Art

African elephant masks and leopard head pieces, beaded palm wine calabashes, water pitchers and drinking horns, ivory bracelets, collars and belts, ear ornaments and prestige loincloths, red feather and red raffia headdresses, food bowls, and double gongs will be on exhibition at the Hopkins Center art galleries from April 2 to May 16. These loans from the Cameroon Collections of the Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, have been organized by Tamara W. Northern, curator of anthropology, Dartmouth College Museum, and adjunct assistant professor of anthropology, who has also written the illustrated catalog entitled The Signof the Leopard: Beaded Art of Cameroon. The Linden-Museum collection of Cameroon objects, without parallel in the United States, is one of only three major Cameroon collections in Europe.

One contemplates wistfully how magnificent the catalog would be, were all 150 photographs of the artifacts in color, instead of only four, but such are the realities of publishing. Full appreciation must await the work itself going on display in Hanover. Publisher of the 136-page catalog is the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut, where Tamara Northern spent a year as visiting curator of African art. The exhibition opened in Storrs in the fall and has been on view at Cornell's museum for several weeks this winter.

Below: food bowl in the form of a crouching leopard. Above, a drinking horn.