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African Hair Signs
Curated by Jan Petry
April 7, 1994 - May 8, 1994

Sign painting, an essential urban art, is a colorful presence in a vigorous, popular art tradition that has flourished for decades throughout the cities, towns, and villages of Africa. Painted lorries, wall decorations, bar paintings, church paintings, political portraits, even barber shop signs, have turned streets into veritable galleries of visual images. A practical, attention-getting art form, sign painting has always been a commercial necessity, - an imperative for those with services or products to sell. By the 1940's, sign painters, motivated by this imperative, had created a genre of pictorial and graphic advertising and commercial decoration throughout colonial West Africa. Lettering skill, highly regarded, stamped an urban artist as a professional since general opinion held that any trained person could draw or paint, but the ability to letter was indeed special.

While literate and able to letter, most sign painters, rarely, have more than elementary schooling. Largely self-taught, they learn their trade through a combination of apprenticeship, trial and error and the copying of conventionalized subject matter. To set up shop requires little or no capital: a wooden shack by the roadside, some odds and ends of plywood, a few tins of enamel paint, and they are in business. Most of them view sign painting as a means to earn a living rather than an artistic calling: economic survival is the bottom line.

Among the sign painter's best clients are barbers and hairdressers whose need to advertise a wide variety of hair styles based on fashion or topical events, is a constant source of revenue for the painter. Though some barbers may actually paint the styleboards themselves, most barbers and hairdressers will order a sign from the sign painter with a few "heads" depicting various hairstyles within the barber's or hairdresser's range of competence. A painted sign, however, is not always a guarantee of such expertise and it may become, like the striped barber pole of small-town America, simply a symbol for "Here is a barber."

Barbers and hairdressers differ in that barbershops (for men) may have barber signs incorporated into the structure of the shop itself and they usually have several barber chairs (sometimes made out of a modified automobile axle and two wheels, one forming the base and the other a swivel seat), and big mirrors on the walls as well as electricity. By comparison, women will often sit on the ground between the knees of the hairdresser so a formal facility for female hairdressing is not necessary. Hairdressers are more likely to be seen performing their art on shaded verandahs or under trees near their homes, often seated next to their colorful styleboard offering a variery of illustrated hair styles for their customer's choice.

By extending Africa's strong cultural tradition of sculptured forms to the medium of hair, the modern African hairstylist has created one of the liveliest of the sculptural arts. The names and forms of the styles reflect all aspects of contemporary African art. Both male and female styles show a similar interest in pop stars and current events. Male styles are given names like "Tyson cut", "Kennedy cut", "Chubby Checker", "Boeing 707", and "Super Concord". Female styles may commemorate a "Fourlane Highway", "Eko Bridge", or a traffic slogan, "Drive Right" (a dramatic projection of hair to the right); or, more personally, "Face to Face", (designed to stay in place while kissing).

Throughout the history of Africa the adornment and styling of hair has been of profound social significance. Like body adournment, types of clothes, or kind and quantity of jewelry, hair style communicated rank and marital status, cult or religious affiliation, political alignments, or occupation. In modern Africa hairstyles act as a similar mode of communication both reflecting and facilitating social change.

This exhibit features work from Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, the Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso, These colorful, bold styleboards combine the art of hairstyling with the popular art of sign painting. Eahc contributes to the visual energy and colorful atmosphere that brightens the face of the cities and villages of this dynamic continent.

--Marilyn Houlberg

Sources:
Beier, Ulli, "Signwriter's Art in Nigeria", African Arts, Los Angeles, 1970.
Bender, Wolfgang, "Commercial Popular Art: Signpainters in Freetown", Art from another World, Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, Rotterdam, 1988.
Houlberg, Marilyn H., "Social Hair", The Fabrics of Culture, World Anthropology, Moulton Publishers, New York, 1979.
Vogel, Susan, "Urban Art: Art of the Here and Now", Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, the Center for African Art, New York, 1991