Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Netherlands
Phyllis Galembo: Masquerade, a Decade

American photographer Phyllis Galembo has an obsessive love for attires and garments which people from different parts of Africa are wearing during religious and profane celebrations and rites. Galembo: “The link between these 2 continents is kept alive by stories of suppression and the Diaspora, and by their rituals, brought to a higher level by art”.

Galembo’s images can be disconcerting because the photographer abstains from every form of décor or sty¬lization, thus drawing the spectator’s eye directly towards the ‘living statues’. The natural extra¬vagance of the dresses with their beads, shells, feathers and waste matter, evokes all sorts of in¬voluntary associations with haute couture shows in Paris.

Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Mu¬seum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Chazen Museum of Art, TANG Museum, New York Public Library, and the Polaroid Corporation.