The Hood Museum of Art today will unleash a series of programs to celebrate the exhibition of "Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia," featuring photographs by Phyllis Galembo which premiered in February and will continue until April 21.
Beginning at 6:30 p.m. tonight, the program "Bembe! Feast With the Gods" will offer complimentary African and Brazilian hors d'oeuvres in the Hood Museum. There will also be a traditional African and Brazilian dinner served at the Courtyard Cafe in the Hopkins Center at 7:30 p.m.
Additionally, Music Professor Hafiz Shabazz, the director of the World Music Percussion Ensemble and practicer of Candomble, will perform music and dance with the Guiro Ensemble during the dinner.
Two films relating to Afro-Brazilian religion will show in Loew Auditorium -- "Bahia: Africa in the Americas" at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., and "Iawo" at 8:30 p.m.
"Divine Inspiration" features 34 of Galembo's color Cibachrome prints, which document the ancient African religious traditions of Nigeria and the spiritual practices known as "Candomble" that were brought to Brazil via the 16th century slave trade, according to a Hood Museum press release.
The International Center of Photography of New York organized this exhibition, which offers a rare view of contemporary Nigerian and Brazilian shrines, religious traditions and ceremonial costumes in striking color.
Traditional Yoruba shrine pieces from Nigeria, selected from the museum's permanent collection by Tamara Northern, the Hood Museum's senior curator of ethnographic art, and a contemporary art installation by Manuel Vega, a New York artist and priest of Candomble, will also be shown.
Galembo, a New York native, was invited to Benin City, Nigeria, West Africa, in 1985 to photograph the traditional altars, ritual objects and ceremonial dress of priestesses and priests. The Edo and Yoruba cultures of southern Nigeria are renowned for their rich artistic and religious traditions of great antiquity.
Benin City today still embraces these ancient traditions, with many people worshipping the deities in large, community shrines and smaller, personal shrines in homes.
Two years later in Bahia, Brazil, Galembo photographed the Brazilian forms of African religion that were brought to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Her direct and uncomplicated style captures the essence of the worshippers and their shrines, and her images clearly link the religious practices of Brazil to their points of origin in Nigeria.
According to her photography book "Divine Inspiration," she selected these two places as her subjects because they are "both centers of ritual activity" with "shared system of religious beliefs and ritual practice."
African influences are found throughout Brazil, but the state of Bahia is where the Yoruba-based religious practices, known to Brazilians as Candomble, are most widespread and faithful to their origins.
Enslaved Africans in Bahia succeeded in preserving their own cultural traditions and maintaining their religious practices through a process called syncretization, through which Catholic saints were adopted to represent the African deities.
Candomble worshippers came to use the feast days of Catholic saints as occasions to celebrate their own deities.
