Over the past several decades, some ethnographers and African art historians have struggled with the untidy ethnographic and artistic realities that have resulted over time from open cultural borders. In his monograph Open Frontiers: The Mobility of Art in Black Africa (University of Washington Press, 1973), René Bravmann eloquently drew attention to the fact that ethnic groups in Africa are not closed artistic entities. Other scholars of that period also pointed out that ethnic groups were neither static nor sealed social units impervious to external influences.

In this volume Susan Gagliardi elucidates the culturally and linguistically complex world that has long been called Senufo. She brings to this effort her extensive field research in the geographic area where southeastern Mali, the northern Ivory Coast, and southwestern Burkina Faso come together. She calls this area the three-corner region. It is inhabited by culturally and linguistically diverse groups including the Senufo, Bamana, and Bobo. As such, it is ideal for studying the artistic consequences of open cultural borders.

Although this volume was published to accompany a traveling exhibition organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, it is not in fact a catalogue for it. Consequently, the text is not intimately connected to the exhibited and illustrated art objects. That said, seen as a larger canvas, the text and illustrations parallel and complement one another to a significant degree.

This volume is divided into eighteen sections containing a total of twelve essays, five of which are brief interleafs. Six additional sections contain plates which are interspersed between the essays and interleafs. This organizational structure is somewhat unique, but it is easy to follow if one registers early on the sequencing of interleaf, plates, and essays.

In his foreword, the director of the Cleveland Museum, William M. Griswold, points out the popularity of Senufo art as evidenced by four previous exhibitions over the last half century. Only one of these, organized by the modernist art historian Robert Goldwater in 1963 at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art, was in the United States. That, too, was accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue which has long been a classic in the field of African art. Later exhibitions took place in the Netherlands (1980), Switzerland (1988), and Berlin (1990). It should be noted that many of the objects shown in 1963 in New York are illustrated in this current volume and were included in the traveling exhibition.

In his preface Constantine Petridis, the museum’s curator of African art, explains that the “publication addresses the construction of the idea of Senufo in relation to a particular spatial-temporal reality” (11). He points out that the first and last chapters of the book emphasize the transcultural and artistic sharing that exists along the boundaries between peoples otherwise perceived as either Senufo or Bamana. He also notes that both the publication and the exhibition focus on individual objects rather than their grouping based on formal or stylistic affinities.

Gagliardi’s opening essays illuminate the colonial-era foundations for defining Senufo identity, the delineation of artistic styles in the late 1930s by the Belgian anthropologist and art historian Albert Maesen, and the exodus of art objects in the 1950s under the influence of an iconoclastic movement called Massa or Allah Koura. Founded by a Minianka farmer, M’pe Dembele, from the Cercle of San in Mali, the Massa movement had no central ideology, thus making it open to a range of interpretations. Dembele did, however, promote the adoption of new power objects to thwart sorcery and promote agricultural and female fertility. His disciples spread a variety of doctrines, which in southern Mali and the northern Ivory Coast resulted in iconoclastic actions that emptied villages of their representational art objects. While some were destroyed, others were collected by European dealers like Emil Storrer, who made art collecting trips to the Ivory Coast. He, in turn, sold many of these to private collectors and museums, and facilitated Goldwater’s 1963 exhibition. Gagliardi also documents the role of Catholic missionaries in the northern Ivory Coast at that time in “rescuing” old objects discarded during the Massa craze, although the subsequent sale of these objects for financing repairs on their church also suggests another motive.

In meticulously reconstructing the complex outcomes of the Massa movement, Gagliardi breaks much new ground. Massa’s iconoclasm set in motion the dispersal of Senufo art through a web of European art dealers, collectors, and museums, and ultimately resulted in the landmark 1963 exhibition. Titled “Senufo Sculpture from West Africa,” that installation, and its accompanying catalogue of the same title, were to define Senufo art for several decades.

In a subsequent chapter, Gagliardi focuses on the interesting and widely discussed phenomenon of cross-cultural sharing in areas where diverse peoples meet along shared borders. The author found dramatic evidence of this in the three-corner area where she conducted her research, since it is a crossroads where several groups intersect. She discusses, for example, the diversity of initiation associations collectively referred to as Poro, as well as the existence of the Bamana Komo initiation society in some Senufo villages. She notes that “diverse individuals and organizations involved in the production and reception of arts in the three-corner region have transcended cultural, ethnic, geopolitical, linguistic, and religious borders since at least the end of the nineteenth century.” For this reason, she says, she aims “to overthrow time-worn labeling conventions that persist despite scholars’ decades-long agreement that such labels confine analysis of certain arts to the narrow realm of purported cultural or ethnic characteristics” (271).

Statements such as these are thought provoking, although they also invite comment. It is likely that cross-cultural sharing has existed for many centuries, especially where diverse peoples meet along their shared borders. In the three-corner area where she conducted her research the author would have observed dramatic evidence of this phenomenon, since this is a crossroads where several groups intersect. However, such borderland cultural sharing might not be so obvious in the heartland of given groups. In addition, the effort to overthrow time-worn labeling conventions will inevitably encounter the enormous challenges of scholar, dealer, and collector preference long embedded in a time-honored lineage of generation transfer. Then, too, proposing so radical a change based upon field experiences primarily in a borderland area is bound to be perceived as lacking the gravitas required to persuade. Yet Gagliardi is to be commended for her advocacy of the complexity and multiplicity of identity in this part of Africa and its resulting impact on works of art.

Senufo Unbound is by all measures, therefore, a splendid publication. The author does a superb job of reviewing the contributions of other scholars to an understanding of people known as Senufo, including Anita Glaze (Art and Death in a Senufo Village, Indiana University Press, 1981), Bohumil Holas (L’art sacré sénoufo, Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1978), and Pierre Knops (Les anciens Sénufo, 1923–1935, Africa Museum, 1980). The 207 color illustrations and numerous field photographs greatly enhance the scholarly text, which itself is based on admirable and meticulous research. It is a thought-provoking volume that challenges readers with its advocacy for interpretive change and for experiencing art without stylistic guideposts. It will be of great interest to all who appreciate the arts of Africa.