"EEH, IF YOU SEE MAMI WATA, NEVER YOU RUN AWAY..." (SIR VICTOR UWAIFO, GUITAR BOY, 1967)

Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas" explores the visual cultures and histories of African and African Atlantic water deities and reveals the power and potency of images and ideas to shape the lives of people, communities, and societies. The exhibition has several sections: The first introduces Mami Wata, her personality, attributes, and visual culture. The next offers a broad historical overview of the sources and currents that constitute her visual history. This is followed by a series of case studies that demonstrate specific cultural, historical and artistic forces that have shaped Mami Wata and water spirit imagery in different places on the African continent, while the next part treats a similar theme for some of Mami Wata's spirit sisters in the African Atlantic world. The final section considers Mami Wata as the muse that has inspired contemporary artists from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. Here, a condensed introduction and art historical overview are followed by a selection of objects from the other parts of the exhibition.

INTRODUCING MAMI WATA

At once beautiful, protective, seductive, and potentially deadly, the water spirit Mami Wata (Mother Water) is celebrated throughout much of Africa and the African Atlantic worlds. A rich array of arts surrounds both her and a host of other aquatic spirits--honoring the essential, sacred nature of water. Mami Wata is widely believed to have "overseas" origins, and depictions of her have been profoundly influenced by representations of ancient, indigenous African water spirits, European mermaids and snake charmers, Hindu gods and goddesses, and Christian and Muslim saints.

The powerful and pervasive presence of Mami Wata results from a number of factors. Of special note, she can bring good fortune in the form of money, and as a "capitalist" par excellence, her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her very name is in pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. The countless millions of enslaved Africans who were torn from their homeland and forcibly carried across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of this "trade" brought with them their beliefs, practices, and arts honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Reestablished, revisualized, and revitalized in diaspora, Mami Wata emerged in new communities and under different guises, among them Lasiren, Yemanja, Santa Marta la Dominadora, and Oxum. African-based faiths continue to flourish in communities throughout the Americas, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.

Mami Wata's powers, however, extend far beyond economic gain. Although for some she bestows good fortune and status through monetary wealth, for others, she aids in concerns related to procreation--infertility, impotence, or infant mortality. Some are drawn to her as an irresistible seductive presence who offers the pleasures and powers that accompany devotion to a spiritual force. Yet she also represents danger, for a liaison with Mami...