African legacies The MFA and the PEM take in a continent BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

The sheer range of objects in the redesigned Teel collection of African art at the MFA — carved doorposts and fetishes, masks and bracelets, drinking horns and figurines — is one reason it’s difficult to talk about "Arts of Africa." Another is that the 50 or so objects — exquisitely presented and intelligently discussed in accompanying wall texts — are representing thousands of cultures across nearly as many years. Imagine trying to represent European art between the signing of the Magna Carta and the fall of the Berlin Wall with four dozen works.

Still, once you’ve made peace with the idea that you’re looking at the Reader’s Digest version of the arts of Africa (I’m saving Oceania for another occasion altogether), you’re in for a spellbinding experience. William and Bertha Teel, whose collection constitutes almost the entirety of the exhibit, weren’t just ambitious and astute collectors, they were also persistent. For nearly half a century, the couple put together a vast and eclectic mélange of mostly western and central African art with an eye toward individual objects of exceptional integrity — i.e., those that hadn’t succumbed to the ravages of use and time. The stunning quality of what the Teels were able to buy compensates for the show’s limited geographic scope, its lack of depth in exploring any one culture, and its inability to provide a sense of the context in which the objects belonged to people’s lives. What’s more, everything in the exhibit occupied a crucial role in the life of a particular person or community, and almost without exception the art work served a direct link to the spiritual world.

One of the subtlest treasures in "Arts of Africa" is a two-foot-tall female figure from the Ivory Coast. She appears to be walking — eyes downcast, knees bent, hands relaxed behind her back — with the measured grace of someone transporting water on her head (though that’s not a vessel she’s wearing). The Baule people believed that men had spouses not just in this world but in the spirit world as well, and that both required caring for. The figurine, in her calm, elongate beauty, wasn’t merely the representation of an ideal of womanhood — she was a representation of a particular man’s devotion to the spouse he would never see.

Few of the objects in the show enjoy the sensual intimacy of the Baule figurine. Most of them occupied a more public place in the life of a community, like the extraordinary wood sculpture of the Senufo people, also of the Ivory Coast, that greets visitors at the gallery’s entrance like some regal personage standing guard at the door to his castle. The five-foot-tall bird is only vaguely described in the show’s catalogue as an emblem of "leadership during initiation rites." All the same, it helps explain how African art was able to reshape Western art at the beginning of the 20th century. African art’s casual integration of the representational with the abstract, the natural with the imaginary, the quotidian with the fantastic gives it a transcendent presence and immediacy. What’s real is indistinguishable from what’s unreal.

The neck, the head, the slope of the beak, and the tapered legs that disappear in a mound at its base all identify this particular creature as a hornbill, which the catalogue lists as one of the five primordial animals of the Senufo. Yet the beak doesn’t end where it ought to — it extends like an elephant’s trunk almost to the feet. And the great, outstretched, tapered wings of an actual hornbill have been rendered in the sculpture by a relatively small square plank of wood that’s out of proportion to the rest of the body and not in keeping with the proper shape.

What happens when you commingle natural, representational imagery with unnatural and non-representational imagery (within the boundaries of the same form!) is a reverberating dissonance: the mind works to extend and triangulate the wings, to foreshorten the beak. Further, what the object "is" can’t be answered; it isn’t a hornbill and it isn’t not a hornbill. You see this technique throughout the show: in the Teke mask that refuses to become a face; in the Kota reliquary figure whose body takes the shape of hollowed-out arrow; in the zigzagging antlers of the Bamana headcrest that alternately suggest serpents and cats. And its effect is to transpose you to a place in the imagination where the genuine and the make-believe are joined.

IN A LUCID ESSAY in the catalogue to "Arts of Africa," Edmund Barry Gaither traces the history of African-American artists in their conscious use of symbols and motifs found in African art, an appropriation that he rightly argues has to be seen in the context of the political underpinnings of the African diaspora. The ambitious, energetic show at the Peabody Essex Museum, "Looking Both Ways: Contemporary Artists from Africa," almost seems like an illustration of Gaither’s essay. Twelve African-born artists who now live and work in Western countries constitute the show, and their own varying employment of traditional African symbols and motifs is part of what makes the result compelling.

Coming from "Arts of Africa" and Gaither’s essay, I found myself at first in checklist mode while looking at "Looking Both Ways." Who did and who didn’t make overt references to Africa? Then the unfairness of that kicked in — who says an African artist has to make reference to anything? And though I was intrigued by the idea that the art at the Peabody Essex is the product of the grandchildren of the artists on view in "Arts of Africa," I reminded myself that grandchildren are as much unlike as like their forebears, and that the problem with generalizing about any group is that art is made by individuals. Some choose to belong to cultural traditions, some choose not.

As it happens, two of the outstanding works at the Peabody go far to reinvent African symbols and motifs. Kendell Geers’s room-sized installation involves wrapping traditional African masks and figures in red and white tape and arranging them on industrial steel shelving. (There are almost as many camouflaged items on display in Geers’s installation as in "Arts of Africa.") In addition, Geers has wrapped a life-sized figure of a female figure brandishing a pistol, and also a small crucifixion. It would be presumptuous to say what the "idea" is, but the effect is to make you aware that the museum experience itself is a form of wrapping. The figures and masks no longer belong to lives, they belong to being looked at.

The other major highlight is Yinka Shonibare’s Scramble for Africa, in which 14 men dressed in what I presume to be traditional African costumes sit a table in various and highly articulated gestures of debate. One raises his arm as if to call for order; one at the far end of the table appears to be rising out of his seat; others point, cross their arms, accuse, or appear resigned. But all 14 men are headless. Scramble for Africa commemorates the participation of African nations in Europe’s division of the continent in the late 1800s.

Powerful, too, are Allan deSouza’s color photos. In his Threshold series, small pictures of big empty spaces at public-transportation terminals — airports, bus stations, train depots — deliver Edward Hopper solitude with starkly shining fluorescent lights and polished floors that make them even more forlorn. In another series called The Searchers, predominantly white tourists in Africa, in safari garb and travel cottons, stare through binoculars at some distant animal or bird while their African guides sit listlessly on the ground nearby. In their quietude and ordinariness, the images speak volumes about post-colonial Africa.

Worked mostly in ink, acrylic, and mylar, Wangechi Mutu’s mixed-media montages suggest both science fiction and horticulture, with human faces (often implying African descent) being grafted onto dripping, semi-organic forms that are in turn perched on botanically correct mushrooms. They appear both nauseating and attractive. And though Ghada Amer’s mixed-media pieces — they all look like embroidery, which some are — could hail from anywhere, there’s nothing generic about them. Amer’s disposition is to embed war imagery with pictures of pop-culture romance, and when she succeeds, the results are explosive. In Tanks and Kisses, you might not realize right away that the colorful border around the four pairs of kissing faces is made up of hearts, flower arrangements, and 10 miniature army tanks.

"Arts of Africa and Oceania"

At the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, ongoing.

"Looking Both Ways: Contemporary Artists from Africa"

At the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square in Salem, through June 20.