MoAD Museum featured in San Francisco Chronicle: "All Things African"

Lew Myers
919-941-9790

02/13/2006

ALL THINGS AFRICAN

by Delfin Vigil

Reprinted with permission by the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, January 22, 2006

Shocking but true: Black people don't exist only during the month of February.

While that might be obvious to most of us in the Bay Area, it apparently comes as a surprise to much of the national media, which tend to focus on black people only during Black History Month in February ... yeah, the shortest month of the year.

"You just can't confine an entire people's culture and history into one small little box," says V. Denise Bradley, who, on the other hand, as executive director of the Museum of the African Diaspora, has done a great job of capturing a continent's culture in one big block of a museum.

Opened to the public less than two months ago, the 20,000-square-foot San Francisco museum has already earned its own acronym/nickname -- MoAD -- and is quickly becoming the Bay Area's capital for appreciating and understanding black and African culture.

But it's not just a black-and-white thing, according to Bradley.

"Just look around," she says, surveying the scene of black, white, Latin, Asian, local and touristy museumgoers taking in an exhibition of contemporary art that mixes images of Japanese geishas with dreadlocks and another by a Jewish Ethiopian artist. "This is the story of humanity, and we're resonating with a global audience."

To emphasize her point, Bradley walks toward one of MoAD's most distinctive exhibits, "Made in Africa," a collection of stone tools from Africa that date back more than 2 million years. What makes the exhibit especially rare is that visitors are allowed to touch some of the ancient stones.

"How often do you get to hold something that is more than 2 million years old?" Bradley asks. "We've had people start crying -- trembling even -- as they hold it. Because when you think about it, by holding something like this, you're reaching back to the beginning -- not of black history -- but the beginning of mankind's history."

There's some history in the making on MoAD's third level, which is dedicated to contemporary artists from Angola to Zimbabwe. Easily the Bay Area's biggest collection of contemporary African-inspired art, it's a place where artists like New Yorker Fred Wilson know that their work can truly be appreciated.

Wilson's art has been in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and other fine-arts venues in the Bay Area, but he admits that he was particularly thrilled to see his 1993 work "Pharaoh Fetish" on display at MoAD.

"I live in a larger world, traveling to Africa and the Caribbean a lot," Wilson says. "To have a museum dedicated not only to African culture but the entire African diaspora is really the future and a way to put us all in a larger context that also uses the past. It reminds us of how we're connected to the rest of the world."

There's a nice field-trip feel throughout the museum, a $20 million nonprofit project that was built with help from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. But thanks to the museum's heart-of-downtown location, when visitors take a break from the interactive video exhibits of centuries of African music, clothing and food, instead of reaching for that brown bag lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Capri Sun, they can pass through to the lobby of the new St. Regis Hotel and grab an un-field-trippy glass of red wine at the hotel bar instead.

Since MoAD is connected to the fancy new 40-story hotel on Mission Street, it reaches a curious potential audience of passers-by who might not have had a visit to a cultural institution on the agenda. It also gives off the vibe that you're doing something educational.

Designed by architecture firm the Freelon Group, the building has an urban look that fits perfectly with neighbors that include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with which the museum has established a joint ticket program for those with all-day visiting plans.

February will be MoAD's first Black History Month, and the museum is more than ready. But Bradley says there aren't any special events planned, other than the already-in-place exhibits, lectures and film programs that are offered all year.

"I think we should think about what Black History Month means," says Bradley, noting that in England, Black History Month happens in October and includes Asians from India and Pakistan. "And in Australia, the Maoris are considered black."

Nonetheless, she thinks MoAD is the ideal place to celebrate Black History Month.

"We take the four themes of MoAD -- origins, movement, adaptation and transformation -- to appreciate our universal connection to Africa as the cradle of humanity," she says, "and to appreciate the fact that black history happens every day."

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