Now that the clamor around Dr. Claudine Gay has somewhat subsided, it all brought to mind the extraordinary scholar Sylvia Ardyn Boone, the first Black woman given tenure at Yale University. In a similar way that Gay was a trailblazer at Harvard as the first African American president of the institution, Boone was an equal pioneer in the Ivy League, establishing the role of Black women in African art and women’s studies.
Born on September 30, 1940, Boone was a native of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., and attended Brooklyn College and Columbia University, where she earned her master’s degree in social sciences. After studying in Ghana, where she often conferred with several distinguished African Americans, including Maya Angelou, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Julian Mayfield, Boone returned stateside and earned degrees in art history from Yale University.
According to a wide-ranging tribute to her at Yale in 2001, Boone first came to Yale in 1970 as a visiting lecturer in the Afro American Studies Program before resuming her studies there, studying mainly with Robert Farris Thompson. Her Ph.D. dissertation, in 1979, “Sowo Art in Sierra Leone: The Mind and Power of Women on the Plane of the Aesthetic Disciplines,” won the Blanshard Prize. That same year, she joined the faculty as an assistant professor of the history of art. By 1985, she was a professor and became the first Black woman tenured at the university three years later.
Along with her teaching assignments, Boone was active in the struggle for women’s studies and later established the annual Black Film Festival at Yale. Her first book was “West African Travels: A Guide to Peoples and Places” (Random House, 1974). In her second book, “Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art” (Yale Press, 1986), she delved deeply into a form of African art and philosophy that had not been widely discussed. “Mende has written almost nothing about their life experiences or about their concepts and ideas,” Boone noted. “They have the distinction of being one of the West African groups that invented its own ideographic and syllabic writing system. Despite this noteworthy development, little of what has been recorded in Mende script has ever become known to scholars.”
When she wasn’t amid a deep dive into African art, Boone was known as a popular teacher whose courses in African art, esthetics of female imagery in African Art, masquerading and masks, and women’s art always drew a crowd of students.
In 1989, she was a key member of the nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Amistad Affair, a milestone in the fight to end slavery and an event that now has an annual celebration.
Boone was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and, at one time, served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art and on the U.N. UNICEF committee that selected the organization’s annual greeting cards. She was also vice president and scholarship chair of the Roothbert Fund of New York City. She died on April 27, 1993, of heart failure. She was 53 or 54 and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.
Each year, a Yale student receives the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for the best graduate essay written for a course or seminar about West African or African American art.
I recently discovered Silvia’s archive in the rare book archive at Columbia University, where I discovered a folder original poetry my mother shared with Silvia. My Mother Eduarda Lillo-Moro admired Silvia Arden Boone very much. They both met at Yale University in the 1980’s. My mother didn’t publish her first book of poetry until 7 years after Silvia’s passing and her last book of poetry is unpublished. The following poem was written in 2010 and dedicated to Silvia…
Sowo Wui: An African Mask
(In Memory of Sylvia Ardyn Boone)
Sylvia, you went to Africa in search of your ancestors, and there, in Sierra Leone, among the Mende women, you found your mask, a ceremonial mask, your spiritual expression. Representing a woman, it must be worn by a woman; it embodies
the ideals of beauty and ethics of the Mende women.
It is not only, as a mask, the shell of the sculpture of a face which should be superimposed over another face to hide it. An entire head, hollow in its interior, its purpose is to cover the head of a dancer to reveal the dancer’s soul. The inner emptiness of this head-mask is the camera obscura of our countenance. Face and soul of a collective given to music and dance, transporting them, transporting us out of ourselves to make us feel as one being in the unity of all.
Sowo emerges from the waters of life with three rings of flesh around her neck. Emerging, she is already entranced, her eyes, almost closed, turning inwards. Her fine lips trace a smile, evoking her mystery. Her enormous forehead, shining and wide, is a mirror of the soul. Her elaborate coiffure is punctuated by perfectly symmetrical braids, crowned by a crest which invites the bird of wisdom and futurity to alight upon her.
The few times a year that she leaves the dwelling of the secret society of women to dance among them all, her mysterious beauty inspires overwhelming pleasure and awe. Few experiences of this spiritual magnitude sustain what we call modern man. When we see her, isolated and static in our museums, we only perceive a fragment, a small part of her previous and sacred life.
My apologies… I misspelled Sylvia Arden Boone’s name in the above comment.
The error was due to knowing my mothers poem in her native Spanish.
Here is the original poem as it was written in Spanish.
Sowo Wui: Una Máscara Africana
( A la memoria de Sylvia Ardyn Boone )
Silvia fuiste a Africa en busca de tus orígenes y allí, en Sierra Leone, entre las mujeres Mende, encontraste tu máscara, una máscara ceremonial, tu expresión espiritual. Representa a una mujer, debe ser usada por una mujer e incorpora los ideales de belleza y ética de las mujeres Mende.
No es como máscara solamente la cáscara de la escultura de una cara que deba superponerse a otra cara para ocultarla. Es toda ella una cabeza, vacía en su interior, que debe cubrir la cabeza de una danzante para revelarnos su alma. El vacío interior de esta máscara-cabeza es la cámara oscura de nuestro rostro. Rostro y alma de una colectividad dada a la música y la danza, transportándose y transportándonos fuera de nosotros mismos para hacernos sentirnos como un solo ser en la unidad de todos.
Sowo emerge del agua de la vida con tres anillos de carne en el cuello. Al emerger ya está en un trance con los ojos semicerrados vueltos hacia su interior. Sus finos labios esbozan una sonrisa que evoca su misterio. Su enorme frente, en su resplandor y amplitud, es un espejo del alma. Su elaborado peinado realza coletitas en simetrías perfectas que coronadas por una cimera invitan a posarse sobre ella al pájaro
de la sabiduría y futuridad.
Las pocas veces al año que sale del recinto de la sociedad secreta de mujeres para bailar entre todos inspira intenso placer por su belleza y admiración mezclada al terror por su misterio. Pocas experiencias de esta magnitud espiritual sostienen anímicamente
al llamado hombre moderno. Aislada y estática en nuestros museos, sólo apreciamos al verla un fragmento y aspecto de su previa vida sagrada .