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Mary Nooter Roberts, Champion of African Art, Is Dead at 58

Mary Nooter Roberts in 2015 at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, in front of “Versatility,” a work by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui. A scholar of African art, she helped change the way non-Western art is presented in Western museums.Credit...Christopher O’Leary, via U.C.L.A.

Mary Nooter Roberts, a scholar of African art who helped change the way non-Western art is presented in Western museums, died on Sept. 11 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 58.

The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Allen F. Roberts, a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also taught.

Professor Roberts, known as Polly, came to her work at the beginning of the multiculturalist revolution of the 1980s, when a linear Western approach to art — “history with a capital H,” as she put it — was being replaced by a dynamic concept of varied and parallel stories. She was well prepared to embrace these ideas.

Born in St. Louis on Oct. 26, 1959, Mary Nooter became a world traveler before she was 3. Her father, Robert, joined the Foreign Service and moved the family first to Uruguay and then to Liberia. He then worked for the World Bank in different parts of Africa, where he and his wife, the anthropologist Nancy Ingram Nooter, became collectors of African art.

Professor Roberts attended Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., where she majored in philosophy and French literature. But in 1979, after a summer visit to her parents in Tanzania, she decided on art history as a career and enrolled at Columbia University.

While at Columbia, where she received her doctorate in 1991, she met her future husband. She also met Susan M. Vogel, a curator of African art at the Metropolitan Museum. When Ms. Vogel left the Met in the early 1980s to start her own museum, the Center for African Art, in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she hired Professor Roberts as her first staff member.

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Mary Nooter with her father, Bob, in Tanzania in 1979. It was after visiting her parents there that she decided to study African art.Credit...via U.C.L.A.

The museum opened with a spectacular show of classical African sculpture in the same season that the Museum of Modern Art presented its widely criticized exhibition “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” The MoMA show, which presented African art as source material for European painters, instantly became a touchstone for how not to approach non-Western cultures.

The Center for African Art’s show was perceived by many as a corrective example and established the museum as an institution to watch.

When the center, renamed the Museum for African Art, moved to new quarters in SoHo in 1993, Professor Roberts, by then senior curator, organized the first exhibition, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals.” The show was the product of two years of doctoral research among the Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, in an effort to access restricted kinds of knowledge, Professor Roberts, in consultation with a female diviner, underwent a rigorous Luba initiation.

“It was a moment of letting go of everything that I had come with to Congo, to Luba country,” she recalled in 2018 in an interview published by the U.C.L.A. School of the Arts and Architecture. “I had to let go of all my assumptions, and I also had to let go of being the one who was the interviewer.”

A second exhibition, “Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History,” a collaboration with her husband, followed in 1994. It was one of a series of shows produced over the next decade at the Museum for African Art that altered standard institutional presentations of African art by acknowledging its spiritually, socially and physically interactive character.

In 1999, Professor Roberts became chief curator of the Fowler Museum at U.C.L.A., and in 2001 she was appointed deputy director. There, in 2003, she and her husband organized the exhibition “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal.” The exhibition focused on the Mouride movement, devoted to the Sufi saint Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba.

Professor Roberts asked the Fowler’s security staff to permit devotees visiting the show to touch the portraits of Bamba, physical contact being an essential part of Mouride religious practice.

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Professor Roberts teaching an undergraduate seminar called “Body Politics in African Arts” at U.C.L.A. in 2015.Credit...Christopher O’Leary, via U.C.L.A.

Professor Roberts’s work in Francophone West Africa led to her being decorated as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008 she left the Fowler to take up full-time teaching at U.C.L.A. while continuing to organize shows at other institutions, among them the National Museum of African Art in Washington.

In 2011 she was made a consulting curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she established the museum’s first gallery for African art. Her most recent show there, “The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts,” appeared in 2017.

In addition to her husband, Professor Roberts is survived by a daughter, Avery Davis-Roberts Moore; two sons, Seth and Sid; two grandchildren; her parents; three brothers, Thomas, William and Robert Nooter; and a sister, Anne Nooter Ruch.

In recent years Professor Roberts made extensive trips to Asia, Africa and Europe to research another modern saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, whose followers include both Hindus and Muslims. Plans for an exhibition titled “A Global Saint in a Virtual World: Devotional Diasporas of Shirdi Sai Baba” were interrupted after she learned she had metastatic breast cancer in 2010.

After her diagnosis, while continuing to teach and publish, Professor Roberts also helped organize seminars, sponsored by the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, to disseminate information about health care resources and research developments. “Having metastatic cancer is a bit like having another occupation,” she said.

In speaking about her illness, she rejected conventional views of it as a battle and spoke of it instead as a “detour” that had opened a path to self-transformation, a process she identified as essential to the nature of the African works she loved.

“They are objects of aesthetic brilliance and achievement made by artists, but they were made for other purposes: for education, or healing, or governance, or spiritual mediation,” she said in the 2018 interview. “I always say they are more than art.”

A correction was made on 
Sept. 20, 2018

An earlier version of this obituary misstated Professor Roberts’s age. She was 58, not 59. (As the obituary correctly states, she was born on Oct. 26, 1959.) The error was repeated in the headline.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Mary Nooter Roberts, 58, Champion of African Art. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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