Mary Nooter Roberts, Champion of African Art, Is Dead at 59

Mary Nooter Roberts, a scholar of African art who helped change the way non-Western art is presented in Western museums, died on Sept. 11 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 59.

The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Allen F. Roberts, a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also taught.

Roberts, known as Polly, came to her work at the beginning of the multiculturalism revolution of the 1980s, when a linear Western approach to art — “history with a capital H,” as she put it — was being replaced by a dynamic concept of varied and parallel stories. She was well prepared to embrace these ideas.

Born in St. Louis on Oct. 26, 1959, Mary Nooter became a world traveler before she was 3. Her father, Robert, joined the Foreign Service and moved the family first to Uruguay and then to Liberia. He then worked for the World Bank in different parts of Africa, where he and his wife, anthropologist Nancy Ingram Nooter, became collectors of African art.

Roberts attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she majored in philosophy and French literature. But in 1979, after a summer visit to her parents in Tanzania, she decided on art history as a career and enrolled at Columbia University.

While at Columbia, where she received her doctorate in 1991, she met her future husband. She also met Susan M. Vogel, a curator of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Vogel left the Met in the early 1980s to start her own museum, the Center for African Art, in a town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she hired Roberts as her first staff member.

The museum opened with a spectacular show of classical African sculpture in the same season that the Museum of Modern Art presented its widely criticized exhibition “'Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” The MoMA show, which presented African art as source material for European painters, instantly became a touchstone for how not to approach non-Western cultures. The Center for African Art’s show was perceived by many as a corrective example and established the new museum as an institution to watch.

When the center, renamed the Museum for African Art, moved to new quarters in SoHo in 1993, Roberts, by then senior curator, organized the first exhibition, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals.” The show was the product of two years of doctoral research among the Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, in an effort to access restricted kinds of knowledge, Roberts, in consultation with a female diviner, underwent a rigorous Luba initiation.

“It was a moment of letting go of everything that I had come with to Congo, to Luba country,” she recalled in a 2018 interview published by the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. “I had to let go of all my assumptions, and I also had to let go of being the one who was the interviewer.”

A second exhibition, “Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History,” a collaboration with her husband, followed in 1994. It was one of a series of shows produced over the next decade at the Museum for African Art that altered standard institutional presentations of African art by acknowledging its spiritually, socially and physically interactive character.

In 1999, Roberts became chief curator of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and in 2001 she was appointed deputy director. There, in 2003, she and her husband organized the exhibition “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal.” The exhibition focused on the Mouride movement, devoted to the Sufi saint Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba.

Roberts asked the Fowler’s security staff to permit devotees visiting the show to touch the portraits of Bamba, physical contact being an essential part of Mouride religious practice.

Roberts’ work in Francophone West Africa led to her being decorated as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008, she left the Fowler to take up full-time teaching at UCLA, while continuing to organize shows at other institutions, among them the National Museum of African Art in Washington.

In 2011 she was made a consulting curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she established the museum’s first gallery for African art. Her most recent show there, “The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts,” appeared in 2017.

In addition to her husband, Roberts is survived by a daughter, Avery Davis-Roberts Moore; two sons, Seth and Sid; two grandchildren; her parents; three brothers, Thomas Nooter, William Nooter and Robert Nooter; and a sister, Anne Nooter Ruch. In recent years Roberts had made extensive trips to Asia, Africa and Europe to research another modern saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, whose followers include both Hindus and Muslims. Plans for an exhibition titled “A Global Saint in a Virtual World: Devotional Diasporas of Shirdi Sai Baba” were interrupted after she Roberts learned she had metastatic breast cancer in 2010.

After her diagnosis, while continuing to teach and publish, Roberts also helped organize seminars, sponsored by the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, to disseminate information about health care resources and research developments. “Having metastatic cancer is a bit like having another occupation,” she said.

In speaking about her illness, she rejected conventional views of it as a battle and spoke of it instead as a “detour” that opened a path to self-transformation, a process she identified as essential to the nature of the African works she loved.

“They are objects of aesthetic brilliance and achievement made by artists, but they were made for other purposes: for education, or healing, or governance, or spiritual mediation,” she said in the 2018 interview. “I always say they are more than art.”