Entre diálogos, trajetórias e reinvenções artísticas a partir de Dacar

Sometime in 1975, I walked into the office of Arnold Rubin (1937–1988), an associate professor in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, inquiring about graduate study in Africanist art history. Students of African art, he assured me, would be at the forefront of mighty changes in the academic world. He promised that we would blow the dust off the hidebound field of art history. Rather shaken by his passionate rhetoric, I left thinking I might be too conventional for such an avant-garde enterprise. So after a much more pragmatic conversation with Herbert M. ("Skip") Cole about the shrinking number of teaching positions in art history, I headed to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my graduate work. There I was plunged into a program of instruction and research that was full of its own unexpected adventures and rewards. While I have always been immensely grateful that Skip Cole agreed to be my advisor and guide, I have never forgotten Rubin's vision, his assertion that Africanist art historians would overturn entrenched paradigms and revolutionize the study of art.This issue of African Arts celebrates a generation of scholars—the elders of our discipline—whose contributions shaped the journal when it was launched as african arts/arts d'afrique some fifty years ago. Arnold Rubin was one of these, as he had been appointed editor of "graphic and plastic arts" when the second issue of the fledgling magazine appeared in 1968. As a member of his students' generation, the cohort charged with bringing the study of African art into the twenty-first century, I would like to revisit my initial encounter with this influential scholar and teacher through the lens of African Arts. Has his vision indeed become a reality? Have Africanists reshaped the narrative of art history over the last fifty years and brought novel, interdisciplinary, Africa-centered approaches to a staid Eurocentric discipline?Clearly, I encountered Arnold Rubin during a time when his own views had been shaped by the theoretical and methodological debates swirling around the art department at UCLA, and by his awareness of the new and rather tenuous position of Africanists within the discipline of art history. After all, in the United States the first dissertation on an African topic presented for a PhD in art history (rather than anthropology or Egyptology) had been written less than twenty years earlier, in 1957, by Roy Sieber (1923–2001). While art historians such as Douglas Fraser (1930–1982) may have taught courses on African art as "Primitive Art" during the 1950s, it was not until the 1960s that Africanist scholars such as Sieber and Frank Willett (1925–2006) could draw on their own fieldwork when they offered classes in American art history departments. Rubin presented his thoughts on the development of the field at a conference on "African Art Studies in the 1980s" held at UCLA in 1979 and reviewed for African Arts by Marla Berns:1Although his ideas were disseminated in the classroom as well as through his many creative research projects, it is Rubin's association with African Arts in the first decade of its publication that allows us to examine how his goals for Africanist art history intersected with other impulses during a unique period. Fifty years ago, personal and professional relationships linking Americans and Africans promised to forge new ways of seeing and describing the world, and the excitement of this promise permeated the journal. I should note here that my own memories of that time were recently refreshed by a visit to an African country I had not seen in almost half a century. My brother arranged for me to join childhood friends and family members for a visit to Malawi, where our fathers had worked from 1964–1969, and where our mothers had volunteered in local colleges and hospitals. The church we had attended, constructed by members of the Church of Scotland congregation before 1891 (Briggs 2013:206), was still a vibrant place of worship in Blantyre (Fig. 1), its physical structure intact. I had only vague memories of an even earlier precolonial monument, the Mandala House, which had been the headquarters of the African Lakes Corporation in 1882 (Fig. 2). The interior is now a bright, sunny space managed by La Caverna, an art gallery specializing in paintings by Malawi's most influential modernists, while the upper floor houses the library and meeting rooms of the Malawi Historical Society. This venerable building thus enshrines the art history as well as the history of twentieth and twenty-first century Malawi, both pivoting around the nation's independence in 1964.Flipping through the first few years of african arts/arts d'afrique, the bilingual precursor of African Arts, also brought me back to the heady days of the 1960s. Just as my father and his American colleagues set up a technical college as a "contribution from the people of the United States of America to the people of Malawi" when that nation became independent from Britain,2 the very first issue proclaimed, in boldface print, that "The African Studies Center of the University of California Los Angeles presents a gift [of the magazine] to Africa." Since