Yinka Shonibare exhibit at Ringling Museum of Art

The three letters after artist Yinka Shonibare might be insignificant to Americans, but they mean something in the United Kingdom.

"MBE" means that Shonibare, who was born in London and raised in Nigeria, is a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

"It's an honorific bestowed by the queen, to recognize artists for their contribution to the arts in the United Kingdom," explained Dr. Matthew McLendon, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, where seven sculptures by Shonibare, "Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play," are on exhibit through late October.

The initials also have an ironic meaning for Shonibare.

"A lot of people think it's quite odd that he would accept this leftover (relic) from the colonial period," said McLendon. "He uses it because of the irony."

Shonibare's sculpture often reinterprets scenes from 18th-century European painting, except that the figures are headless mannequins costumed in clothing fashioned from Dutch-wax fabric, which has its own unique history.

The fabrics incorporate what are seen as traditional African designs, but were made in Europe starting in the 19th century specifically for an African market.

"These very brightly patterned fabrics that many people think were indigenous to West Africa, were manufactured in Europe and produced for an African audience," said McLendon. "So this became the perfect kind of metaphor or symbol for Yinka, whose work deals with identity, with ideas of 'Africanness' in the colonial and post-colonial world."

Shonibare is one of a group of artists sometimes referred to as the YBAs, "young British artists," who came to prominence in the mid- to late 1990s.

Educated at Goldsmiths at the University of London, Shonibare was challenged by a professor who asked why he was not creating African art.

"He had to confront that people saw him as African when he saw himself as a citizen of the world," said McLendon.

The show at the Ringling comes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art and is installed in the Astor Galleries. Seven child-sized mannequins are set up at play --a little girl on a scooter about to break up a game of marbles being played by a little boy; a little girl skipping rope; another child seated in "time out" on a bench; a little girl playing with her doll beneath a piano.

"There was a narrative running through my head as I put them together," said McLendon, who started planning the exhibition from photos of the sculptures he printed out and arranged around the galleries.

"It is like directing a play," he said. "You want to give them a motivation, a reason for doing what they're doing."

The mannequins are headless, McLendon said, to avoid overt references to ethnicity, and also as a somewhat sly reference to the beheading of French aristocrats.

"I think it's something very different for the Ringling," said McLendon, who, in just a few months, has begun to aggressively promote the museum's own extensive collection of modern and contemporary art.

"I think because it's dealing with ethnicity, with cultural identity, with the Gilded Age and colonialism, this speaks and hopefully will speak to a very wide audience, including audiences who haven't felt they've been very well represented at the Ringling."