Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa

Exhibition Schedule: The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, January 26–July 21, 2019; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada, September 21, 2019–February 23, 2020; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, TBD–TBD

Upon entry, the viewer encounters deep blue walls, explanatory wall text, a map of Northern Africa and Europe that details the various trade networks in question, and finally an expansive screen projecting an image of the Sahara Desert. Here, the text clearly delineates the goals of the exhibition: to focus on objects that move rather than solely on the sites in which they were either created or consumed, and the map certainly emphasizes this point.
The map lacks any borders-historic or contemporary-instead offering an array of major trade hubs that functions as nodes within a webbed network of trade routes that span from Ife through Tunis and Venice to Lubeck in Northern Europe. All of this is to say the geography the exhibition takes on is expansive, and the objects they have pulled together are equally broad in the forms they take. This didactic introduction is supported by maps and works on paper, Overall, the exhibition presents the material impetus for the trade networks and lays out why North Africa ought to be historically important even for scholars whose interests lay further afield: cultural products like gold-leaf paintings and ivory carvings could not exist without raw materials or influential cultural products supplied from Africa. The juxtaposition of Seated While the stunning objects take the fore, the average viewer struggles to identify the pertinent information that explains why this vial or that fabric was included in the exhibition.
In many instances, without the aid of the exhibition catalog, the historic narratives and networks of objects are difficult to understand. In part, the wall labels are expected to fulfill this large task-provide tombstone information, illuminate the object to a general audience that may not be familiar with non-Western and medieval material culture, and only then divulge the particulars that made this specific object of interest within an exhibition dedicated to cross-cultural movements and aesthetics. Such a daunting task means that interested viewers frequently clumped around an expert or catalog owner passing through the exhibition hoping to overhear the information the wall label omitted. Some objects made use of the limited space by prompting more questions than answers, helping to articulate how much work and scholarship are yet to be done. Wall text for The Asante Jug (Richard II Ewer), a copper ewer created in fourteenth-century England with an English inscription and found in Asante possession during nineteenth-century British colonialism, notes that why and how the ewer went from medieval England into Africa is unknown but expresses the importance of Saharan trade routes as channels through which cultural goods and material resources flowed.
While understanding the range of objects and cultures this show endeavors to put in conversation, one major issue of entanglement that the exhibition does not address in a direct or satisfactory manner is slavery. While the wall text introducing "Saharan Frontiers" notes, "the imports of the desert such as male and female slaves," quoting the twelfth-century writer Mohammed ibn Abu Bakr al-Zuhri, the only noticeable discussion of the enslavement, sale, and forced movement of peoples comes in "Saharan Echoes." The wall label for the nineteenthcentury Danish drawing of a guinbri informs the viewer that the term "Gnawa" originally C a r a v a n s o f G o l d , F r a g m e n t s i n T i m e : A r t , C u l t u r e , a n d E x c h a n g e a c r o s s M e d i e v a l S a h a r a n A f r i c a One can understand why the curators wanted to focus on the benefits that contact between cultures conjured and downplay a fuller and more complicated assessment; indeed, such a narrative leads away from the objects at hand and prompts larger questions about human labor and social histories. And certainly, the objects are the strength of the exhibition; the curators have endeavored to afford equal attention to all objects (regardless of how visually enticing), attending equally to pristine gold dinars and a contemporaneous glass bottle, pulling together objects that do not prioritize the "fine arts." This array in large part comes from the many non-Western institutions that the curators partnered with to bring stunning objects that scholars and publics who are familiar with Western collections would not come into contact with otherwise. Objects from museums and collections in Morocco, Mali, and Nigeria did much of the heavy lifting within the exhibition and will bring much-needed scholarship and visibility to these collections, listed in full in the catalog and corresponding website caravansofgold.org.
And yet, the relative silence on issues of race, slavery, and institutional inequity must be points of conversation for future shows.
The exhibition climaxes in "Long Reach" and "Shifting Away" before taking a chronological jump in the final section, making "Saharan Echoes" feel disconnected from the rest of the exhibition. Here, the show risked entering into the problematic historic narratives that cast Africa as a timeless and unchanging location (something shared with the introductory screen of a static desertscape), which could be mitigated by wall text and labels, though once more such texts were already overburdened. Ultimately, the exhibition attempts to highlight how traditional forms are articulated in recent objects. But one wonders if it was the best ending given the strength of the previous sections, which were expansive in their objects and geographies and made clear that medieval Saharan Africa was a complex, nuanced, and thriving site of commerce and culture that was strongly interconnected with the cultures around it. This very point comes across strongly in the exhibition catalog, which deserves as much praise as the show for its interdisciplinary research and excellent illustrations, assuaging some of the logistical shortcomings of installing such a challenging enterprise. Overall, the diversity and multicultural connections presented in this show prove to be extremely relevant in a cultural moment in which we must continue to think critically about what voices are historically amplified or suppressed; confront institutions founded on White and European supremacy; and recommit ourselves, our discipline, and our institutions to a nuanced understanding of history that acknowledges its multivocal nature.
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