at the Museum of African Diaspora

Barbara was telling me that my library card can be used to get free access to several museums in the Bay Area. I decided that I wanted to see my options, so one weekend, I checked out the available passes and zeroed in on the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. It piqued my curiosity because I've seen how different African art is from African-American art at the de Young Museum. 

The exhibit currently on display was called "After the Thrill is Gone", which attempted to use fashion as an instrument of discourse about politics and culture in present-day South Africa. The artists in this exhibit were young, born after apartheid. The question was (to me): what thrill faded away? 

My lack of cultural education came to the front when I saw the pieces of the exhibit. I didn't have anything profound to say about the installations. I didn't have a deep interpretation about them neither. What I had, instead, were questions.

There was a sculpture of a disembodied dress; the person wearing it was invisible but was very much present in the room, based on the way the dress was positioned. Behind the sculpture, there was a set of hanging white hats called kufi; again disembodied because the heads supposedly wearing were invisible. In both installations, I felt like the artists were talking about people fading away after the thrill is gone. Did the people wearing the hats and the woman wearing the dress move on with their lives? Did they reach their dreams or picked up the pieces of their losses? Were they heavily involved in their communities, only to fade into oblivion after the thrill was gone?

Another piece that caught my eye was called "The Real Housewives of Disney". I noticed it because of the bright colours used by the artist and the depiction of the characters from the cartoons I grew up watching. It took me some time to notice the rest of the piece's title, "Homoexotica". Why was this piece titled as such? The evil witches were there: Ursula, Maleficent, Cruella de Ville, and Snow White's evil stepmother, to name a few. Jafar, Scar, Hook, Gaston, and Shan Yu were among the male antagonists featured. The other characters were from cartoons that I didn't watch. Anyway, why were they in the picture? What was the artist trying to say? Could it be that Disney is from a different culture, hence the exoticism about the these characters? I guess that this is yet another of those pieces that end up making me say that I didn't get it.

A piece that showed just how much fashion communicated one's cultural identity was a series of portraits of identical twins; one was wearing contemporary Western attire while the other one was wearing traditional attire. It was striking to see that just changing one's clothes convey different messages. To me, one wanted to prevent sticking out in the international community while the other wanted to show his cultural affinity. It reminded me of when I saw portraits of Filipinos wearing traditional attire at the National Museum of the Philippines; back then, I wondered how they would look like when they wore modern attire. Were they just models asked to wear costumes? Were they really part of the tribes whose attire they were wearing? Did they wear these clothes everyday?

There were other exhibits too (local artists); however, I was mostly stumped by their works. I didn't understand what messages they were trying to convey. Were any of these messages even about African diaspora? I didn't sense artists exploring their African heritage and how they fit in the global context. Instead, they seemed to have drawn inspiration from figuring out their sexual identities and/or how to assimilate with other cultures; the pieces were also, seemingly, about the artists finding their voice in al the clamour. To me, these are not solely African issues; these are questions being tackled by "queers" (as one of the artists referred to themselves) in other continents and by immigrants who cut ties with their home countries in the hopes of brighter futures elsewhere. These topics are more universal that, in my mind, the artists probably missed the discussion on African diaspora... or I just totally missed the messaging.

It's certainly a museum that provides safe spaces to open people's minds about topics which don't get discussed out loud elsewhere. A must-visit in San Francisco, definitely.