give you a few of these questions maybe you can just share a little more information on them. We did get a few people asking if they were intentionally different colors which I think you then really spent some time on but some of our members are wondering if the iron oxide was found in nature or is that something they kind of had to make and then also I wonder if you could share a little bit about how you think those colors aged you know are they is that color what you might have expected to see back when it was originally created or do you think there's been a lot of sort of change there? Oh these are great questions um red iron oxide occurs naturally in the ground and so people uh it's it's kind of like digging clay if you go next to a stream that you can look and you'll find some uh deposits of clay that are um they'd have to sort of break them apart and get some of the rocks out but that's useful and it's the same thing with the red iron oxide it's a naturally occurring material they'd have to do anything to it and kaolin also is naturally occurring it's a sort of a white clay it's added to porcelain it's one of the things that used to create porcelain so those would have been all naturally occurring and the question the other part of the question was is this the condition that it was in originally I think that was the the core of the question now this creates a certain kind of problematic idea is that a lot of the art from the latter half of the 19th century that came from West Africa were objects I shouldn't necessarily call them art reliquary that they were cleaned up for the market so some of the things that we see that um are kind of very black and clean and shiny were um were washed and cleaned and buffed and blackened that there had been raffaea which is a kind of um occurs in nature you can use it for weaving that would have been included in in masks especially also there would have been calorie shells that are often attached to masks and those are taken off so we do know that there's a lot of changes in the way that people created works of works of importance in their culture and in fact by the latter half of the 19th century probably the 1880s 1890s people in cote d'voire were actually creating some works for the sort of european trade in in objects in african objects so what we see in terms of their condition is unlikely to have been sort of the original condition in fact many of the objects i'm thinking of sculpture in the rituals would have been sort of anointed with um blood um either human sacrificed blood or probably an animal like a chicken and those things would have been cleaned off if you see original works they will be often caked with blood because they were used over and over again in different rituals interesting well i suppose i must be glad that uh the barn's ballet door is not caked in blood yeah it would be unlikely for the doors to have been used caked in in blood because they didn't do that right right okay understood i say um okay i'm gonna jump back a little bit to the idea of different granaries within compound and ask if different granaries um if those different granaries would have different designs on their doors there should be a uniformity or or would there be different designs oh let's see the doors that i have seen crocodiles uh turtles sometimes a fish again water related and it seems to be water related based on that early sort of creation myth uh with abla puka the um queen yeah so um the range of images but the range of images is relatively narrow hmm i think okay and we did get a question which i think ties in here is asking um were hippos used in the design i know you mentioned that the hippopotamus was a big part of that um sort of founding uh mythology and perhaps we did see some different designs so i think maybe if you could just unpack whether we were looking at were we looking at hippos were we looking at crocodiles uh we were looking at crocodiles turtles um there were some uh men on horseback with um from that this is from a the door from the mat and they didn't know what the symbolism was i just um didn't talk about them uh and they were probably later and they were related to like the colonial history of kutvar apparently in kutvar um the uh people who were living there uh really resisted uh french rule so there was a fair amount of um of sort of warfare back and forth and skirmish issues so uh so you know that this door i don't know um it it's provenance around the the horse horsemen but mostly it's crocodiles fish turtle birds interesting yeah um on that door actually that we just took a look at there were you know the people on horseback and on the upper right there's that long object with two circles is that what you're saying you're not sure what that is and that could be related to colonialism it's sort of okay interesting yeah and it's interesting because um interpreting the symbols is relatively hard to do and um i because people they're they're sort of idiosyncratic based on the maker and the person who was being made for um so i i don't know okay yeah that makes sense um maybe and this this is a question we received what what type of art are the ballet people making now or if if any oh wow that is a great question um they are uh let's see as far as i know i mean some people are making works for the trade so they're making imitations of doors and uh masks and sculpture but they're doing them for the trade they're not doing them for a symbolic