E kaaro! Welcome! There is power and meaning in language. There is power and a sense of welcoming in

E kaaro! Welcome! There is power and meaning in language. There is power and a sense of welcoming in seeing your own cultural heritage in a museum, and seeing it described in your own language. One: Egúngún marks the first time that the Brooklyn Museum has produced a bilingual exhibition in an African language (Yorùbá), and to the best of our knowledge, the only time an American museum has used Yorùbá in this way. Making this happen was a team effort across multiple departments, from graphic design, to exhibitions, to curatorial, and editorial.Yorùbá is a tonal language (where saying a word with a different tone changes its meaning), so when it is written, accents and diacritical marks help readers understand how to interpret a word. After the wall texts in English were written by the exhibition curator and edited by our in-house team, Dr. Adedoyin Teriba (Pratt Institute) translated them into Yorùbá. Together, the curator, editor, translator, and graphic designers worked through multiple drafts to make sure that every text was correctly worded, from the biggest paragraphs to the smallest photo credit lines.The English language texts in the exhibition also extensively use Yorùbá words, with spellings standardized from the Ọ̀yọ́ dialect (the most common dialect used in scholarship). As they see them used throughout the exhibition, we hope our visitors from all backgrounds will make these words—as well as Yorùbá aesthetic theories—part of their everyday art vocabulary, just as they’ve come to learn words and names in art history like Michelangelo or sgraffitoOur in-house font was redesigned by Grilli Type to accommodate all of these crucial markings for written Yorùbá. Transferring the exhibition texts (made of cut vinyl) presented new challenges, as hundreds of small accent marks needed to be carefully adhered to the wall in each section, and then checked (and re-checked) for accuracy.Without a doubt, this was a big challenge, and one absolutely worth taking on. Including texts in Yorùbá is a statement of welcome to our Yorùbá and Yorùbá heritage neighbors in New York City, as well as to the Yorùbá communities in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin and to our visitors from those countries. Having the texts in Yoruba also demonstrates to our non-Yorùbá speaking audiences at the museum the vividness of the language, which they can hear spoken in the exhibition’s documentary One: Egúngún - Perspectives from Nigeria, which incorporates seven different interviews shot on location in Nigeria in 2018. A first for the Brooklyn Museum, we hope this bilingual exhibition is the first of many to use an African language!Posted by Kristen Windmuller-Luna -- source link
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