My name is Alisa LaGamma. I am curator in the department of the
arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. My topic today is Africa.
I had a highly unconventional upbringing. I was born in what is today the Democratic Republic
of the Congo in the city of Lubumbashi in the years following Congolese independence.
It was historically a region renowned for some of the great sculptural traditions that are
represented by masterpieces in the Metropolitan's collection; works by artists like the Buli Master,
the Master of the Cascade Headdress. The reason my family
lived in sub-Saharan Africa was that my father worked
in the Foreign Service, and for that reason we lived in a number of different places.
In later years we moved to the Ivory Coast. That was a very formative period for me.
Among our family photos are images of us visiting a Senufo village and watching a painter
produce one of the tapestries, a celebrated form of expression from the town of Korogho.
When I was a small child we had lots of African art. My father used
to joke with us that, you know, we had our dolls and these were his.
So this is something that was very much a part of my upbringing.
Among the many great masterpieces in the Metropolitan's collection is
a Baule Helmet Mask my parents gave to the museum when I was a small child. It was something
that the curator at that time thought would be a useful addition to rounding out the collection.
It was an unusual circumstance that many years later I wound up
working with the collection. After living in the Ivory Coast, my family
moved to Italy for six years. Italy was flooded with visits
to museums and churches and other contexts and environments
for viewing art that also fired my imagination and
greatly influenced my interest in studying art history.
When I was an undergraduate I majored in art history. We didn't have courses in
African art. At the period when I was about to graduate from college my parents were
living in Senegal. It seemed like that might be one of the last times
I had a family connection to this part of the world.
It was important to me in the long term to maintain
a connection with Africa.
The idea of developing an expertise in African art became
a permanent bridge with a region that has especially meaningful
influences on my life as an individual.
I love that cultural diversity and youthful vitality
of the field that I work in.