San Diego Natural History Museum shows 'Shona: Spirits in Stone'
San Diego, CA - Shona: Spirits in Stone—Art and Animals from Africa, an exhibition featuring sculpture of internationally acclaimed Zimbabwean Shona stone sculptors, as well as masks, jewelry, and baskets, will open at the San Diego Natural History Museum on July 11 and will remain at the Museum through October 12, 2008. All of the stone artwork is available for purchase with the proceeds benefiting the Museum as well as the African communities in which the Shona artists live. Picasso was apparently an early fan of Shona sculpture.
“Art and animals form a primal connection in man’s development and evolution,” says Jim Stone, Vice President of Public Programs. “Some of the earliest expressions of art reflect man’s relationship to the natural world. The sculpture and other artwork by the Shona people embody that tradition.”
The exhibition features the masterpieces of Zimbabwe’s most collected and best-known sculptors, and also introduces some works of Africa’s newest generation of young men and women artists. The most often used stone is serpentine, which has a great range of hardness, depending on mineral inclusions. Many of the carving stones come from the Nyanga Mountains or near The Great Dyke, a volcanic ridge running for hundreds of miles through the countryside. It is the longest linear mass of volcanic rock in the world. Heat and pressure, concentrated on this ancient rock mass for millions of years, have created unique mineral fusions now reflected in the variety of colors, shadings, and combinations of stone.
Shona sculpture is sculpted with stylized geometric features that portray feelings and experiences common to mankind. The mythical stylized stone carvings have an innate and spiritual force all their own. The Shona often sculpt animals, bird life and fauna, and the powerful Shona ancestor spirits are portrayed in an unmistakable style. The core concern of Shona sculpture was, and mainly continues today to be, to revere and acknowledge their ancestral beliefs and heritage—sourcing forms from 1000-year-old Shona ontology.
“As the first to bring major collections of this art form to the U.S., it has been an amazing privilege for me to know and work with the Shona sculptors for over 30 years—I never cease to be amazed and renewed by the vitality, inventiveness and genius of the artists of Zimbabwe,” says Anthony Ponter, Curator. “The art has changed over time, with more outside contact and influences, but these changes, processed through a Shona consciousness, have not diminished its power, but rather made it even more universal in its’ appeal.
Shona art is in the permanent collections of the Rodin Museum, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Mankind, London; National Gallery of Zimbabwe; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; and the Kresge Museum in Lansing, Michigan.
Celebrating its 134th year, the San Diego Natural History Museum is the second oldest scientific institution in California, third west of the Mississippi. Its mission is to interpret the natural world through research, education, and exhibits; to promote understanding of the evolution and diversity of southern California and the peninsula of Baja California and to inspire in all a respect for nature and the environment. Located in Balboa Park, the Museum is open daily except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Phone: 619.232.3821. Website: www.sdnhm.org.