From Saturday through Nov. 10, many Toledo Museum of Art visitors will gather into the anteroom for the museum’s newest exhibition, Ethiopia at the Crossroads.

There, short videos of Ethiopia play across a wraparound screen suspended over the entrance to the exhibition.

From its people to its biosphere, these visuals introduce audiences to the diversity of the populous, oft-overlooked East African nation, both as context and as an invitation to the exhibition, said Sophie Ong, who curated the exhibition for the TMA.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads spans the country’s artistic traditions through 2,000 years of history. Using over 220 works to build a framework for the intersection of culture, religion, and climates that the region has fostered from the beginning of known history to the present day, Ethiopia at the Crossroads is the most comprehensive exhibition on the nation in sixty years, TMA officials said. 

With a breadth of devotional painted icons, manuscripts, coins, textiles, metalwork, carved wood crosses, and contemporary media like digital installations, the exhibition provides a launch pad for learning about an area of history many haven’t heard.

“People underappreciate the vibrancy and depth of historical artistic tradition in East Africa,” said Adam Levine, TMA director and CEO. “Right at the Red Sea, it was the highway through the ancient world.”

The exhibition includes recent TMA permanent acquisitions that showcase the cross-cultural exchange that resulted, such as a 4th-century BCE alabaster Figure of a Man from South Arabia and a 16th-century Gospel Book illuminated by Hakob Jughayets’i that Levine called the most important Armenian manuscript in the United States.

The exhibition’s genesis came from the TMA’s year-long restoration of the Cloister Gallery, which features three medieval arcades composed of capitals and columns from different monasteries in southern France. The Cloister reopened in 2021 with a renewed focus on a “broader and more global narrative within the Middle Ages,” Levine said.

This expansion included Ethiopia, whose history with Christianity dates to the founding days of the religion itself.

As part of the TMA’s new strategy to organize or co-organize every exhibition they display, Sophie Ong, the museum’s assistant director of strategic initiatives, reached out to Christine Sciacca at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore about partnering on Ethiopia at the Crossroads. 

The organizing trifecta was completed when the TMA brought the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Mass. into the fold.

For the Walters Art Museum, a comprehensive look at the country made sense because Baltimore has the largest population of Ethiopians outside the nation itself.

Northwest Ohio has its own Ethiopian diaspora, but the foremost reason for this partnership is the idea of weaving one crossroads with another.

Toledo is “at the crossroads of America, at the junction of the longest north, south, and east, west highways in the U.S,” Ong said. Presenting Ethiopia at the Crossroads connects and centers these parallel traditions by “celebrating [the] exchange of ideas of peoples and artistic practices,” she said.

Unique to Toledo’s version of the exhibition is the House of Yatreda, a multi-sensory and multi-spatial experience created by the Ethiopian family artist collective Yatreda. Yatreda is the 2024 TMA Digital Artist in Residency; members of the collective have spent the year traveling to Toledo from New York to work on their contributions to the exhibition.

Pieces by Yatreda include Mother of Melenik, featuring the collective’s creative director Kiya Tadele as the Queen of Sheba in a living exploration of Ethiopian history. Mother of Melenik is also a non-fungible token, a unique encoded digital asset that cannot be digitally replicated; visitors to the exhibition can print their own version of the artwork through a display created by Yareta through a collaboration with the University of Toledo art department.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads is “a really wonderful opportunity for our audiences in Toledo to get to see how history and the present day are so interconnected,” Ong said. “Whether it is through digital art or it’s through religious practice, history is still very vibrant and active today.”

The House of Yatreda will also be holding an Ethiopian coffee ceremony three times throughout the exhibition, with the first taking place Saturday at 2 p.m. The other two will be at 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 14.

First Published August 16, 2024, 8:46 p.m.