Robert-Goldwater-Library

Makonde masquerade @ Wallach Art Gallery

Mapiko dancer entering a village accompanied by a lipalipanda player. Matambalale Village, Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique. Photograph by A. Bortolot, 2004.





Revolutions: A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique, an exhibition of masks and other performance objects from East Africa, will be on view at the Columbia University Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery from 19 September through 8 December 2007.

The exhibition features more than 60 examples of Makonde art, on loan from public and private collections, including a comprehensive selection of masks, figural statuary, puppets, drums, dance scepters, and ornate metal bracelets dating from the late 1800s to the present day.

Alexander Bortolot, a doctoral candidate in art history and archeology at Columbia University -- and a former graduate intern in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- is the curator of the exhibit and author of the forthcoming accompanying catalog. In addition to the curatorial essay based on Bortolot's research, the publication will include more than 60 color images that provide a rare record of Makonde visual culture.

Alex will deliver a gallery talk on Thursday, 25 October, at 6:30 p.m.

Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
826 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University (campus map)
Gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 1 - 5 pm.

• Exhibition description (pdf)

• Search "Makonde"

Where art and commerce meet

From BBC News Online, July 26, 2007 (thanks, Nicole!)

Simpsons win over Kenyan carvers

By Muliro Telewa, BBC News, western Kenya

A group of carvers in western Kenya are looking forward to the first Simpsons movie hitting big screens around the world, even though they are unlikely to see it. 

Although most of them in the remote village of Tabaka in Kisii have never watched the animated TV show, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie have changed their lives and the new film should see demand for their work soar they hope.

Soapstone carving is a traditional craft passed down from generation to generation, and the Abagusii tribe is renowned for their carving prowess.

So when Twentieth Century Fox designated the Tabaka soapstone carvings as official Simpsons merchandise in July 2006, their lives improved overnight.

The Tabaka Classic Carvers are licensed to produce 12 models of the show's characters, and they are keen to expand their portfolio.

Pauline Kemunto and her husband work with the Simpsons team in Tabaka; he carves the figures and she smoothes the soapstone afterwards

"I don't know who they are," she says about the dysfunctional cartoon family.

"But I like them because I earn from them."

Click here for the rest of the story

Timbuktu digital library project

From the NY Times, 8/7/2007

A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. (Candace Feit for The New York Times)

Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival
by LYDIA POLGREEN

TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

“This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”

Photo source >
The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost’s future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.

“I am a historian,” Mr. Haïdara said. “I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past.”

This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.

“We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa,” said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. “This is our chance to regain our place in history.”

The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city’s musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu’s only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it ... [Read more]

• Library of Congress online exhibition of Malian manuscripts from Timbuktu
• Timbuktu Manuscript Project (University of Oslo Centre for Development and the Environment)
  • Visit the Timbuktu Libraries
• Search WATSONLINE

Art of Being Tuareg at the Cantor Arts Center

The exhibition, "Art of being Tuareg: Sahara nomads in a modern world," the first major exhibition in the United States about the Tuareg people, is timely, as changing conditions in the Sahara -- from global warming, uranium mining and oil production -- have raised questions about the Turaeg's future. The exhibition was organized in partnership with UCLA's Fowler Museum, but the lead author on the catalogue and primary curator is the Cantor's director, Tom Seligman, who has been communicating with and studying the Tuareg for more than 30 years.

via LA Times, {CALENDAR, Part E; Pg. 6}:

Tuareg crafts cross paths with the world
Exhibition illustrates how the nomadic people maintain their culture in modern life.

By Hugh Hart, Special to The Times

"A house is a coffin for the living."-- Tuareg proverb 

Romanticized by European colonizers as fierce, camel-riding warriors swathed in indigo veils, the semi-nomadic Tuareg people of North and West Africa for centuries coaxed a livelihood from their harsh environs in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya.

Thomas K. Seligman, director of the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, says the Tuareg's historic distaste for permanent lodging makes perfect sense. "In their worldview, Tuareg live freely, with almost no stuff, in an environment that they know and control."

Yet in recent decades, life for the Tuareg has changed drastically, forcing an ever-growing engagement with the modern world. An exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum, "Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World," curated by Seligman, encompasses recent photographs and videos that reflect Tuareg society in the 21st century, complemented by 235 objects made from silver, leather, wood and fabric representing traditional craftsmanship.