reason uh the spirit uh wives or the spirit spouses uh people are still carving and they really don't share those they are hidden away and uh they will take them out for sort of limited ceremonies then i mean they're making art that is informed by the west uh so um you know architecturally you know sort of western influenced uh i don't really have like a great answer for that other than in Nigeria there is an artist who's passed away his name is Twin77 and he did very large figures and animals uh highly decorated and his name comes from he was the seventh twin to survive uh his sort of a live birth so that's how we got the name Twin77 so that's kind of related back to the image of the two spirit wife masks but um i don't know all kinds of work yeah it's a broad a broad question but no i think that's a good that's a great answer very interesting of course once a market has been created you want to fill that market but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's sort of what they're currently interested in how can you tell oh i think this is a really fascinating question how can you tell which reliquaries are authentic versus those made for trade and maybe we can't oh okay uh i am not an expert uh so i don't i don't know and i think people actually really have a hard time with that it's kind of people really have a hard time remember that their wood things don't last a long time so uh they would tend to rot if they were in sort of an area there was lots of moisture so we're not an expert on authentication of african objects um yeah well that makes sense we appreciate your sharing your knowledge with us authentication or not so here's um something i think you did um touch on briefly but maybe we can just spend another moment on it is how would these objects have been procured from the ballet people oh that's interesting so uh at the time as i understand it when paul geome was actually acquiring objects uh cote d'voire was in the hands of these sort of resident merchants so you can imagine like just people going there and buying stuff people go into a village uh and purchase things or trade objects um the ballet people were really interested in sort of western objects so they were pretty much except for the spirit wives happy to trade things um so that was it they also could in sort of ripped out of a village i mean i really don't know um and uh it is um one of the great um dilemmas of the 21st century is how people acquire objects from all different cultures um and how people um bring objects back uh to their sort of rightful owners so i think that exists for african objects as well yeah i think that makes a lot of sense so we have i think you know really we do have other questions that really want to dig into some of the technical things that you covered but um we're coming close to the end of our program and i kind of like uh ending on that ambiguous note you know we can appreciate um our opportunity to take a look at these works but always nice to sort of wonder about their past lives and how they ended up here at the barns but um i really want to thank you so much for taking the time to um to share all of this incredible research and knowledge uh with us here today um this is quite a fascinating presentation um for myself and we've gotten a lot of positive feedback um in the chat as well um anyone listening who wants to hear more from michael you can do that at at the barns um he gives our team talks in the annenberg court so um whenever you are ready to visit i encourage you to um to stop by you'll be able to to hear more from him um as you may know we are open we're excited to welcome you back you can learn more about our safety procedures on the website um we'll post that link in the chat and we ask that you make a reservation to visit in advance our capacity is quite limited um so we can keep everybody uh safe and spread out um in march we will open a new exhibition soutine de kooning conversations in paint which explore the affinities between the work of heim soutine and william de kooning uh this exhibition has been called the season's major art exhibition by the philadelphia inquire and it will be open to members first on march fourth and fifth before it opens to the public on march six we'll also be hosting a virtual curatorial preview on march third so i hope you'll join us online for that you can register for that on our website additional virtual programming continues as well we post a new barns takeout video on our youtube channel every friday and for members we have another exclusive lecture in march with tamer mason another member of our incredible barns our team it's titled soutine rembrandt and hardy so she will be looking at the way uh soutine was influenced by artists that came before a nice tie into the exhibition will kind of consider how um de kooning was inspired in a lot of ways by soutine our winter adult education classes are enrolling now we have a number of semester long courses as well as monthly offerings as a member you get a 10 discount on your registration if you need assistance registering please give us a call at 215-278-7100 we are so grateful for your interest in and support of the barns we miss you and we look forward to seeing you again hopefully here for the curatorial preview or for our next talk um and please feel free to post additional questions in the chat or reach out to us at members at barnsfoundation.org happy valentine's day and have a great weekend