If you have seen Beyoncé’s video for “Run the World (Girls),” you may remember her holding two hyenas on a chain.

She’s making reference to Hugo and his series The Hyena & Other Men. Hugo’s fascination with the “Hyena Men” came about after a friend e-mailed a picture he had taken of a man walking a hyena on a chain in Lagos, Nigeria. The men, called “Gadawan Kura” (rough translation: “hyena guides”), were surrounded by myth and mystery and largely assumed to be drug dealers, bodyguards, thieves, and debt collectors. In fact they are itinerant performers who tame and work with hyenas, monkeys, and rock pythons to entertain and to sell traditional medicine. They are all related, and the tradition is passed down generation to generation. Through a journalist friend and a Nigerian reporter, Hugo was put in contact with the Gadawan Kura, who agreed to let Hugo travel with them for eight days. Two years later, with the project feeling unresolved, Hugo returned to Nigeria and took more photos. These images are more intimate, more informal, and reflect the trust and understanding the artist had developed with the hyena guides two years earlier and maintained over the interim.

Hugo’s fascination with the men and their relationship with the animals—at times doting, at times brutal—led to this series. It was this paradoxical relationship, and not the spectacle that surrounded their performances, that led to Hugo’s portraits. Thematically, Hugo explores the hybridization of the urban and the wild; the interplay of dominance, submission, and codependence; and the fraught relationship we have with ourselves, nature, and animals. In his text on the series, Hugo writes:

When I asked Nigerians, “How do you feel about the way they treat animals,” the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals, but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalized. Or why Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

The NCMA has been fortunate enough to have one of Hugo’s hyena photos, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, on long-term loan. You can see it in the Modern and Contemporary Galleries in West Building.

Beyoncé’s use of the Hyena Men imagery raises questions about appropriation and exploitation, for the Gaduwan Kura and Pieter Hugo were never credited or compensated. The artist has said this about the singer’s video: “I don’t particularly like the Beyoncé song. It all seems so derivative—the music, the imagery … I’m sure the Hyena Men are wondering if they’re going to get paid!”

As for Beyoncé, she has released a statement acknowledging her use of “references” in her videos and stating, “I’ve always been fascinated by the way contemporary art uses different elements and references to produce something unique.”

Whatever your feelings on plagiarism, exploitation, and pop culture, I’m pretty sure we can all agree on the awesomeness of the original. We also have a second Hugo photograph, Naasra Yeti, from his series Permanent Error. It is equally as arresting, stirring, and beautiful. Come by and see them. You won’t be disappointed.

P.S. The New Yorker wrote about it first. So did The Guardian.

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

Image: Pieter Hugo, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007, chromogenic print, On loan from the collection of Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez

I’ve loved Nevelson since I was a kid, having seen her work in museums in Washington, D.C., particularly the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Nevelson’s balance of order and chaos—many different things contained within definite rectangles—always appealed to me. It seemed like a good way of thinking about aesthetic composition, history or politics, or even personal situations. Nevelson makes sense to me as a visualization of analytical thinking, which I equate to beauty.

Thank goodness Nevelson never used color. Black Zag CC is a uniform flat black. Her works are always monochrome—black, white, gold, even some clear Lucite. Color moves shadow into secondary consideration, and shadow is crucial to Nevelson’s boxes. Shadow conveys the tension between presentation and concealment, as well as whatever ambiguous intermediate levels she can establish between those poles. These are the compositional components of her sculpture, whether it’s freestanding or on the wall like this piece.

Black Zag CC comprises six rectangular areas, or boxes. Each is easily recognizable as a discrete element, although some protrude into or overlap the others slightly. But it’s not a tile game—you can’t imagine them rearranged. The particular box at the center must be the center box. This is a strictly composed work.

Still, I love how this piece divides neatly in several different ways according to how I choose to look at it. A modularity of vision, not of composition.

I can see it as having two parts. There’s the typecase on the right side, with its intense internal detail, largely presenting the shadows of its grid. So the rest of the piece becomes unified into one image, its convex faces reflecting light, conveying their flatness. The typecase seems like what’s inside all the other boxes, as if it’s been opened to reveal its inner workings. Only the very center of the work shows a compromise—a thin rectangular frame that echoes the fundamental unit of the typecase, floating atop a curved, 100 percent black depth.

Another way of seeing two parts is to concentrate on that central box. It images a camera, with the thin rectangular frame becoming the aperture and a set of vertical ribs in the shadows of the box becoming a large-format camera’s bellows. The five perimeter boxes almost become photographs of different subjects, spit out from the center like Polaroids.

From either of those dualities, I can then see the piece as having three parts. The complexity of the upper left area emerges as singular, with the protruding frame, the dangling, miniature column, and the secondary frame of a chair’s back. Certainly there are more levels behind even the chair back. It recedes almost infinitely.

And can I just say, I love the dangling miniature column. Is it the later “addition” to the work that the wall text mentions? I cannot get enough of the column. It bothers me that I can’t get down to its scale; I can’t get my vision in behind it to see what the back of it looks like. What a brilliant decision, to put a small dangling thing in this work, and to frame it so that it doesn’t simply protrude off the front and draw attention to itself as compositionally contrary to the rest of the work. It’s the only part of the work on the scale of one’s hand. Everything else is for the eye. But the column would fit neatly into your hand. You could carry it around. It wants touch, not gaze.

Once I am this far into the components of a few of the boxes, it’s easy enough to just decide to see all six boxes individually. The wonderful lower left box that looks like two vertical doors sliding open to allow a figure to step through. Its figure’s outline abstractly feminine—a skirt and a breast. The box captures a moment of excitement, a verge, an emergence, a single frame of a film. Then there’s the central lower box, playing organic leaf or frond forms across a background wall or lath. The play of curved line against straight line brings these two lower boxes together.

The central upper box becomes a cipher. It’s the least interesting box, on its own, but it anchors the others. They can seem to radiate out from it, since its two curves mimic a sun and a sky. Perhaps it’s a nod to landscape as the one underlying visual metaphor for all art.

Some of Nevelson’s body of work is overtly metaphorical or deals with gender norms, like Dawn’s Wedding Chapel. But I see this midcareer Black Zag CC as a sheer study in her compositional approach. How she decides to put this next to that, and how she builds different modes of correspondence between proximate things—the complexity just turns me on. It sounds stupid, but I get a little breathless sitting in front of it.

That complexity of thought, to me, is beauty. And it’s why I visit Black Zag CC whenever I can.

— Chris Vitiello is an arts and performance writer based in Durham.

Image: Louise Nevelson, Black Zag CC, 1964–71, final addition 1977, painted wood construction with fabricated, found, and bought elements; wire and metal hardware; and Formica frame, H. 48 x W. 59 x D. 9 in., Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)