Fowler Museum Director Marla Berns, who has studied indigenous Ga'anda and Yungur groups in nearby northeastern Nigeria, says the Tuareg developed their distinctive fusion of lifestyle and art as a matter of necessity: "It's the kind of aesthetic that grows up around cultures that are on the move. You can't carry a lot of superfluous material, because you're hauling it all around with you. There's a tendency to put a lot of attention on the adornment of the self, as well as the adornment of where people live and the objects they use." The material on display comes courtesy of the Tuareg's artisan class, known as inadan. Seligman and others believe the smiths, leather workers and artists most likely descended from Jewish metallurgists who migrated to North Africa after they were expelled from Spain by Christians in the 14th and 15th centuries. Their role within the Tuareg caste system is complicated.

"Historically," Seligman says, "the inadan were scorned and feared because they have a lot of unusual capacities that were seen as socially dangerous but absolutely essential. Nobody else would think of touching the material they work with, much less trying to do anything with it."

In 1971, Seligman became intrigued with the inadan when he met silversmith Saidi Oumba and his wife, Andi Ouhoulou, in Agadez, an ancient city in Niger that historically served as a caravan stop. Oumba and his family practice the "trembling hand" technique of silver smithing passed down from generation to generation.

Since then, Seligman has made more than a dozen visits to the region, including two collecting trips partly financed by the Fowler. After a four-month journey to Niger in 2001, Seligman conceived "Art of Being Tuareg." His goal: "To bring an understanding of the Tuareg people and their history as well as their dynamic engagement with the so-called modern world."

The show's older artifacts, on loan mainly from Musee d'ethnographie Neuchatel in Switzerland and Paris' Musee du quai Branly, include daggers and swords with intricately engraved hilts, camel saddles, teapots, tasseled leather bags colored in turquoise and red pigments derived from pomegranates, indigo, sorghum and minerals, along with Cross of Agadez jewelry bearing the mysterious symbol most associated with Tuareg identity.

The exhibition's contemporary component addresses the ways in which this once-isolated culture has responded to the encroachments of modern life. One video piece, for example, documents a desert wedding attended by nobles on white camels while other guests arrive in trucks. The wedding band does not rely on traditional goatskin drums. Instead they dress in Western clothes and play rock music on electric guitars, although they still belt out lyrics in the Tamasheq language.

"What's happening with the Tuareg is happening all over the world," Seligman says. "The region is experiencing environmental degradation and huge stress from a variety of geopolitical and global forces -- cash economy, roads coming in -- there's this kind of blending of other cultures."

"Art of Being Tuareg" demonstrates one connection, seen as largely positive, made between ancient tradition and the global economy with a display of Tuareg-produced bracelets, earrings, necklaces and other luxury items marketed to trend-conscious consumers.

The silver wares, including several crafted by Oumba that now belong to the Fowler collection, reflect the way the Tuareg have modified tradition to satisfy a larger public. Some objects are made of gold, traditionally regarded as a taboo metal. Salt and pepper shakers cater to Western tastes. And items that would have once been anonymously produced are now signed by the artist to ensure authenticity in the face of knockoff "Tuareg-inspired" merchandise.

Says Berns, "The smith class found a way to capitalize on what they produce and haven't had any difficulty selling to an outside market. Even though they may not have the social status of the nobles, the inadan have a different kind of social status in our global society because they have a cash economy. They're now making money."

Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday and until 8 p.m. Thursday from May 30 to Sept. 2 at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University Campus. Admission is free. For information, call (650) 723-4177 or visit www.museum.stanford.edu

more info:

The soul of the Sahara, brought alive in regal display
Jesse Hamlin, The San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, May 26, 2007

images:

 

Bringing the Internet to Africa ... slowly

From The New York Times, July 22, 2007

A customer in the Bourbon coffee shop in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, uses a wireless connection. (Riccardo Gangale for The New York Times)

Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
By RON NIXON

ON A MUGGY DAY IN KIGALI IN 2003, some of the highest-ranking officials in the Rwandan government, including President Paul Kagame, flanked an American businessman, Greg Wyler, as he boldly described how he could help turn their small country into a hub of Internet activity.

Mr. Wyler, an executive based in Boston who made his fortune during the tech boom, said he would lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service. Until that point, Mr. Wyler, 37, had never set foot in Africa — he was invited by a Rwandan government official he had met at a wedding. Mr. Wyler never expected to start a business there; he simply wanted to try to help the war-torn country.

Even so, Mr. Wyler’s company, Terracom, was granted a contract to connect 300 schools to the Internet. Later, the company would buy 99 percent of the shares in Rwandatel, the country’s national telecommunications company, for $20 million.

But after nearly four years, most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize, Rwandan officials say. “The bottom line is that he promised many things and didn’t deliver,” said Albert Butare, the country’s telecommunications minister.

