The Howard County
I N
F O C U S
VOL.5, NO.3
F O R
P E O P L E
O V E R
5 0 MARCH 2015
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Showcasing works of African art
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY NATASHA GLAROS
By Tony Glaros Doris Ligon may be Baltimore born and bred, but she can’t seem to get her mind off of Africa. “I was in my 30s before I heard anything positive about Africa,” declared Ligon, 78, who, along with her late husband, Claude, opened the African Art Museum of Maryland in Columbia 35 years ago. “In those days,” she continued, “Africa was called the Dark Continent. In 1980, I decided there was a need for more understanding.” The museum she and her husband founded was only the second nationwide that exclusively explored and celebrated the arts of Africa. The first was started by Warren Robbins, a cultural attaché for the State Department, who used part of a Washington, D.C., townhouse to display the African he treasures he collected. In 1979, Robbins successfully convinced Congress to take over his collection, and it later became the seed for the establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on the National Mall. Ligon’s museum is still just one of three African art museums in the country, and the only one founded by an African American.
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Columbia’s first museum It was also the first museum in Columbia, Ligon recalled. The museum’s original space was rented from Historic Oakland, a sprawling and stately manor house on Vantage Point Road that was built in 1811. However, when it came time to renew the lease, the rent “was more than we could afford,” Ligon said. “They had raised it so astronomically high.” The museum relocated several times over the years, until it settled in its present space in 2011, in intimate quarters in Maple Lawn, the nascent mixed-use development in Fulton. The museum is nestled just off the lobby of its landlord, the headquarters of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. Through the decades, Ligon’s original and absorbing focus has not deviated. Nothing in the inventory speaks to European, American or Asian art. It’s a onenote production steeped in the story of the world’s oldest civilization. “Some people call the art of Africa prim-
ARTS & STYLE Doris Ligon, who with her late husband founded the African Art Museum of Maryland in Columbia, stands beside a throne from the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria (with a model of a seated king in colorful clothes, whose face is concealed by a mask). The throne is one of more than 3,000 artifacts Ligon has collected for the museum. Many museum pieces are on loan to schools and other institutions throughout Howard County.
itive,” she said. “We’re telling the people there’s a message in this object, placed in its indigenous setting.”
The museum’s treasures Most of the 3,000 pieces that compose her treasure trove come from white collectors, she observed. “But blacks are beginning to collect,” she said. The pieces, she added, typically come from those who have been assigned by agencies such as the State Department or Peace Corps to a country in Africa. Ligon, who holds an undergraduate degree in sociology and a master’s in museum studies from Morgan State University, sprang from her desk to escort a visitor on an abbreviated tour. Upon entering the cozy, peaceful reposito-
ry, visitors come face to face with a three-foot tall wooden mask designed to be danced with by the Baga people of Guinea, in West Africa. The top half of the creation is in the shape of a bird that represents the ability to soar over the earth, skirting the Creator in heaven. The lower section conveys the sense of a fertile woman nursing her baby. The mask is worn in celebrations of the rice harvest, equating the fertility of the land with that of human beings. “It’s about men and women working the soil, and the longevity of the Baga people. It’s about feeding new generations.” Next, Ligon stands in the vast shadow of a giant mask from Malawi that reaches almost See ART MUSEUM, page 27
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