the journal and the technical school were offered to Africans at the height of the Cold War, when the continent and its resources were seen as vulnerable to influences from the Soviet Union, postcolonial theorists might characterize both as instruments wielded by the US government to ensure the loyalty of African allies.3 It was true that my father had been hired through an American university with funding from the Agency for International Development, while the growth of the African Studies Center at UCLA was nurtured by government grants and fellowships. Faculty and graduate students at UCLA were provided with funds for research on the African continent, allowing the African Studies Center to act as a "think tank" that was continually renewed by contacts with Africa. Former Peace Corps volunteers, sent by the US government to promote democracy and economic progress in Africa, enrolled in graduate programs after returning home, joining the ranks of scholars who studied the arts of the African continent. Yet despite their origins in hegemonic political policies, educational programs and initiatives such as african arts/arts d'afrique fostered a discourse that exposed Americans to African ways of knowing, to epistemologies which would lead researchers such as Arnold Rubin to challenge the assumptions of his own academic traditions.In the second issue, the editors wrote that the purpose of the new journal would be "to record the art of the African past, to provide an outlet for the contemporary African artist, and to stimulate the creative arts in Africa" (Povey 1967:2). Judging from other short entries, the publication was a highly experimental enterprise. According to a later reflection written by John Povey (1929–1992), the specialist in African literature who was one of its original editors, "the entire original concept of African Arts derived from a purely serendipitous seat proximity on an airline which brought Paul [law professor Paul Proehl (1921–1997)] and [Sudanese artist] el Salahi together. They communed and agreed that what was really wanted was a magazine that would display the manifold arts of Africa—hence the plural title—to the world" (1991:6).4Arnold Rubin had joined the editorial board quite soon after his arrival at UCLA. He was almost immediately joined by Skip Cole and by Eugene Grigsby, a professor of African and African American art history at Arizona State University. Other editors worked with them to assemble material celebrating a broad spectrum of African creativity. The first issues featured short essays on architecture, dance, theater, the cinema, music, literary criticism, and oral literature, in addition to an overview of the archaeology of Ife by Frank Willett, a reflective piece by Léopold Sédar Senghor, and reviews of contemporary art. Some of the discussions in these first volumes, such as a long essay by Bohumil Holas, were deeply primitivist, and John Povey himself could give way to paternalist pronouncements: "Somewhere between the inhibiting forms of the tradition and the too facile fashionable fads of contemporary art in the West, rests the legitimate area in which the African artist can create" (1968a:1). Yet in these years Dennis Duerden stated, "I am looking for an African kinetic artist, or one who uses a computer" (1967:30). Too few contributors would join him in expecting African artists of the 1970s and 1980s to engage with developments happening elsewhere in the world of contemporary art, and apparently neither video artists not digital arts would appear in the pages of African Arts prior to the twenty-first century. John Povey himself was startlingly prescient when he humbly acknowledged that "We hope that the possibilities supplied by the presence of this forum will encourage Africans to write their own account of their arts. Such essays will undoubtedly reveal to us areas of perception which are inevitably denied even to the most sympathetic of outside critics" (1968b:1). Unfortunately, the "presence" of the journal would diminish in African libraries and art centers during the following decades (Nettleton 2017, Okwuoso 2017), and as Simbao has clearly demonstrated (2017), scholars based on the African continent would be hindered from publishing their research in the journal by a variety of constraints. It is now clear that the laudable sentiments of Povey needed to have been accompanied by sustained action.Soon after its inception, the editors announced an annual competition, with monetary prizes for winning submissions of art (two- and three-dimensional work) and literature (plays, poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels) that would be published or reproduced in the magazine. Each issue would include reports by African "correspondents" providing "perceptive analyses of the underlying situation that confronts the African artist" (Povey 1968b:1). As a showcase for African literature, african arts/arts d'afrique was bilingual, offering essays in French and English. At the time, this was a sophisticated, European approach that addressed a wide, intercontinental readership, even if the possible incorporation of other languages commonly used in Africa (such as Arabic, Portuguese, or Swahili) was not mentioned. In many ways