Anna Hammond: How did you become interested in African art?
Frederick John Lamp: Although I grew up in a very conservative, staid, unexpressive culture—the Mennonites of Pennsylvania—I was always interested in black culture, even as a small child. I listened to black gospel music on the radio from Philadelphia, because I found it more expressive than what I was part of. I went to a Mennonite high school, and some of our teachers were returned missionaries from Africa who had just loved their time there. I also saw pictures in National Geographic and elsewhere that fascinated me with their suggestion of a freer spirit.

AH: Where did you go to college?
FJL: Kent State University in Ohio. At that time, in the early 1960s, there were no courses on Africa—in history or any other subject. But Peace Corps recruiters came around, and I said, “Ah! This is how I’ll get to Africa.” They told me I was going to Sierra Leone and I had never heard of it. The artist Martin Puryear had just come back from the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and was one of our trainers.

AH: What did you study in college?
FJL: Art education. I assumed I would be an art teacher and artist. In Sierra Leone I did a lot of drawing and photography, which I continue to do. I taught school—English—in a little village way out in the country. I just enjoyed living there, going to visit people, having dinner and sitting on the chief’s porch talking with the elders. I didn’t know a word of the language when I arrived, not even how to say hello. But I soon picked it up, and people were so hospitable and really welcomed me.

When I came back African Studies programs were just starting to develop, and I got into a program at Ohio University. My coursework included African art and African dance. When I finished, I found that no one was hiring someone with a degree in African Studies. The professor of African art said, “You’re going to have to get a master’s in art history.” So I went to Syracuse University and got a degree in art history, specializing in African art by making my own program, with a lot of independent study.

There were no openings for jobs at the time so I just sent letters saying “I’m available. Here I am.” The National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., didn’t have a job, but by great fortune, they had just received a major collection of photography and African art from a Life magazine photographer, Eliot Elisofon. So I volunteered for a summer organizing the photography. At the end of the summer, the director said, “I’ve arranged with universities in D.C. to present courses, and the first starts at Catholic University in two weeks. Do you think you could teach a course in African art?” I had just seen the movie Funny Girl, in which an interviewer for the Ziegfield Follies asks her, “Do you think you can skate?” Of course, she had never skated in her life. But she says, “Could I skate!?!” So I said, “Could I teach a course in African art!?!” having no idea how I would, but I did it for four years. Then I got a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to go back to Sierra Leone for six months of field work on boys’ initiation ceremonies.

AH: So you studied art history, you were working in a museum, but then you did something most people would consider anthropology rather than art.
FJL: There wasn’t a great tradition of field work in African art—maybe six or ten people from this country had done it. Now it’s very common. The feeling was that you studied art from the objects, and there was no point in asking Africans their opinions or getting background information. Many anthropologists would say that they as scientists don’t have the tools or vocabulary to study art production, creativity, or aesthetics because there’s no way to study those things quantitatively.

When I do interviewing in Africa, I tend not to have a questionnaire, as an anthropologist would. I’ll say, “Tell me about boys’ initiation.” I want to see what people say first and where they lead the conversation. I get a lot of information from how they speak, what their gestures are, how they prioritize information.

In any case, the field work propelled me into a position where I could apply again for graduate school. It was now the 1970s, and there were more programs in African art, but most were quite traditional. Robert Farris Thompson was teaching here at Yale where I eventually earned my Ph.D., and I was fascinated that he was concentrating on motion. In 1974 he did an exhibition at the National Gallery called African Art in Motion. It was a groundbreaking exhibition, and it influenced me a lot. I had gotten involved in dance in the graduate program at Ohio, and I spent a summer at the Laban Institute for movement studies in New York, where I studied with Irmgard Bartenieff, one of the founders. Her way of learning was to do and feel. We would look at films of all kinds of dances, Indian dances, Nepalese, African, and so forth, and actually go through the movements: How does this feel, when your arm is in this position? Is there a heaviness to it? How does it feel when it moves in an arc? And so forth, to describe the effort and the shape of the movement. So when I look at African dance, I am always thinking about how the steps feel as I take notes.

All this led me to look at African art forms holistically—not just the material arts, but also theater, dance, all the performance aspects. And that’s what I study. In the field, I document the steps, the movement through space, the space itself, the setting (just like a stage set in theater), the architecture, the paths through the village where the dancers enter and exit.

AH: At the Gallery, you’re essentially creating a department and a program. What are your ideas about presenting this art to the public?
FJL: I think this department will become a major center for African art study in the United States, because of the collections, especially the Benenson Collection and other archival collections, that are coming to us. Three different photo archives will be online before long. There’s nothing like that anywhere else. As for my particular vision for displaying African art, I would like to move toward presenting African art as performance. That is a problematic and contentious area—what can be displayed, what a gallery of art really is, what the limitations are, and what we can do in this new context.

AH: What would your ideal be?
FJL: I would love to include as much media as possible and show as many elements of the original performances as I could. The costumes and paraphernalia we now see in our gallery are displayed the way they were collected: absent all these other things, stripped of the material objects that would be attached. The mask of the Baga, for example, we see as an abstract piece of modern art, abstract sculpture, whereas actually it would be this towering presence of a woman with a shawl and long raffia skirts, and with all the movement it would look totally different. Some of the small masks are only tiny parts of the material form. So to start with, I would like to display as much of the full material form as possible. If that means constructing costumes, we could do that, if we know exactly what the original costume would look like.

I would like to use video to give some sense of the dance, and I’d like to include music. These aren’t just additional, incidental trappings. They are as essential to the art form as the wooden mask. Sometimes the music is even more important. We privilege the wooden object much more than the Africans do.

AH: If you were to advise students interested in studying African art, what would you suggest as preliminary work?
FJL: To think outside of themselves and their own culture, to look for what other cultures have to offer that ours doesn’t. To look at the things that don’t translate easily. And to immerse themselves in as many of the arts as possible. A couple of years in theater gave me a sense of what it takes to put on a production and what it is to perform. I see the rehearsal that goes into African dance—nobody ever thinks about that. They think the African performers just come out there spontaneously and dance. I investigate the training, the rehearsal time, the evaluation, the use of the setting, the lighting. So I would advise people to expand outside the traditional parameters of art history.

AH: Can you imagine Western art being displayed in a museum setting in the way you’d like to see African art displayed?
FJL: Ah! Well, some contemporary art is made for the museum wall, but most art isn’t and wasn’t. Even a lot of modern art was made for the salon, where people sat and sipped tea and had intellectual discussions. So when people say Western art isn’t functional, I don’t agree. It all had a setting. Medieval art definitely had its settings and larger artistic contexts, just as African art does. When you see an altarpiece isolated against a white wall, it’s giving false information about what it was for, how it looked to people at the time. How different to view something like that in the midst of a grand cathedral, with organ music transporting you.

With African art, I’m not so interested in presenting the cultural context, because you can never provide one that translates fully or easily. It’s always that problem of translation: you misinterpret things because you look at them in light of your own culture. The physical forms of a culture, if you were to put them in a museum, can be misleading. For example, when we see an image of the Tuareg taking their camels across the Sahara, we see it as something completely different. To them it’s like driving a minivan.

Frederick John Lamp spoke with Anna Hammond on December 9, 2004.