Kreamer lecture marks new Hood exhibitions
The Hood Museum of Art celebrated the opening of two new exhibitions on African Art with a lecture and gallery reception this weekend. Christine Mullen Kreamer, the exhibit developer at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., delivered a lecture titled "The Head Carries the Body: Head and Hair in African Systems of Thought" to a nearly full audience in the Loew Auditorium on Saturday afternoon. Kreamer is the co-curator of the exhibit "Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head" currently on display in the Jaffe-Hall Galleries. The exhibit travels to Hanover from its home gallery at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her lecture emphasized the social, religious and intellectual significance that the head holds in African cultures. "The head carries the body" is an Afro-Cuban metaphor that refers to the body as the "body politic" or the people of a community who are ruled under a figurehead. She said that in African culture, the head is the seat of intelligence and strong emotion.
