Hervé Youmbi: Artists Commissioning Artists

Collaborations: Cameroon

This exhibition privileges and celebrates individual masquerade artists who are widely acclaimed. Yet masquerade is often created collaboratively. In this multimedia installation, artist and co-curator Hervé Youmbi worked with carver Alassane Mfouapon, tailor Kingsley Ngwa, beaders Nadine Chewo and Marie Kouam, wigmakers Frédéric Feudjeueck and David Kengné, and members of the Tso and Ku’ngang masquerade societies (including longtime friend and artist Hervé Yamguen) to create hybrid masks that blend pop culture with traditional mask styles

Collaboration can also be seen in how Youmbi’s masks circulate between the global art world and the ritual universe of performance in the Cameroonian Grassfields, and more recently Senegal, as the artist collects the documentation of each transactive exchange. Youmbi’s work subtly reminds viewers of the fugitive nature of meaning, with each new context adding beauty—and value—to an object’s story.

The artist also questions the boundaries of conservation and knowledge creation, foreshadowing the growing interest in museum transparency and restitutions: What has the movement of African objects “done” to them? How can highlighting the active and ongoing social lives of objects—and the human hands necessary to drive them—transcend the cultural boundaries of museums themselves?