"People gather strength through their roots," Vusumuzi Maduna—who died in 2007, at age 66—once said, "and it is through art that we hear our ancestral voices."

In August, Maduna’s “Inner City Totem I,” 1981, a wood and steel sculpture outside the Cambridge Community Center that resembles a monumental African mask, was vibrantly restored by Greg Curci of Winthrop for Cambridge Arts. Curci replaced rotted wooden pieces, painted to match the original; cleaned and varnished rusted steel; and replaced worn fasteners. Curci completed restoration, including repairs to significant structural damage, of a companion piece, “Inner City Totem II,” 1983, at the Margaret Fuller House this month.

“People in that community feel like the city doesn’t always invest in them. ... People are very happy and energized by the investment from the city to restore that sculpture,” says Darrin Korte, executive director of the Cambridge Community Center, a nonprofit providing social, cultural, educational and recreational activities to the Cambridgeport neighborhood—especially to the "most under-represented, under-resourced members of our community."

“Greg Curci executed a sympathetic treatment that really allows the two ‘Totems’ to be seen again as, we believe, Maduna had intended,” Cambridge Arts Director of Art Conservation Craig Uram says of the restoration. “Additionally, some slight structural modifications were made that will allow us to more easily maintain the pieces as part of our annual program, keeping them looking remarkable for a long time.”

Maduna was born Dennis Didley in Cambridge on Oct. 22, 1940. He went on to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and live in Boston. An artist and teacher, he co-founded the gallery at Boston’s Harriet Tubman House. For a time, he was an artist-in-residence in the African-American Masters program at Northeastern University, later he had a studio at Boston's Piano Factory building.

Maduna’s mother's parents were from Barbados. He grew up surrounded by people from the West Indies. "When I went to the barber shop they talked about the independence of Barbados, these old Black gentlemen," Maduna told The Boston Globe in 1992. “People just talked about their Africanness all the time. Maybe that's what stimulated me.”

As part of his pursuit of his roots, he took a new African name, said to mean “builder of a culture.”

“He wanted to delve more into mask-making and sculpture, so he changed his name. And I think he relished the fact that he could be different,” says Lena James, Maduna's on-and-off companion with whom he had a son in 1973 and a daughter in 1986.

At a 2007 memorial, Kay Bourne reported, Maduna's friend Arnie Cheatham recalled how Maduna worried that the name he had been given was “such a mouthful.” Cheatham replied, “Just keep saying it to people and they’ll get used to it. Sometimes it’s good to be reborn.”

Maduna's exploration of African, Caribbean and Native American cultures also informed his art. He crafted masks and standing wood sculptures from pieces of dressers, tables and other things he found on the street.

“He would say the spirit was in him—not just to replicate, he would make changes," James says. "He would look at books that he had on African art and then go and do his own thing."

Maduna was often single-minded in his dedication to making art. “He don’t care what he lives on, he has to do his art," James says.

Among Maduna's first public commissions was his 1971 “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial,” inside Cambridge’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., School. The 40-foot-long sculpture of plastic, perforated sheet metal and metal mesh portrays a sermon, a demonstration, an arrest, and the mule-drawn cortege at King’s funeral.

“He wasn’t a rah, rah Black Power type,” James says. “I asked him about Martin Luther King in discussions. I think he was more radical than the peace movement, but he said it’s for everyone to choose for themselves if they’re only going to associate with Black people. He said, for himself, it’s all [people].”

The "Inner City Totems" were among Maduna's first attempts at translating African-inspired masks into large-scale sculptures.

In 1987, Maduna sculpted “The Judge,” a 12 1/2-foot-tall, painted steel evocation of a horned African mask that stands outside Boston’s Roxbury courthouse. “Something quiet with dignity, with its eyes opened, and no expression—something that has nothing to do with the judicial system's traditional role in the black community,” Maduna told The Boston Globe in 1995.

