10-27-2022 Howard Mag - Flipbook - Page 16
3 THINGS
BY MIKE KLINGAMAN Howard Magazine
PHOTO BY KIM HAIRSTON
Doris Ligon
co-founder and director of the
African Art Museum of Maryland
At 86, Doris Ligon still fusses over the
cache of artifacts she has amassed over
almost half a century, nearly 4,000 in all.
The collection comprises the African Art
Museum of Maryland, a nonprofit that Ligon
founded in 1980 with her late husband,
Claude. The first museum ever in Columbia,
it is one of three of its kind in the U.S. and
includes everything from traditional tribal
masks and textiles to kingly thrones and
sculptures, all gifted by private donors.
“I wanted to create exhibits for people
who are as unaware of Africa as I was when
we started,” said Ligon, a Morgan State
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| Fall 2022 | howardmagazine.com
University graduate whose treasures have
educated adults and schoolchildren alike.
Here are three things you might like to
know about Ligon:
She has climbed the stairs of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“My husband was in the Army and stationed in Europe, so we traveled to Italy with
our five-year-old son and took the [296 steps]
to the top of the tower. I remember thinking,
as we twirled around that staircase, how
many more? I never thought about the tower
tumbling down. The climb was educational;
it was fun. I wasn’t out of breath at all. Would
I do it again, at 86? Absolutely, though I don’t
know how far up I’d get.”
Her grandmother gave her the headsup on education.
“When I was a child, my grandmother
told me that ‘whenever you learn something,
you put another wrinkle on your brain.’ Well,
I’d seen pictures of brains but I didn’t know
that they came like that, so I decided that
I wanted to have the most wrinkled brain
in the world to please my grandmother. I
wanted to learn.”
Before collecting art, she gathered
houseplants.
“At one time I had 300 houseplants all
over the place, from cactuses to orchids to
a ficus that draped itself over the breakfast
room table to make it look like we were
eating in a restaurant. I kept a loose leaf
journal with each plant’s common and
botanical name, and when I fed it. If the
plants had spider mites, I washed them in
the kids’ bathtub [to the children’s dismay]
and let them drain there overnight. I was
an excellent parent to those plants, but now
I’ve transferred all of my attention to the
museum.”