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DARK MATTER Vodun and Other West African Power Art from the William Harper Collection
I always remember my father being a collector—in that ultimate, driven sense of the word—of curious and beautiful things. Even in his own work, the predominant aesthetic is one of assemblage. I had grown up around both African and contemporary Western art, but one day a new type of strange object started appearing in the house. They were Fon bocio figures, and over time they grew, along with related West African power works, into a small village of golem-like yet benevolent creatures that resided alongside us. For many years the nail fetish figures of the Songye and Kongo had been Bill’s unattainable longing. But in the early 1990s at the old Museum of African Art in New York, Bill saw for the first time three Fon figures from the collection of Don Nelson, and thus began a new obsession. As Bill describes it, these works appealed to him because they possess an assemblage and fetish-like quality that resonated with a similar aesthetic in his own work. Bill ascribes passionately to the view that art does not have to be pretty and refined to be profound and beautiful—event though much of