the magazine resembled creative modernist publication projects such as Minotaure, produced in Paris in the 1930s, or Black Orpheus, published in Ibadan after the 1950s, or Transition, launched in Kampala in the 1960s. What is striking, however, was the offer by the editors of african arts/arts d'afrique to distribute their color illustrations of African contemporary art to schools so that teachers could mount them on bulletin boards (Povey 1968a:38). This was a didactic effort to reach out to the American public, a program to dispel misconceptions about African cultures. In today's global art world, where critics value the transgressive, provocative stance of marginalized artists, few curators would attempt to place reproductions of contemporary African art in K-12 classrooms of the United States.As Doran Ross noted in his review of the first twenty-five years of African Arts (Ross 1992:1), submissions of literary works and coverage of contemporary art faded away after the annual competitions came to an end in 1975. Just as Arnold Rubin brought his experience with performance, ephemeral art, and ritual in African contexts to his exploration of American cultural practices, African Arts covered a broad range of urban and rural artistic creativity in Africa and its Diaspora during the 1980s. It became a leading outlet for fresh, new accounts of artists' practice based on fieldwork conducted in communities throughout Western and Central Africa, and studies of arts from Eastern and Southern Africa were featured as well. Given the variety and sophistication of the new studies appearing in African Arts, its readers may not have noticed how few contributors were still visiting the studios of artists working in African galleries, cultural centers, and institutions of higher education. In a "First Word" written as African Arts approached its twenty-fifth anniversary, Povey complained that at the 1989 Triennial conference of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, "contemporary African art … was considered at best marginal, at worst a regrettable intrusion of a tiresome product outside the concerns of serious scholars" (1990:1). Other journals would eventually arise to cover arts identified as "contemporary," such as Revue Noire (in 1991) and Nka (in 1994), and in last decade of the twentieth century African Arts itself would once again turn its attention to artists who had studied in African universities or art institutes. I would argue, though, that by neglecting critical studies of these African artists during the 1980s, Africanists missed the opportunity to interact with art historians in other "non-Western" fields, who were extending their own research methods into the study of modern and contemporary "global" arts (Sullivan 1996, Farago and Pierce 2006, Hay 2008).Furthermore, because African Arts focused on community-based (rather than nationally based) art and architecture during the 1980s, it bypassed a pivotal period in the history of African modernisms. During my visit to Malawi, I was honored to meet Willie Nampeya, now professor emeritus in the art department at Chancellor College in Zomba, who had been a student of my mother, Barbara Blackmun (Fig. 3). After learning of the challenges faced by Prof. Nampeya and his younger colleagues, and realizing that they have worked for many years in relative isolation, I wish that I (and other faculty in American institutions) had been more aware of their need for international recognition and support (see Simbao 2017:6). Whatever the reasons, close contacts between art educators working in Africa and in the United States still tend to be the exception rather than the rule.The switch to a monolingual format in volume 4 (and the adoption of the name African Arts) may have contributed to the diminishing number of articles on modernist cinema, literature, and theater appearing in the journal. One immediate casualty was the coverage of francophone northern Africa. During the first few years, contributors had written about artists based in Tunis and Cairo, providing material that is useful now for researchers reviewing the history of African modernism. The original inclusion of arts from the entire continent had reflected political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when newly independent African states sponsored arts festivals in Dakar, Algiers, and Lagos that were expressions of African solidarity. Of course biennials and other exhibition events today return to this model by soliciting artworks from across the continent, weaving economic and political networks as part of national cultural policies. And of course many art fairs are sponsored by francophone African nations and produce bilingual texts.The early articles on textiles, ceramics, and other artisanal traditions in the Maghreb were also responses to the work of historians and archaeologists, who were then mapping trade routes and the movements of people and ideas across the Sahara. But in the 1960s, art historians had often been introduced to African art by European modernists, who believed that only sub-Saharan Africa could produce art nègre, authentically "primitive" art. Even after abandoning the tenets of Primitivism, many art historians remained in thrall to