Mr. Wyler says he sees things quite differently, and he and Rwandan officials will probably never agree on why their joint venture has been so slow to get off the ground. But Terracom’s tale is more than a story about a business dispute in Rwanda. It is also emblematic of what can happen when good intentions run into the technical, political and business realities of Africa.

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.

A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet traffic is routed this way and costs African countries billions of extra dollars each year that they would not incur if their infrastructure was up to speed.

“Most African governments haven’t paid much attention to their infrastructure,” said Vincent Oria, an associate professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a native of the Ivory Coast. “In places where hunger, AIDS and poverty are rampant, they didn’t see it as critical until now.”

Africa’s only connection to the network of computers and fiber optic cables that are the Internet’s backbone is a $600 million undersea cable running from Portugal down the west coast of Africa. Built in 2002, the cable was supposed to provide cheaper and faster Web access, but so far that has not happened.

Prices remain high because the national telecommunications linked to the cable maintain a monopoly over access, squeezing out potential competitors. And plans for a fiber optic cable along the East African coast have stalled over similar access issues. Most countries in Eastern Africa, like Rwanda, depend on slower satellite technology for Internet service.

The result is that Africa remains the least connected region in the world, and the digital gap between it and the developed world is widening rapidly. “Unless you can offer Internet access that is the same as the rest of the world, Africa can’t be part of the global economy or academic environment,” said Lawrence H. Landweber, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who was also part of an early effort to bring the Web to Africa in the mid-1990s. “The benefits of the Internet age will bypass the continent.”

• Read more of the article here
  

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré @ Ikon Gallery

28 July – 16 September 2007
First Floor Galleries

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Brindleyplace
Birmingham
B1 2HS

Tel: 0121 248 0708
Fax: 0121 248 0709

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s practice is encyclopedic, aspiring to the depiction of everything, a means of apprehending and communicating the way the world works. He makes thousands of postcard-sized drawings, graphic images bordered by upper-case texts that categorise and date them. They are exquisite, symbolic cartoons, drawn in
ballpoint and coloured pencils. As he explains: “I usually depict men and women. After all, the earth is humanity.” Also there are pictures of hunting traps, clouds, rocks, gold weights and kola nuts, very loaded from a West African point of view. More generally, they convey a need to know how we know the most familiar things – not just a question of communication, but how our communication determines our understanding.

By accumulation, Bouabré’s work acquires its strength and gravity. His various series involve hundreds and hundreds of pieces, drawings that are like diary entries, countless observations on everyday life. There is a modesty, of medium and subject matter, foiled by a philosophical ambition that is conveyed by the umbrella titles: Connaissance du monde (Knowledge of the World), Le Musee du Visage Africain (The Museum of African Faces), Alphabet and Vision.

In addition, Ikon presents a new series, entitled La Haute Diplomatie (High Diplomacy), comprising 193 colourful drawings that portray individuals who personify all the countries of the world. The figures, one per postcard, wear clothes that incorporate the colours and shapes of their national flags. Each has a distinct demeanour, but they all extend their right hand, in a diplomatic gesture of friendship. The consistent format belies the humorous, poignant idiosyncrasies that make subtle political references. Bouabré extends notions of connectedness with an increased internationalism. Birmingham, one of the
most multi-cultural cities in the world, could not be more appropriate for this exhibition.

A book featuring La Haute Diplomatie, published by Ikon Shop, is available for a special exhibition price of £11.95, full price £14. Texts by André Magnin, Yaya Savané, Ettore Sottsass and Jonathan Watkins.

David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings

via SMH:

On view: July 18-October 28, 2007

David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings. One of Britain’s leading contemporary architects, Adjaye is known for his innovative buildings and their equal emphasis on the experience and function of architecture. Making Public Buildings focuses on his engagement with public space and the built environment, and follows the evolution of ten major buildings from design to production to completion. The exhibition includes architectural models, drawings and films of the buildings, which include the 2005 Venice Biennale pavilion and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo; photographs of Adjaye’s travels around the world, and writings by artists and architects who have impacted his work. Focused on learning, community, contemporary art and housing, Making Public Buildings reveals Adjaye’s interest in rethinking social space and redefining the urban landscape.

Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye has influences that range from West African art and architecture to the work of musicians such as George Lewis and Sun Ra and artists such as David Hammons and Chris Ofili. By applying conceptual frameworks to the fundamentals of architecture, he explores space, scale, measurement, light and materials to create daring and original buildings that transform the way we think about architecture and public space. Making Public Buildings is Adjaye’s first major exhibition.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and Arario Gallery, Beijing.

