The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University hosts free-to-the-public exhibitions and programs inviting a journey across multiple centuries and continents titled The Otherworld is Home. Inspired by the Yorùbá proverb, “Life is a journey, the otherworld is home” (ayé l’àjò, ọ̀run n’ilé), the museum-wide presentation explores themes of personal reclamation, cultural identity, spiritual passage, and connection across Africa’s many diasporas.
The three simultaneous exhibitions below offer opportunities to explore the enduring resonance of African artistic traditions and their continued influence on contemporary life. These exhibitions are activated with a full slate of programming that may be found on the museum’s page.
Featuring more than 40 classical and neoclassical works, this exhibition highlights how African artists use traditional craftsmanship to connect the tangible and spiritual worlds. “This exhibition and essay explore how, what, and why African works of art . . . work: how they move and affect us; what roles they perform; and the ways they may acquire different purposes, meanings, and values as they travel across oceans and cultural, political, and religious boundaries over time and space,” writes guest curator and scholar of African and African diaspora arts Henry John Drewal.
Artist Iké Udé’s ongoing photographic series Sartorial Anarchy merges clothing and objects from different times and places to upend recognizable signifiers of cultural and individual identity. The Nigerian born artist, now living in New York City, transforms himself into a multifaceted amalgam of many identities in these photographic self-portraits. According to the artist, “In each image, I married disparate costumes from widely diverse traditions, countries, and time frames. And in mixing eras and cultures, I was able to bring harmony, as it were, to their similarly irreconcilable differences.”
Thresholds brings together the work of Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb, Stephen Hamilton, and Daniel Minter to dynamically explore the depth, complexity, and resilience of Black cultural memory. The artists create at a threshold between the seen and unseen, the present and the ancestral, and the place left behind and the place arrived at. Working across several media, they present their work alongside African works from the Haggerty’s collection to create a “call and response,” a participatory exchange in which one voice calls out and others answer in turn. Building on a shared yet continually unfolding cultural memory, where the past remains active and unresolved, these practices become sites of inspiration, critical reflection, and renewal.
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