Many cultures, many identities

BY MARK STRYKER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Curator Nii Quarcoopome (Knee Quark-oh-pome) talks about "Through African Eyes," which he organized. Quarcoopome, born in Ghana, has been curator of African art at the DIA since 2002.

The Message: "I’m hoping that visitors coming to the show will walk away with the impression that there are many African cultures and each carved its own path when it came to developing relations with white people. Because of that we have to be very conscious of the cultural context of objects created out of those relationships. The same way that we have many African cultures, there are many European entities, so therefore impressions that one African culture might develop about one European group may not necessarily apply to another European group."

A Fallacy: "A lot of people see black-white relations through the prism of America’s own history of racial tension. We don’t have that in Africa, except perhaps in the later years of South Africa. In much of Africa you well find a spectrum of reactions to the European presence, from affection to respect to hatred. You have the whole spectrum but it all boils down to which culture. You have to always be mindful of the complexity of the relationships. You can’t use one brush to paint the whole picture."

The Journey: "I’ve been working on the show 10 years. … I decided to go with this because it was the one most likely to generate debate. The others were much more boilerplate. I wanted something that would force people to look at objects a second, third and fourth time and cause people to rethink how Africans used these images for their own purposes."