Get to know the 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 which 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 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 heads-up 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.”
