Rosette!

There’s an elephant in the room with you — one you see, and one you feel. With eyes closed, there’s nearly a weight to the atmosphere.

The literal elephant has golden lined ears, a mounted Art Nouveau-inspired abstraction that resembles a tiger or elephant depending on how you tilt your head.

There’s another elephant standing with you: colonialism. The impacts of a colonialist legacy are speckled all around you. Look close.

Artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. wants you to marinate in the power struggle these objects represent. Stew in the conflicting idea of art ownership. Walk into a museum and question everything. I was grateful to have an hour to pick his brain.

In his new Carnegie Museum of Art show Rosette, Barrois poses fascinating and needed questions about the interconnectedness of the objects around us, and how the proximity to each other, and to us, illuminate a certain history and influence their assumed value.

He wants us to take into consideration the historical context of these works: from who and where did it come from? How did it land in this exhibit for your eyes to see? Ethically, or at the expense of someone?

Barrois and I walked through the would-be film set together. We talked about the (un)ethical questions of museum art ownership, the threads of inspiration that led him to this exhibit and how the legacy of colonialism reveals itself in art and museums.

Forging Connections

Rather than let the story unfold on a movie screen, Barrois beckons you to step inside the film, occupy the atmosphere and weave through the artifacts. He wants you to consider the conflicting presences: an art movement influenced by a gruesome past, stolen valuable artifacts, a fractured sculpture of children alluding to inhumane labor exploitation.

Barrois recognizes how objects, just by being in a certain place, or next to another object, evoke or imply a certain connection, history and value. They create stories. They force us to remember.

“Acknowledging the relationship between things that are seemingly separate,” Barrois told me. “What does an elephant molar have to do with [Former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo] Patrice Lumumba? Actually, one of the people involved in his assassination took one of his teeth. This is where the name [of this work] ‘precious gums’ comes from.” These types of connections are all over the room.

What does it mean for a museum, or anyone, to own art? How do you own something created to do more than be owned? How does art reorient power? Could a forged artwork be more ethical than a stolen one?

He asks you to share a space with the characters (maybe they’re on their lunch break, soon to return at any moment?) and ruminate. Form your own conclusions.

One of my conclusions? Black art and creativity being stolen is nothing new. It happens across industries and eras; in Hollywood, in music, in journalism, in culture at-large.

In the art world, however, stolen Black creativity can often come with violent, bloody historical implications. It can be easy to forget under the bright lights. It’s not like museums always put that part of the history on explainer placards.

Museums are tasked (by who?) with maintaining the artistic integrity of cultural masterpieces society holds dear, to preserve them for future generations to appreciate. At the same time, there’s a level of complicity in the movements and historic moments which have extracted — in bloody, gruesome, vile and violent ways — art, culture, value and humanity from countries. Many of those countries are home to people who look like Barrois and me. Black people.

For decades, Black and indigenous peoples have attempted to reclaim stolen art.

The debate even reached the United Nations in 1978, when the Director-General of unesco, Ahmadou-Mahtar M’Bow, gave an appeal on behalf of the world’s culturally plundered peoples.

“Everything which has been taken away, from monuments to handicrafts—were more than decorations,” he said. “They bore witness to a history, the history of a culture and of a nation whose spirit they perpetuated and renewed.” (Source: The New Yorker)

The New Yorker reported in April: “more than half a million such objects—by some accounts, more than 90% of all cultural artifacts known to originate in Africa—are held in Europe, where they have long seemed destined to remain.”

When art is stolen, power is taken with it – what is left in its wake are usually fragmented pieces of culture and history to be picked up, stitched together and rebuilt by the Black and brown faces left in the dust.

The history of a people, the love shared, the moments that shape a culture — now stuffed into boxes, packed into museums thousands of miles away, propped under mounted lights, with a set admission price. 

The impacts reverberate through generations.

The Value of a Fake

The role of a museum in art collecting and preservation is perplexing and tangled, but worth unraveling.

The idea of a conservator-forager narrative marinated in the pool of his mind for nearly 20 years, Barrois told me. Perhaps a novella? Maybe a film? He eventually wrote a couple of screenplays, but this one stuck.

At first, he considered the motivation to forge as a way to protect it from, say, a greedy inheritor who may do something with the art that the original owner didn’t want or intend. Forging as a protective strategy to keep the real work safe. “To allow a fake thing to travel in the world or through a market,” Barrois said.

Years later when he was reading about the history between Belgium and The Congo and “things just kind of snapped into place,” he told me. This history, he said, felt like a good motivation influenced by his interest in crime-fiction novels and a class he took on painting conservation.

That history is a small slice of a long-standing call for African art to be returned to its rightful homeland and original countries, a call that’s only began to be answered in recent years by museums and Western nations.

Talking with Lyndon, and my own musings and walkthrough of the show made me think of the Black people still working to reclaim their art, and in turn, a sliver of their power that’s been scattered across the globe.

Nigeria’s ongoing efforts to recover the Benin Bronzes, thousands of sculptures seized in 1897, is an example of this effort. The art pieces are scattered among more than 100 collections, with most being held at the British Museum. The bronzes have, for decades, been symbols of the African struggle to reclaim its art.

In late 2022, Germany returned 22 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, a first step in an agreement to give back more than 1,100 Benin Bronzes from German museums. Celebration-worthy, but still a first step.

Nigeria's Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed said at the 2022 ceremony: "Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, nobody could have anticipated these bronzes returning to Nigeria, because the obstacles to achieving repatriation were seemingly insurmountable. But today, with the pioneering gesture of a friendly nation, Germany, the story has changed." (via NPR)

Wandering through the exhibit, I found myself asking is art even made to be owned?

Most artists would likely say no, I thought. They may even laugh.

Owning art is a side-effect of capitalism, where things are created to be sold, not just appreciated and experienced. And so what does it mean that institutions claim ownership over something never meant to be owned, and put a price tag (see: entry fee) on it? 

The pandora’s box of questions is its own rabbit hole. Barrois seems comfortable in the free fall, and wants you to fall with him. 

Does the forger have a point? Could forged artwork somehow be more ethical? 

It’s for you to decide.