Read a recent interview with Adjaye in New York Magazine.

more via Flavorpill:

Homes for creative A-listers Ewan McGregor, Juergen Teller, and Chris Ofili have made Tanzania-born David Adjaye one of Britain's leading starchitects. The Studio Museum in Harlem traces the evolution of ten projects — all of which address public space — from initial conceit to completion. Your Black Horizon, an Adjaye-designed windowless pavilion, housed Ólafur Elíasson's light installation at the 2005 Venice Biennale. In Whitechapel, London, Adjaye designed the Idea Store, a flashy cube of blue-and-green glass that houses the local library, dance studios, and community center. Not one for tradition, Adjaye retooled a former train station in Oslo as the Nobel Peace Center, adding a sculptural aluminum canopy to the building's courtyard. (HGM)

Note: This exhibition continues through Sun 10.28 (Wed-Fri: 12-6pm / Sat: 10am-6pm / Sun: 12-6pm).

David Goldblatt: Intersections

via Art&Education :

David Goldblatt: Intersections
July 8 through August 26, 2007

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2626 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720
t. (510) 642-0808
f. (510) 642-4889
TDD: (510) 642-8734
Wednesday and Friday to Sunday, 11 to 5; Thursday 11 to 7.
Closed Monday and Tuesday

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents David Goldblatt: Intersections, an exhibition of color photographs of life in post-apartheid South Africa by one of the world's leading documentary photographers. David Goldblatt's images of his native country have gained worldwide recognition for their intimate, unflinching views of a culture ravaged by prejudice and injustice. David Goldblatt: Intersections features two recent series of work, Johannesburg Intersections and Platteland Intersections, which show the changing face of contemporary South Africa. The exhibition opens at the museum on July 8 and runs through August 26, 2007.

Goldblatt, who was born in Randfontein, South Africa, in 1930, first started photographing his native country in 1948, the same year the National Party came to power and instituted the policy of apartheid. Since that time, Goldblatt has photographed the South African people, landscape, and cities, creating arresting images that follow in the tradition of the great documentary photography of the twentieth century.

The photographs featured in Johannesburg Intersections reveal the crosscurrents of values, ideas, spaces, and people that make up South Africa today. Goldblatt captures many of the significant social changes that have occurred in the past decade, including the large numbers of black low-wage workers who now live in the cities, and the white residents and businesses that have relocated from the cities to newly built suburbs and office parks. He also depicts the crude cemeteries that are evidence of the impact of HIV/AIDS in the townships, and political change in the form of the elected officials who lead municipalities created following government reforms. In Platteland Intersections, Goldblatt shows the vastness of the landscape, the damage done to the land by the mining industry, and the dignity of the people living on the land.

Goldblatt photographed exclusively in black and white until well into the 1990s; with color, he felt, he could not express his rage, revulsion, and fear of the ideology of apartheid. With the beginning of a new political and social era after the abolition of apartheid and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, Goldblatt felt the need to expand the expressive possibilities of his work. A new generation of color films and the remarkable control of contrast and color saturation enabled by digital reproduction have made that possible for him. His more recent work, including the series featured in David Goldblatt: Intersections, uses large-format photography combined with advanced ink-jet papers to produce images that are redolent of the colors and light of the South African landscape.

Goldblatt's photographs of life in South Africa have been published in a large number of magazines and books. His major publication, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, was released in 1998 to critical acclaim, and that same year a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It wasn't until 2002 that Goldblatt gained international recognition with an exhibition of two groups of photographs at the contemporary art exhibition Documenta 11. Today his work is in major collections around the world, including the French National Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

AIDS
[via http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/goldblatt]

Goldblatt's most recent works have accented the most topical and urgent problem in South Africa: HIV-AIDS. South Africa has one of the highest percentages of HIV-AIDS victims in the world. Although there are signs of change, the government has reacted less than decisively, even to the extent of denying the problem. There are several public campaigns to heighten awareness of the disease and of safe sex, among them the "planting" of the "AIDS ribbon" in the social landscape where, as Goldblatt's photographs show, it is often submerged and seemingly forgotten.

David Goldblatt: Intersectionswas organized for the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany, by Dr. Christoph Danelzik-Bruggemann, curator.

