Doran H. Ross (1947–2020) was an African art scholar, author, and museum director and curator. Ross was a renowned Ghanaian arts scholar who spent 20 years at the Fowler Museum at UCLA managing or curating nearly 40 African and African American exhibitions shown at 30 venues across the country. His specialties included Ghanaian art, including Asafo flags, gold, elephant art forms, Asante regalia, and the works of Ghanaian painter Kwame Akoto (Almighty God).
Early life
Ross was first introduced to African art as a student working on a double major in art history and psychology at California State University, Fresno. He received his M.A. in art history at University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to teach at various California institutions until beginning his career at the Fowler Museum in 1981 as associate director and Curator of Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceanic arts. He later became deputy director and Curator of African Collections, before becoming the first non-faculty full-time Director in 1996, a position he held until he retired in 2001.
Career at the Fowler Museum
His first major exhibition at the Fowler (then the UCLA Museum of Cultural History) was The Arts of Ghana (1977), co-curated with Herbert M. Cole, which was accompanied by a comprehensive publication he co-authored. Doran was among the most important scholars of Ghanaian arts in the world with research interests that centered on the royal and military arts of the Akan peoples, especially their dress, adornment, and regalia. Among his Akan publication highlights are Akan Gold from the Glassell Collection (2002); Royal Arts of the Akan: West African Gold in Museum Liaunig (2009); Art, Honor and Ridicule: Fante Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana (2017) with Silvia Forni; and Akan Transformations: Problems in Ghanaian Art History (1983), which he edited.
Ross was largely responsible for setting the standard for the Fowler's highly researched, contextualized, and multi-media exhibitions of global arts, always paired with a scholarly volume, a paradigm that continues to this day. He was firmly committed to a team approach for exhibition development, believing that exhibitions benefited from diverse perspectives beyond those of the erudite scholar. This was a methodology then considered novel, but one Ross saw as essential. Among the many highlights of his tenure were his contributions to the new Fowler Museum facility, designed and built in 1992. He signaled the new institution's ambition and vision with four simultaneous inaugural exhibitions (each with its book), including Elephant! The Animal and its Ivory in African Culture, which he curated.
Other projects
Ross oversaw many other projects throughout his career. He managed and/or curated some 38 African and African-American exhibitions that were shown at 30 different venues nationally. For example, he spearheaded the Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou project (1995), co-curated by Donald J. Cosentino and Marilyn Houlberg, which has since become one of the Fowler's most memorable exhibitions and publications. Ross curated the community-based project, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African-American Identity (1991), an initiative that involved a year-long African art and field collecting course he co-taught with the Fowler's Director of Education Betsy Quick at Crenshaw High School. A smaller version of this exhibition, initiated and funded by NEH on the Road and co-organized with Quick, traveled to 35 community venues around the country. Over his term at the museum, Ross oversaw the acquisition of thousands of objects into its permanent collections. His years at the Fowler were also a time when the museum's national reputation as an innovator in exhibition development, engagement with community advisors, and the production of multi-author publications was established with authority. Many Fowler projects were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and it was Ross who set the stage for the museum's long and successful record of receiving major grants from this federal agency. During his years at UCLA, he also taught a three-quarter Museum Studies course, inspiring students to seek museum careers while mentoring graduate students at UCLA and elsewhere who benefited from his guidance. Inspired by his gratitude for his mentor and friend Skip Cole, Ross went out of his way throughout his career to assist and advise students, and to help them publish their research. Ross served as an editor of the UCLA journal African Arts from 1988 to 2015, and published 47 articles, reviews, First Words, In Memoria, and Portfolios in that journal from 1974 to 2014.
