Parcours des mondes

2011 was an important year for the Parcours des mondes which celebrated its 10th anniversary.

10 years of work and development to take the event to a high-standing international level.

And it has been 10 years that have seen traditional non-european arts achieve wide-ranging acceptance and popularity and Paris develop its role as the international capital of Tribal Art.

After Jean-Paul Barbier Mueller, the President Jacques Chirac and Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani, Parcours des mondes is pleased to welcome James J. Ross as the Honorary President of its 10th edition.

James Ross is a name familiar in the tribal art world as a New Yorker who has amassed one of the finest privately held collections of traditional African art.

A member of the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a significant patron of other arts institutions, Ross and his wife Laura have endowed the African art gallery at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Ross’ collection started in the mid 1970's with no particular intent or focus. He acquired several pieces over the next decade or so before deciding that rather than building an art collection, he should concentrate on his work. While he took this hiatus, Ross began studying the field intensely, feeding his habit by buying books rather than objects and immersing himself in the subject. In the mid nineties, using the knowledge he had acquired, he began to buy African art objects again, a significant percentage of them coming from Alain de Monbrison, Lance Entwistle, and Pierre Dartevelle, although many others in the U.S. and Europe have contributed material.

The research Ross engaged made him realize the value of making published images of African art available to both the specialist and the general public. Over the course of years, he has had images from pre-1921 publications digitized and entered into a searchable database. The project was recently donated to Yale University and has been launched online as the Ross Archive of African Images (raai.library.yale.edu).

A related project is the Yale/Guy van Rijn Archive of African Art, a massive, object-based effort toward an electronic catalogue raisonné of African sculpture. This online archive is still a work in progress and has yet to be made available to the public.

Every collection has its own character that reflects the individual who formed it. The unifying factor of James Ross’ collection is the sheer beauty of each and every piece. While there is no shortage of sculptures that would easily fetch seven figures if they were offered on the market today, every object shares both a jewellike quality and a projecting gaze that the viewer is forced to reckon with.

Ross is extremely generous with his material, frequently lending objects to museum exhibitions and images for publication. This stems from a firmly held belief that no matter what he may have paid for a piece, he is a temporary custodian of a cultural object that has a larger purpose in the world.

(Adapted from the article published by Jonathan Fogel in Tribal Art magazine - Spring 2011)