Artifacts in Action

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• Luisah Teish

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It's happened again. You're in a museum, staring at a display of masks and other cultural relics, and you can feel your mind starting to wander. Traditional exhibition design, with its emphasis on object-as-art, can lead to drowsiness as well as genuine confusion as items from other parts of the world are divorced from their original uses and set in glass cases, often with little or no explanation as to their significance. Enter Luisah Teish and “Folktales from the African Diaspora." Teish, who has training in the West African Ifa/Orisha tradition, brings relics from an exhibit called "Art/Object: Re-Contextualizing African Art" to life. She invites visitors to imagine themselves in a village on the other side of the world as she tells a story from Mali of how the ancestors first came to Earth, or illustrates the rituals that accompany a sacred ceremony. She weaves in folklore from different parts of the African diaspora, animating a Masquerade costume of the Yoruba deity Egungun and acting out what slave life was like on a plantation in the Caribbean. She also leads participants in crafts such as creating their own ancestral mask to take home. No chance of boredom here.
Sun., Nov. 21, 2 p.m., 2010