Museums in Libya 2.0: "lamusediffuse"

via Rhizome.org, 7/6/07:

After several months of intense and exciting work, the project Museums in Libya 2.0 is already available on the Internet.

lamusediffuse is a nonprofit research group proposing the use of Social Web tools for the inclusion of non-dominant cultural expressions in the scopes of culture diffusion on the Internet. Accordingly with this objective, the project “Museums in Libya 2.0” is focused on two starting facts, the first is the lack of information about Libyan museums available in the website of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and the second is the apparent lack of museum websites in this country. As a consequence of this, the objective of our project has been overcoming both realities through the following actions:

* Overcoming the gaps of Web 1.0 by using a methodology based on Web 2.0 tools as a flexible, interactive and participative alternative option of information exchange;
* Proving Social Web academic usefulness and its tools as a valid and effective research tool;
* Palliating the lack of contents on Libyan museums on AFRICOM website by compiling, contrasting and structuring the information available on the Internet about the subject;
* Elaborating a reference map where gathering and locating the museums of Libya;
* Raising awareness about the online institutional forgetfulness situation of Libyan Museums at the present time in comparison with others in the rest of the world;
* Creating a methodological model for small museums and museums of developing countries or under conflict situations, reasonable in economic and maintenance terms;
* Encouraging museum professionals to Web 2.0 tools use as an economic, simple and effective solution to overcome any lack of computer science personnel or tools and digital technology;
* Emphasizing the importance and role of the Jamahiriya Museum of Tripoli and improving its online visibility for both international and local audiences;
* Finally, creating a reference document on the Libyan museums that will be published under a Creative Commons license of attribution and for noncommercial use.

You can find more details about this project on lamusediffuse's website

From now on you can enjoy the wonderful Libyan museums strolling through the interactive map, where you will find information on each museum provided by our collaborators and Social Web users. Do not forget also consulting our wiki and updating it with new data. Besides, you can collaborate sharing your photos of Libyan museums including them in our group in Flickr, e-artcasting.

At this moment we leave you with the presentation we have made to present the project on next July 11 at the Medialab of Madrid (Spain,) within the Inclusiva.net encounter: New Art Dynamics in Web 2 mode (http://www.inclusiva-net.org) In the meanwhile, you can consult the references of the project in lamusediffuse's del.icio.us account (http://del.icio.us/lamusediffuse/libya). We hope meeting some of you there!

Link to the presentation.

Art From Tribal Cultures: Summer in Chelsea

Marada Figure, New Ireland, Tabar Island, side view (detail).
Photo: Betty Cunningham Gallery.

via NYTimes:
Art in Review
Published: July 6, 2007

IT’S ALL SPIRITUAL
Art From Tribal Cultures
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th Street, Chelsea
Through July 27

HOLLAND COTTER

For its summer group show, Cuningham Gallery has set aside contemporary art in favor of what looks like a telescoped version of last spring’s Tribal and Textile Arts Fair. In this case all of the work, whether for sale or on loan for the occasion, has been selected by a single New York dealer, Alan Steele. Installed in natural light in a white-box space, it adds up to a forceful ensemble. Chelsea doesn’t often offer such sights — old art that looks considerably fresher than a lot of new art — and it could use more.

And the show could use some focus. The “tribal cultures” represented are from all over the map: Africa, Oceania, Asia and North and South America. The work encompasses a broad range of materials and meanings. But instead of using function or place of origin as an organizing principle, Mr. Steele goes for the vaguer categories of formal affinity and all-purpose spirituality.

General physical resemblance is sufficient reason for displaying a Nepalese shrine figure, an Easter Island ancestor figure and a carved Tlingit dagger together: all are small, slender, vertical and figurative. And spirituality, whatever its meaning, is accepted as a natural bond between visually and culturally disparate things: between, say, a classic Fang reliquary figure from Gabon, looking like a muscle-bound baby, and a Mimbres bowl from New Mexico, its suave abstract designs like millennium-old Art Deco; or between a Taoist ritual mask shrouded in strips of calligraphy-covered rice paper and a swatch of Tahitian mulberry bark cloth ornamented with delicate nature images.

Was the Polynesian cloth made to be worn on the body or hung on the wall? What ritual purpose did the Chinese mask serve, and what does the writing on the paper mean? Does “spiritual” mean the same thing when applied to these two objects or to a Fiji war club or an Ethiopian carving platter?

The show’s response to all of this is in its title and is symptomatic of an outdated approach to exhibiting non-Western art. This approach has made a comeback in the hazy, lazy Postmodernist — which is to say Modernist — 2000s: no context, no explanations; just beauty, our way.

But do we still need to be persuaded of the beauty and spirituality of “tribal” art? No. Do we still need to learn why “tribal” and “spiritual” are spurious categories, and how the objects defined by them turn the modern Western concept of art itself on its head? Yes.

I urge you to visit “It’s All Spiritual” for its extreme beauties, and I encourage you to bring the questions the show doesn’t ask.