An Art Collection About Ancient Yoruba Culture

By Thomas K. Pendergast.  The Sunset Beacon, the March 2011 issue.  Republished by Katie Mallory on Blogger.com. 

Sunset District artist Katie Mallory is on a mission to give African Americans something back that was taken from them long ago - a sense of their ancestors' culture and history.

Mallory says it was none other than filmmaker Spike Lee who gave her that mission, though he probably does not know it.

"Spike Lee was on television. He was being interviewed and commented that African Americans have literally had their roots severed from beneath them," she said. "That settled on me. I thought about it and realized it's absolutely true. When you look around there's a real absence of information about where they're from. There's a real void."

Mallory studied art in high school but was a religious studies major in college. Today, she is an interior designer as well as artist.

When she graduated and went into the working world, she gave art up for a while to pursue other career goals.

A turning point came when she almost went blind, due to misusing temporary contact lenses that scratched her corneas. While being treated, she could not work and rediscovered abstract painting just to have something to do while she recovered.

After she could see again, she saw the interview with Spike Lee. Suddenly, she understood something that she never had before that moment.

"I realized that roughly 12 percent of our population here in the United States has absolutely no clue where they're from. It's as if they got dropped off here," she explained. "Imagine if you were an orphan, separated from your parents. You don't even know where you're from.

"When I heard Spike Lee talking about it, that's what triggered it because I realized that he was pointing out that these people had been robbed. That's so incredibly monstrous."

Mallory started researching the history of Africa and the slave trade.

"I could not research every tribe that was enslaved on the west coast of the African continent, so I had to pick one. I picked the Yoruba because it was one of the most significant groups in terms of numbers."

Mallory said the Yoruba, who inhabit the African coasts of Nigeria and Benin, were among the tribes that supplied the Americas with the majority of its slaves. So, it's likely that many modern Afro-Americans have at least some Yoruba blood in their veins.

She said they were an extremely religious people with polytheistic beliefs.

"Their religious system (was) central to their lives. They had an enormous pantheon of deities, about 400 of them," she said.

She found that there was plenty of information available about the Yoruba that she could use to influence her art.

Colors, for example, are very symbolic of gods and goddesses, with different colors or sometimes combinations of colors representing different deities. For example, the colors silver and white represent the god Obatala, and yellow and gold represent the goddess Osun.

"In Yoruba culture very often the gods and goddesses are actually legends of real people who lived a long time ago. They carry their memory through the generations by turning them into deities. So, Osun was probably a real person and she lived in poverty," Mallory said.

"She had children and she was responsible for them by herself. Her situation was so desperate that she had to wash her white dress in the river and it turned it yellow. So, her symbolic color is yellow. The Yoruba people absolutely love her because she loved her kids and overcame poverty."

She explained that the Yoruba also worshiped their ancestors, which is reflected in some of her African-inspired art.

"For them, when a family member died, especially a parental figure, that person became a higher power. They didn't have the status of a full-on god, but their status was still higher than the village priest," she said.

"Their deceased parents and grandparents had enough supernatural power to protect them here on Earth. When the slaves were brought here to the United States, they called on their ancestors to protect them and they didn't. It was an absolute shock to them.

"So, for example, if you were a slave here in America and you had children, who were taken away from you, you might think that if you died, you could then protect your children. One of the most tragic things about the institution of slavery was relying on this form of protection, which obviously didn't work," Mallory said.

She said dead ancestors of the Yoruba inhabit a realm that western minds might identify as another dimension. In that dimension, she said, the ancestors are "actually here on Earth, just as the rest of us are, but they are visiting with their ancestors and their deities. Only the village priest and the most enlightened elders can communicate with them."

As for her art, she said she prefers to use acrylic paint instead of oil paint because it dries faster.

She's been looking to find a publisher who would be willing to put her African collection into a book, so far without success. Not that this is a big surprise to her. She said she went into the project knowing that, for purely commercial reasons, she might not find one.



"It seemed to be a very high-risk project. I really did not think that any publisher would want these illustrations," she recalled. "When you go to the corporate book stores and see, for example, children's books, the ones that have African American characters on the front cover are usually about celebrities, such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. There's nothing over there that delves into these kids' ancestry groups."

Nevertheless, she channeled her talents into art that shows the Yoruba culture.

"All of the information about their ancestors was completely stripped away from them. Children were separated from their parents at a very young age in slavery and they were told absolutely nothing about where they were from," Mallory said. "Now, it's 300 years later and they still don't know anything about where they're from. I hope to find a non-profit publisher who would take this thing and run with it, just for the sake of giving people their heritage back."

Even if she has not found a publisher yet, she is still working to complete her mission.

Some might ask why a white American woman would dedicate her passion for art to display a people that are half a world away.

Her answer is simple and direct

"Because nobody else was going to do it," she said. "That's the honest truth. If I didn't do it, it would never get done."

To view Mallory's paintings, go to the website at http://picasaweb.google.com/katiemallory.