“He said it is a mask for justice,” James recalls, “and he wants Black people to pass and see there’s the library where you could learn and there’s the courthouse. Black people could pass and know to have justice you must know, get the knowledge of what history is about, what’s happening now—in my words—so you could go into the courthouse and argue.”

For Boston’s 1991 First Night New Year’s Eve spectacle on City Hall Plaza, Maduna worked with scholar and artist Robin Chandler to create a ship adorned with a huge mask adapted from the Yoruba culture to recount that explorers from the Kingdom of Mali may have sailed to the Americas early in the 14th century.

“I am an African person born in America and so when I work, it reflects my African heritage,” Maduna told The Boston Globe in 1992. “When you're an artist you go inside yourself and express what you find.”

A powerhouse of a collection, which might even be better termed a “council,” of over 50 of VUZI MADUNA‘s assemblage masks and standing wood carvings made a striking display. They illuminated the large basement area that is The Gallery at the Piano Factory, 791 Tremont Street in Lower Roxbury.

Born in Cambridge, Vuzi, a resident of the Boston Piano Factory building until his recent passing, saw his art as a spiritual link to a distant African past, a link through which the wisdom of his ancestors is conveyed.

One of his public art projects is the steel sculpture “The Judge,” installed outside the Roxbury Courthouse in the Dudley Station area.

In an interview with this writer in 1989, Vuzi said that the reason “there is no mouth on this piece, but all the other faculties, is that it puts the onus of admittance on the defendant.

“Human behavior is the responsibility of the individual. The piece is meant to make you deal with your own behavior,”

Vuzi was thinking particularly of the young people flowing into the courts.

“What it says to them is, your father, mother, uncle, somebody told you the truth. I know you understand it. This piece is another somebody talking about human interaction, about how might is not right,” he said.

The exciting presentation at the Piano Craft gallery of pieces from four decades of Vusz‘s work, had been curated by Ekua Holmes with the assistance of his family and many artists, including Maddu Huacuja, who were friends of Vuzi‘s.The work must come down to make way for an exhibition of jazz related art put up in association with Jazz Week celebrations throughout the city, however, you can see his pieces on-line if you visit the link at the end of this article, provided by AAMARP resident photographer Hakim Raquib.

Many of Vuzi’s friends and his wife and two children gathered at the gallery, April 14, to swap stories about the reclusive artist who had so determinedly guarded his privacy and yet had established many firm and loving relationships.

Before longtime friend and fellow Piano Craft building resident Arnie Cheatham played a lyrical solo dedicated to Vuzi, the saxophonist recalled how Vusumuzi Maduna worried that the African name that had been given him replacing his name Dennis Diddley was “such a mouthful.” Arnie told him, “just keep saying it to people and they’ll get used to it. Sometimes it’s good to be reborn.” Then, Cheatham blew Billy Strayhorn’s composition “Daydream,” a favorite of Vuzi’s.

In introducing the speakers, Ekua Holmes gestured to the exhibit that surrounded them and the audience. “The star of the exhibit is Vusi,” she said,” and like stars in nature, his life’s work, his art, will continue to be with us, shining and shedding its light.”

Among the speakers were Vusi’s immediate family, his companion Lena James and their two children, now adults, Basonge James and Niamia James. Also remembering Vusi and his work at the microphone were longtime friend and fellow artist Johnetta Tinker, art scholar and director of the Museum of the National Center of Afro American Artists E. Barry Gaither, and this writer.

Sitting in his darkened South End studio, artist Vusumuzi Maduna resists any light that might be shed upon him.

Often when a door is cracked open to allow some illumination of what inspires this man to create African-flavored art such as that now featured at Brockton's Fuller Museum of Art, he gently shuts the door in the face of curiosity, holding back details or placing them off limits with a "don't put that in print."

