How to present the art of cultures distant in space and time from our own remains a quandary of museum practice.

"Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley" presented the problem to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where it originated, and to Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, where it continues through Oct. 14. The Cantor installation has high visual impact but manages only mixed success at conveying the multilevel story it intends to tell.

Cantor Center director emeritus Tom Seligman, who continues to teach African Studies at Stanford, brought the exhibition here. "First and foremost, I think some of the sculpture is extraordinary," he said of the show, "and some of the ceramics are extraordinary as sculpture. ... Half a dozen of the pieces - such as the Afo maternity figure from the Horniman Museum in London - have been icons in the field since I can remember."

The arts of northern and southern Nigeria have been extensively studied in the West. But as the editors of the exhibition's substantial catalog write, the Benue River Valley represents a neglected middle zone, "too far south for Sudanic Arab chroniclers to have visited and too far north for coastal European traders and explorers to have penetrated before the mid-nineteenth century."

The exhibition argues that the Benue River formed a channel along which aspects of style and function in ritual artifacts were transmitted among peoples centered in adjoining regions.

The array of wood carvings and ceramic "spirit vessels" - some quite startling in form - tries to make this argument visible.

"The lack of animation of so much African art has always presented problems" to exhibitors said Marla Berns, director of the Fowler and co-editor of and contributor to the catalog. "You don't have a sense of the heat, the music, the chaos in which these things appear, which gives you a very different sense of how they'd be experienced by the people witnessing them."

Scholars such as Berns and Seligman must still speculate about the meaning and use of certain artifacts. "Some things in this show are really unusual," Berns said, "such as the very tall vertical masks. I wish I could have seen them in use, because they seem like such a peculiar idea, and so hard to use, that they must have meant something very powerful if they're so extreme."

To compensate for the static presentation that valuable artifacts necessarily receive in museums, "Central Nigeria Unmasked" incorporates films and video of ritual performances, particularly masquerades in which ancestors reappear as large, colorful shrouds animated by one or more people inside them. Even though viewers of these recordings know what is going on, the performances have a transfixing and disquieting effect.

"The footage really shows how the cloth became the ancestor," Berns said. "Some of them are so amazing, you can't even tell how many people are inside, which gives you a taste of the participants' suspension of disbelief."

The antiquity of the static artifacts on view is hard for a visitor to guess and sometimes hard for experts to determine. But the masquerade footage is striking partly because it shows the shrouds as ancestors cavorting through city streets, with observers in Western dress and cars nearby.

"There's always been change that has forced communities to regroup," Berns said, "and these masquerades have been most resilient in accommodating the changes that occur. ... That's why we wanted to make it clear that these events were taking place in cities, where you see cars and architecture. ... In one, a celebrant is carrying a photograph of the deceased, so new elements get added to make the ancestors' presence more powerful."

The masquerades are "partly about community cohesion and having a good time," Berns said, "but there's still the sense that the ancestors must be honored, because they're the reason we're here. Even we do that."

A show such as "Central Nigeria Unmasked" makes us wonder how the makers of the things we see feel about their export, by whatever means.

Often people had to move, Berns said, "but their shrines would stay where they were, and artifacts would get stolen and passed to runners who brought them to dealers and so on."

Asked about this, "some of the people said, 'They can steal the pot, but they can't steal the spirit,' " Berns said. "They're very practical about it."

"I do think there's a sense of loss," Berns said, "but also that this is how things go. ... And it was a tremendous source of pride for them to imagine that people in America cared about their ritual objects."

Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley: Sculpture, photographs and video. Through Oct. 14. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford. (650) 723-4177.
