One of the objects I have chosen to redefine as art is a drum from the Ngbaka people of Northern Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), an object the M.H. de Young Museum exhibits as ethnographic. The drum simultaneously can be a musical instrument and a work of art. Whereas Western artists often make art objects to describe or illustrate life, cultures such as the Ngbaka make the object of expression-such as the drum- one and the same as the art. We all know that drums are among the oldest instruments, common to practically every culture. The drum, worldwide, looks much the same: a conical, cylin- drical, convex, or concave tube with a bald flat top that you beat with your hand or a stick. Drums have been used by many cultures not only to make music, but also to make sounds and sonic codes. The drum is a primordial instrument of transition from sound to rhythm. When asked where jazz might end, Dizzy Gillespie replied, "Where it began, with someone playing a drum."

But the drum, perhaps the most pre- historic instrument, also is among the most modern in its look. Hence it bridges form and use differences in ethnology among the peoples throughout history who played it, or made art from it. While the Ngbaka drum may reveal to us a traditional style of beauty in Zaire, its streamlined form is mirrored by twentieth-century modernist art works that were inspired by the drum, or shapes that look like it. The drum looks as much like a statue as a pedestal. In its simplicity of form it provides a platform for a wealth of decoration, and many cultures have visually expressed themselves with designs on its surface. Its top is a plateau, white and round, like a spotlit stage awaiting the performance of the people who created it. The Ngbaka drum is considered a male instrument and was designed to appear as an otherworldly being, with four legs and peg handles that resemble horns.

While museums such as the de Young typically display such objects as ethnography, the drum's relation to twentieth-century Western art is inescapable. Change its label and it will fit into a "modern art" gallery. Of course, our modern artists have been inspired by art such as this; the use of the drum form is considered to be among the highest achievements of twentieth-century masters such as Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp. The ethnic creations of these European artists have been elevated to the status of international art, while the ethnic creations of Ngbaka artists remain balkanized by museums in the ethnography galleries.

I have chosen several artworks with musical themes to reveal differences in the ethnology of Eurocentric artists. William Keane's painting The Old Banjo (ca. 1889) reveals a photographic aesthetic in its detail and precision, yet does so with an entirely different focus than that of, say, the contemporary French post-impressionists. The ethnology of Keane's work is the effort to reproduce a "reality" comparable to photography's. Through realistic depiction, Keane dignified objects associated with what Walt Whitman called the American common man.' In contrast, his French post- impressionist counterparts saw photography not as a means of replicating realism but of capturing movement and light in a new way. The pursuit of realism and its relationship to photography in painting has evolved into an American ethnological tradition spanning the work of artists such as Keane and Thomas Eakins to that of con- temporary photo-realists.

Man Ray's Danse dans le Metro (1948) is an abstract study of music through dance and sound. Abstract art is not common to all people. It is the language of twentieth-century Western art, which because of the dominance of Eurocentric people has spread across the world. Abstract art incorporates ethnic codes. It appeared strange to others - and still does to many, even in our own society - and became accessible only through their learning these codes. Man Ray, living in Europe, was among the first American abstract artists to learn this indigenous European ethnology called abstract art. Many of his contemporaries, including regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, pursued the American vernacular of realism at home. Their art ethnologically related more to Keane than to Man Ray.

Abstract art initially was very strong in Russia and other communist countries. Many early communists saw abstract art as a new visual language (ethnology) that fit their new culture. They knew that art was not freely universal, but a product of culture. Lenin admired and supported abstract art. The American art establishment did not. With the rise of Stalin, who hated abstract art, and the victory of the West in World War 11, abstract art was banished from the communist countries that had championed it. It then gained favor in America. Stuart Davis' painting Night Life (1962) is a good example of his style in the abstract idiom. It vibrates visually like musical pulses, fusing the image of the black musician with the dynamism of street noises, billboards, and other elements of the urban environment. More abstract than Man Ray's, Davis' painting takes on a homegrown ethnological spin: jazz. This ethnically African American music became the icon of American freedom in painting. Artists such as Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, and Willem De Kooning found an American source of inspiration in its improvisational forms.

"Bird Lives!" was well-known among graffiti in New York subways, referring to the untimely death of jazz great Charlie Parker, whose nickname was "Bird." Thus, Ted Joans' painting Bird Lives! (1958) reflects not only the life of Charlie Parker, but also the influence of the abstract-art tradition of the 1950s. John Saccaro's Ballet Chinoise (1952) is typical of abstract expressionism of the period, which sought to make the gesture on the canvas relate to the gesture of dance or the impact of sound. By the late 1960s artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, in different ways, were extending the concept of painting into forms of expressive color ("like John Coltrane's jazz sheets of sound," Sam Gilliam said). Laddie John Dill's painting Untitled (1984) is an orgiastic abstraction that reminds me of John Coltrane's sheets of musical sound. It is all part of a grand American art ethnology.

Two of my paintings in the show, Gimme a Pigfoot (1995) and A Night in Tunisia (1991), are inspired by music, including jazz and blues, as well as Caribbean and African music. My idea is to show them as yet another aspect of ethnology. These paintings are based on narratives about the folklore of people of African descent and their relation to a Eurocentric world. Gimme a Pigfoot, is the title of the blues tune made famous by Bessie Smith (and there is a pigfoot and a bottle of beer in it). It is about the coming of Columbus (ship) and Europeans to the New World, a mixture of things African (Yoruba Ibeji dolls, snake charmer) and Caribbean (food, plants, reggae dancer). It is also about how they live lives characterized by the old and the new (the airplane.) A Night in Tunisia (the name of a tune by Dizzy Gillespie) is intended as a satire about jazz and an African American nostalgia for Africa. Musical instruments representing Dizzy (trumpet), Charlie Parker (saxophone), and others play themselves in an environment of African objects and parrots, and with the city of Tunisia as a backdrop. Dizzy himself hitches a ride from African slaves. A Night in Tunisia is a cultural misdirection. It is a metaphor, meant to portray people like me as slaves of our ethnological perspectives. I do not spare myself or African Americans the same criticism I throw at Eurocentric museums. We are all slaves of our different ethnologies.