Visiting professor Alisa La Gamma divides her time this semester between Columbia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is the associate curator for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

A collection of cast brass crucifixes and religious icons from the Kingdom of Kongo, in present day Angola and the democratic Republic of Congo, will soon join the masks and sculpture from sub-Saharan Africa in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While museum curators and conservators have been working for months to unlock the mystery behind the collection through art historical and technical analysis, today, the project provides a lesson.

In a white-walled laboratory of the Met, beneath the Rockefeller Wing, where the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas are held, a cluster of Columbia graduate students glimpse five centuries of crosses and icons laid out on a table covered in white paper. Alisa LaGamma, associate curator for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, begins today's session of African Art and Spirituality, a graduate art history course at Columbia. "These objects have always been considered as imposed and idiosyncratic, but not African art," said LaGamma, who this semester shares her time at the Met as associate curator and Columbia visiting professor.

But LaGamma believes these crosses tell an African story. While the earliest crosses in this tradition were once imported from Portugal in the late 1400s, the range of styles evident in the collection suggests that generations of African artists crafted and adapted them for use by Kongo heads of state and an African elite of practicing Christians.

"Christian icons in central Africa are normally associated with the displacement of African beliefs in favor of those imposed by the West through missionaries during the 19th and 20th centuries. But the works in this collection are evidence of a much earlier dialogue between leaders of pre-colonial Kongo and their European counterparts," said LaGamma. "Over the centuries, works in this tradition created by Kongo artists in their own image even made their way into the collections at the Vatican as part of the exchanges that occurred across the Atlantic."

The students and curators observe the detail of the crosses, discuss the composition of the metal and ruminate on their age and place of origin. One cross depicts Jesus with distinctively Negro features. Another, an icon of St. Anthony of Padua, sits atop a wooden staff used in the 18th century as an insignia of a Kongo head of state. Another St. Anthony icon is covered with a sticky resin, likely to be palm wine, which is still a staple of celebrations and ancestral libations in Africa. If tests on chemical composition, dating and detail are right, the story unraveled here will be added to what one graduate student calls the "black hole" of pre-colonial African art history.

"While there are many European accounts that comment on this early chapter of engagement between Africa and the West, there are no written records of African perspectives on the period," said LaGamma. "You can think of what we have here as primary documents from that perspective." Here in the acclaimed repository of the world's objets d'art, LaGamma, GSAS'95, teaches the next generation the importance of the hidden, sometimes lost meanings behind aesthetic artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa.

"African art, like art from all parts of the globe, has intense spiritual significance. We are looking at how these objects relate to those kinds of spiritual meanings and what happens to the object when it is taken out of context," said LaGamma.

While some might see her work as obscure, her research has already contributed to the relatively young discipline of African art history. African art, in a range of media from terracotta and stone work to metalwork, applied beadwork, carved ivory and wood sculpture, has piqued Western interest since the time these items were ferried away by European explorers, missionaries and colonialists. The masks in particular have been coveted by the art world and even served as inspiration for European artists such as Modigliani and Picasso, whose art was deeply marked by their exoticism and angular simplicity.

Once believed to have originated from Europe, five centuries of cast bronze crucifixes and religious icons tell an African story.

Discovering the significance behind a particular African masquerade tradition is what drew LaGamma to her calling. As a graduate student she was fascinated by a long-admired classic form of African art, the 19th century wood masks crafted by the Punu ethnic group of Gabon, in equatorial Africa. While they were coveted collector's items, their cultural significance and origins were poorly understood outside Gabon.

LaGamma spent a year in Gabon observing the Punu as they used these masks in elaborate celebrations. As a result, the meaning behind the mask became appreciated after 200 years of its popularity in the West. Still used today, this mask reinforces a sense of community in the village in the wake of a death or after the completion of an important community project, like the building of a school. LaGamma also solved the mystery behind the exotic, feminine features of the powdered white face. Each village commissioned a mask in the likeness of the most beautiful woman among them.

As African art specialist at the Met, LaGamma is working to build the collection, sometimes traveling to Africa and making purchases directly from artisans, other times acquiring pieces from dealers in Europe and the United States. Her expertise in the field, as seen with the Kongo Christian crosses, helps inform the collections that millions of people view each week. When she is not teaching Columbia students, she trains educators, docents and the public on the meaning behind African art, illuminating cultural traditions that are little known in this country.

"One of the things that drew me to African art history is that you can take big ideas and do original work, rather than building on an already well-studied topic," said LaGamma. "In this field you can make a contribution that lays a foundation."

Columbia is home to one of the top two art history departments in the nation. Many courses, such as LaGamma's class, are offered as a part of collaborations with world-renowned art institutions like the Met. The Kongo crucifix and religious icon exhibition, a gift of African art collector Ernst Anspach, will be on view in a special exhibition in the Michael C. Rockefeller wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June through September 2001.