Dancers and volunteers with the artwork before the procession. (Photo by Shareen Pathak)
After four months of design and construction, a grand processional accompanied artist Sandra Bell to install the Ndunga Public Art Project at the Harlem State Office Building on Sept. 21. The project is a ceremonial Congolese “masquerade” that has been used for generations to warn communities against transgressions. Bell, the brains and hands behind the project, said her motivation is to call attention to crimes against women.
The Ndunga Public Art Project is a 12-foot cube covered by thousands of dried banana leaves and topped by a steel mask, which will represent the community’s guardian. It required a team of five people working with Bell to build it in the hushed courtyard of the Union Theological Seminary on 122nd Street and Riverside Drive.
Bell’s team surveyed Harlem artists to decide who the Ndunga’s ancestral guardian would be. Harlem’s art community voted for Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman, so the steel mask atop the structure combines both recognizable faces. The artwork will occupy the site indefinitely.
A procession led by African drummers accompanied the project from the Union Theological Seminary to the Office Building on 125th Street . Dancers decked out in white with showy feathered headdresses twirled red flags as students from the CUNY Prep High School, who helped with the project, beat drums along with professional percussionists. “I love the music, the dancing, the drums. It’s more about the feeling it inspires than the art itself, I think,” said Theisha Goodman, joining the crowd dancing on the streets.
“I feel the energy emanating from the mask,” said Orion Gordon, a Harlem-born filmmaker who calls himself the “official documentarian for the project.”
“It’s been a long journey,” Gordon recalled. “There were days the rain fell and soaked the leaves and we kept having to dry them again. Drama!”
Harlem’s artists have faced increasing financial obstacles in recent months, Bell added. “I applied for funds to the Lower Manhattan cultural council and was turned down three times,” she said. “The problem is politicians, they’re hard to get to and they don’t want to support art.” But she persevered. “Somehow the ancestors were helping and we found the Harlem Arts Alliance that gave us some money.” The alliance provided $1,200; Bell took more than $5,000 from her own retirement fund to complete the project.
Bell said she chose to display her work on the plaza at the State Office Building because “it is very public, and I don’t want it in a museum. I want people to touch it and sit in front of it and walk by it.”
Bell, a diminutive Trinidadian immigrant, has been designing “big masquerades” for years. She first heard of the Ndunga, the Congolese mask, when the Museum of African Art in Long Island City commissioned her to create one. “I watched the reaction of the people that came to visit,” she said, “and they were so mesmerized by it that I got the idea that this could be a healing project.”
Bell timed the Harlem project to the International Day of Peace. “All over the world, women are being discriminated upon,” she explained, “Rape is a means for warfare, especially in the Congo. Harlem is a vibrant and close-knit community, and there is no better time or place for me to do this.”
Asked what the best result from this artwork would be, she mused, “Peace on Earth would be too much, right? I’ll take a $20,000 donation so I can pay for the glass structure to encase it.”