Maduna, an articulate and deeply reflective man, is not playing cat and mouse. At 51, he has grown weary of fighting the urge to legitimize what he does under "dissection" that looks at him instead of his art. "That clouds the art," he says, and the art already has to struggle for its place in what is deemed the mainstream.

So he prefers to remain silent on some things and allow his spirited sculptures, masks and ritual objects to speak for him. "Hey," he says finally, holding a cigarette in one hand and sweeping back dreadlocks with the other, "I'm just being me.

"You wouldn't ask a blues singer why he sings the blues. . . . I am an African person born in America and so when I work, it reflects my African heritage. When you're an artist you go inside yourself and express what you find."

When Maduna and the five other artist featured in the "Ancestral Vision" exhibit have journeyed inside themselves, they have come back with creations that reflect their heritage in ways as individual as a fingerprint. Yet, there is a universality to their work that, when given the chance, can speak to all cultures.

The Boston artists -- Maduna, Allan Rohan Crite, Kofi Kayiga, Lawrence Sykes, Susan Thompson and Barbara Ward -- are black. They are proud of their heritage and celebrate it in their work. But they do not want to be thought of as black artists doing "black art," lumped together in an exhibit for Black History Month, the politically correct time of year to acknowledge their existence.

They demand -- as does the Fuller exhibit -- that their work be recognized on its own terms.

Although the exhibit continues through March 8, museum exhibitions director Otto Peter Erbar started it on Jan. 12, purposefully distancing it from the notion that the exhibit is only for Black History Month.

"I called the exhibit `Ancestral Vision,' " he says, "but I also very carefully entitled it `African Inspiration in Contemporary Art.' I haven't said African-American art. I haven't said African-American artists because it's contemporary art first and foremost. It happens to be African-inspired. But so was Picasso."

Like that of the other artists, Maduna's work -- whether or not he likes to talk about it in these -- is shaped out of individual upbringings, family values and personalized struggles.

Maduna, who eight years ago shed his "slave name" and took an African one that means "builder of the culture," was born in Cambridge and grew up in a neighborhood of people from the West Indies. His mother's parents were from Barbados.

"When I went to the barber shop they talked about the independence of Barbados, these old black gentlemen. . . . People just talked about their Africanness all the time. Maybe that's what stimulated me," he says.

He creates masks and wood sculptures using discarded tables, dressers and other materials he finds on the street. He prefers this wood not only because it is cheap but because found objects have an energy about them that captures the spirit that African ritual objects possess, says Maduna, who has studied African religions.

Sculptor Vusumuzi Maduna, formally known as Dennis James Didley, died on Sunday, Jan. 28, after enduring a long illness.

Maduna, 66, has contributed many works of art to the communities of Cambridge and Boston. An explorer of culture through art for over 25 years, his African name, Vusumuzi, meaning “builder of a culture,” was particularly fitting.

Maduna’s sculptures and masks celebrate the African American experience with formal references to African, Caribbean and Native American cultures. Some of them can be seen in the Green Street Grill at Charile’s Tap in Cambridge.

His work has been shown in Dallas’ Museum of Art and the Museum of African American Life and Culture; the Japanese Visual Artists Union in Tokyo; Guangshou Fine Arts Academy in the People’s Republic of China, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston.

He was a member of the African American Master Artists in Residency Program (AAMARP), as well as resident member of the Gallery at the Piano Factory in Boston. One of his many public works include “The Judge,” which is displayed at the Roxbury District Court.

Maduna has been featured at Brockton’s Fuller Museum of Art, along with a number of other venues.

“People gather strength through their roots,” Maduna once said, “and it is through art that we hear our ancestral voices.”

Maduna was born on Oct. 22, 1940 in Cambridge to the late Edna Watkins and Sam Didley. Educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he has been exhibited widely and served as Master Artist in Residence at Northeastern University.

Maduna is survived by his son Basonge James, daughter Nia Maya James and their mother Elena James. Known by many as Vuzi, he is also survived by a vibrant community of artists and friends.