Continents in Conversation
Bill Cosby’s Art Collection Joins African Art at Smithsonian
WASHINGTON
— On an impulse, in the early 1960s, a cultural attaché for the State
Department named Warren M. Robbins started buying African art, first one
piece, then many, and filled his Washington house with sculptures and
textiles. In 1964, he turned his basement into a mini-museum and opened
it to visitors, partly as a gesture of cross-cultural outreach at a time
of high racial tension in the capital and across the land.
Later in the same decade, Bill Cosby,
already a television star, was making shopping trips to the Brockman
Gallery in Los Angeles, a space featuring new art by African-Americans.
Learning as he went, he not only bought for himself, but also arranged
to have art by black artists displayed on the walls of the sets where he
filmed, with the aim of giving popular exposure, via TV, to work
ignored by the art establishment.
Mr.
Robbins’s basement museum eventually became a major Washington
institution, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African
Art, with a home on the National Mall. The African-American collection
assembled by Mr. Cosby, now private and little seen, has, by repute, an
institutional status of its own. On Sunday, it will make its public
debut at the museum in an exhibition called “Conversations: African and
African American Artworks in Dialogue” from the museum’s holdings and
the Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr. Collection.
Technically,
the show celebrates the 50th anniversary of the museum’s founding. But
for many people, the main interest will be the Cosby objects, which make
up about a third of the 160 ingeniously juxtaposed pieces on view.
Although the Cosbys initially acquired an eclectic range of modern and
contemporary art, since 1977, when the artist and historian David C.
Driskell became their adviser, they have focused on African-American
material that covers a lot of chronological ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment