A fine Eastern Pende Panya-Gombe African mask. Coll.: David Norden
Dallas Museum of Art
High profile: Roz WalkerCurator Roz Walker is tickled to show Dallas Museum of Art visitors wonderful things from Africa they might not otherwise get to see03:43 PM CDT on Saturday, June 12, 2004
She has waited nearly five months to bid on this piece,
by Olowe of Ise from the turn of the 20th century, on behalf of the Dallas
Museum of Art. She'll have to hold on another 30 minutes before the auction
house gets to her choice, known simply as Lot No. 60. So she summons museum director Dr. Jack Lane and deputy
director Bonnie Pitman out of a meeting and to her office, which has enough room
for two chairs across from her desk. The phone rings again a few minutes after 10. In another
few minutes, the bidding begins at $80,000, and Dr. Walker starts vying for the
prize. "It was quick in that the bidding was
rapid-paced," she says. "It was almost like an out-of-body experience.
I'm sitting there and there were pauses. "You had to make a quick decision and be thoughtful
at the same time. We weren't bidding every time. You come in when you want to
stay in the game." Dr. Walker gets the final word: $470,000. Bibliography:
Olowe
of Ise by Roslyn A. Walker, 150 pages,
Publisher: Smithsonian Books (October, 1998) Landing the coveted sculpture not only validated the
hire Dr. Lane and Ms. Pitman made eight months ago, but it also punctuated a
return from a retirement that Dr. Walker never really planned or wanted. It was a chance viewing of the museum's Web site at an
aunt's urging that led her to consider moving for the Dallas job. But it was her credentials 21 years with the
Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art and curator work in Nigeria
that told the directors she was ideal for it. Her mission: Give the museum's African art collection
breadth and depth; illustrate the art's aesthetic and anthropological value; use
the art as a vehicle to connect with the community. "When you make this kind of hire, you look for
everything directing a museum, working with collectors, mounting
exhibitions, scholarly catalogs and sometimes you expect to
compromise," Dr. Lane says. "In this case we didn't." She was born Roslyn Adele Walker in Memphis, Tenn., the
younger of two girls and the third generation of Roslyns. Her father, a pharmacist, died as the result of a car
accident when she was 6; her mother died eight years later of cancer. So the two Walker girls, Roz and her sister, Patricia,
left Memphis to live with their aunt, Jim Etta Lee, in Baton Rouge, La. As a child she was called "Del," so there
would be no confusion between her and her mother. As an adult, she became Roz.
In academia, she is Dr. Walker. No matter what she's called, friends and family have
seen her passion for art that began with a little girl who couldn't resist the
urge to draw. She would draw anything, really, but her favorite
subjects were ballerinas, reflective of her ballet and tap dance lessons. (Today, she still walks through the museum with that
delicate grace, light bounce and erect posture found in dancers.) The young girl loved days when her mother brought home
rolls of butcher paper from the local grocery store. When that ran out, there
were always envelopes, which she turned inside out and used to continuing
drawing. Some days, nothing with a clean surface was off-limits,
her sister says. "I remember, she would go to school and she would
have a tablet with big lines and the dashes that teachers used to teach you how
to write big letters," Patricia Walker says. "She'd take the tablet, and the first page would be
for ABCs. The second page would have ABCs, but the rest would be for drawings. "But there was one day when my mother had the
living room painted. We looked up and Roz had done this mural with
crayons." Like most little girls growing up in the pre-Barbie era,
she and her friends also enjoyed dressing up paper dolls with one exception. "She would make her own dolls," recalls
childhood friend Juanita Robinson Carter, who grew up four blocks from young
Roz. "You know what? They were better than ones we
bought. That's why it wasn't just her artistic sense I was always in awe of, it
was her sense of adventure." That sense of adventure meant trips to museums, which
enhanced Roz's love for art and fostered a blossoming curiosity still strong
today to know more about the person and place behind the displays. As a child, she went on museum visits in Memphis, as
well as St. Louis during summertime trips to see relatives. As a teen in Baton Rouge, she devoted Sundays to church
and the museum. In Baton Rouge, Roz attended Southern University
Laboratory High School, a school that many children of Southern University
faculty and staff attended. (Her uncle was an athletic director there.) And the
artwork she left behind remains memorable more than 40 years later. "She would take a simple thought or object and do
something with it others could not," recalls J.D. Smith, her art teacher at
Southern. "She would put some lyrical marks in her work, as
if things are moving about on the page, not something static."
A plan to slow downIn late fall of 2001, Dr. Walker was diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm, which was eventually surgically repaired. Six months later, she retired from the Smithsonian and took on a less-hectic pace as a consultant. She also resumed drawing, an activity set aside for nearly 30 years while she immersed herself in academia and curator work. But a summer class at Tugaloo Art Colony in Mississippi changed that. "I think I was intimidated by the idea of trying to be creative in that way because I was surrounded by so much great art," she says. "I've had other creative outlets like entertaining, cooking and writing, but I missed this. Every now and I then I get out the pad and draw." Today, there is a balance that had been missing. She's seeing her aunt the one who first suggested she consider Dallas more; she's drawing again; she's deeply involved in the art world; and on May 14, she put her thumbprint on the museum's collection by getting the Olowe statue. "The museum has great opportunities to connect and reconnect to the African-American community while educating everybody on its contribution. I came at the right time. I couldn't have planned it better."
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Discover the African Art books I like or join me on facebook African Antiques is the archive and not growing much anymore but still updated. Visit African Art to join our free newsletter and read recent African Art News. For the last news about Dallas-Museum-of-Arts you should join our African Art Club and become an insider of the African art market. And if you are a collector of African Art, have a look at our exclusive African Art Collection for sale. David Norden
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The
Tribal Arts of Africa |
It's 9:45 a.m. and the phone rings in Roz Walker's
office. It's Sotheby's calling from New York about the Nigerian sculpture to be
auctioned that morning.
She won and secured Olowe's sculpture of a bowl
supported by a kneeling woman. It's her first acquisition since joining the
museum last fall as senior curator for the arts of Africa, the Pacific and the
Americas.
