Let the fun begin

Late this afternoon, António Ole will be arriving – we hope. The adventure of getting both this artist and his art to Washington DC is a subject to which I will probably return a few times.

For now, let’s begin with the art. When the two enormous crates containing 5 bodies of work by Ole came wheeling down the corridor that leads from the truck (un)loading dock and into the museum, folks from around the museum came out of their offices and began to applaud. We had accomplished the seemingly impossible.

When looking at the photo of the Smithsonian Institutes security dog sniffing the crates, the scene seems quite sweet but it also gives a little insight into the staggering amount of political, procedural, and practical obstacles that prevented the seamless delivery of these artworks. In order to bring them in the building, we had to make arrangements for a dog to come in after hours and sniff for contraband so that we would be in compliance with federal regulations. No box can enter the museum without first being checked. But, at least jumping through this hoop came with the added pleasure of Labrador kisses.

When I visited in António in Angola, it had seemed the most insurmountable feature of this exhibition would be finding available hotel space in Luanda, negotiating the infuriating complications of getting the plane ticket, and just surviving the 2-day series of flights. Once in Luanda, it was a full-on multi-sensory marathon of looking, smelling, listening and taking in an African city unlike any I had visited before. I could feel the pulsing energy of this metropolis of 4 million. Alongside crumbling walls, new structures were going up. People mingled with cars in the busy streets, and along the edges of the roads. Luanda seethes. Moving along its congested streets makes it easy to see how Luanda’s architecture, textures, history and frustrations have inspired António Ole. I was in the city to finalize the checklist for the Artists in Dialogue exhibition and see what I could of the contemporary art scene, and so each busy day was filled with visiting António’s studio, his apartment, museums, cultural centers, banks and the various offices which include Ole’s work in their collections. By the end of four days, António and I had both agreed that the museum would borrow the work which really marked the start of his career forty years ago – a vivid gouache on paper piece entitled, On Taking the Pill; an untitled series of six photographic portraits from his days working as a documentary film maker with Angolan national television; N/S, a series of seven delicate and subtle assemblages made of objects found largely on the beaches of Luanda’s cost; the triptych, Disintegrations, made from the torn pieces of a vinyl banner that once advertised the theater group that perform in the same building as António’s studio; and On the Margins of the Borderlands, the artist’s first large scale installation, and one that features a boat made of welded iron – not an easy thing to pack and ship across the ocean.

The first challenge in shipping the artwork actually proved to be even finding a shipping company. This was the first time the National Museum of African Art had tried to bring artwork from Angola and we had no contacts over there. So, we asked the Portuguese embassy, the American embassy, and even an oil cargo company in our efforts to find people who could build, pack, and travel crates that were big and strong enough. And let me pause right here to thank some folks from the US Embassy in Luanda who really made this all possible, Abby Dressel the Public Affairs Officer and her team, Coe Economou and Ana Paula Fereira. They also went to heroic lengths helping us find experts in Luanda who could identify the genus and species of two crows, a crab claw, and a fishbone incorporated into some of the artworks. But that is another story unto itself. For today let’s just say that we actually found two experts who could look at the desiccated spine of a fish, delicately pasted on handmade paper and framed in a wood box, and somehow identify in what kind of fish it had once swum. And, armed with that information we were able to fill out paper work to prove that we were not illegally transporting parts of endangered animals.

It took five months to find a shipping company, measure the artworks, build the crates, identify the animal elements of the artworks, fill the crates with the art and discarded cardboard boxes for protective filling, get approval from the powers that be at the Smithsonian to spend the exorbitant amount of money required to pay the crate-makers and shippers, and then put the crates on an airplane.

Here’s where the next glitch came in… The Angolan shipping company put the crates on a plane on New Years even, forwarded the flight information, and then went on vacation. The only problem was they sent the wrong flight information. This is a big deal in the art world because, typically, art cargo is accompanied by an art handler. This person ensures that the crates are kept in climate controlled environments so that rapid changes in temperature won’t hurt the art, that the crates are not banged against anything, and other precautionary measures. I may never know for sure what became of our crates, but based on the fact they arrived with splatters of salt water, and the pattern of the splatters, I would guess they were turned on end when a vehicle went by and doused them in salted slush. But for now, I am happy because we opened the crates and everything was fine. More than fine. Beautiful. Whatever else may be said, António Ole creates artwork that I just love to look at.