the masterpieces of West Africa and Central Africa that had inspired early twentieth century French painters. It is not surprising that the pages of African Arts would be dominated by these regions, even though Africanists such as Rubin and Cole had moved far beyond formal analyses of sculpture to broader understandings of the totality of creative production on the continent in its very first issues.Perhaps the shift away from Egypt and the Maghreb was also a result of the critiques of the field of African Studies in the 1970s, when African Americans affirmed their own ancestral links to ancient cultures. Following the lead of Robert Farris Thompson, many Africanists extended their art historical analyses to the Americas, narrating art histories as creative expressions of the Black Atlantic world. As African Studies in several institutions was subsumed under "Black Studies" or appended to departments of African American and Africana Studies, the art historical relationships between West Africans classified as "black" and North Africans seen as "non-black" by outside observers became more difficult to place within an American academic framework. When Sidney Kasfir reviewed Jan Vansina's Art and History in Africa for African Arts, she underscored his inclusion of arts from the northern half of the continent, asserting that this was perhaps "the most alien part of the author's perspective for African art specialists" (Kasfir 1986:12).For the first decade or so, the journal had close relationship with commercial enterprises. In addition to receiving funding from the Kress Foundation to print images in color, african arts/arts d'afrique received advertising revenue from airlines, a mining company, and the Franklin Gallery in Los Angeles. Private collections as well as exhibitions at public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum were reviewed. This context helps explain why Rubin wrote his influential essay "Accumulative Sculpture: Power and Display" (Rubin 1974) for the Pace Gallery in New York City before publishing it in the contemporary art journal Art Forum (Rubin 1975). It would be several years before a messy divorce would separate private galleries selling "primitive arts" (or "tribal arts") and the academic world. This divorce was finalized as postcolonial theory pushed art historians (and the editors of African Arts) towards new discussions of professional ethics, fieldwork methods, and collection practices.Arnold Rubin may have been instrumental in moving african arts/arts d'afrique in a direction that was quite different from that originally envisioned by Povey and Poehl. His own, detailed study of Kutep mud sculpture in the first volume contained the publication's first endnotes (Rubin 1968). For its second volume, the magazine featured an extended study of Chokwe arts by Marie-Louise Bastin that spanned three issues and whose overview from the of most early Skip essays on appeared that as a new for critical of fieldwork Rubin's and a in on in the of the literature on and Robert Farris wrote his of African Arts was as a forum for research in the arts by art and other submissions were to as they would be at other journals (Ross Povey when from his editorial that despite its African Arts had became an academic publication in with the of a It could thus could more of a to the discipline of art how has this years ago, Doran Ross wrote a "First Word" in which he complained that "the arts of Africa to be in the world, the art the or the classroom … Even the most courses on African arts a at colleges and the Africanist who to have had the in the field of art history as a wrote in the vision of an to position and the of to the rather than the product of artistic to have been Yet by the of African art history more "African art … has collections and What might we in 2017, a decade are many ways to the of Africanist art historians within the American academic world, from positions of Africanists in art history programs or the number of courses we to the number of on African art published by university or the number of articles and reviews we have in the most The number of Africanists who art exhibitions as or curators might also be in addition to the many gallery art independent and whose academic to their in African art. Yet as faculty members at American college or university such might not us what we really wish to our in the art historical they not us much about or even we have had an the field as a I a the art history When Doran Ross and wrote their African artworks to art as of "primitive" Some African again in the on twentieth century European where they were by the of the where they had been of both of the leading for art history Art the by and Art include on African art that are with on or the The that will provide at to African in an in art history. of artworks from the African also in the of American school students need to for an Art History these on the work of Africanists to working in the on African art history, written almost in the by Skip Cole for Art the and and Roy for Art History have been for later in to provide student readers with a historical Povey might have of these which African art was of when the arts of other As several scholars have serious studies of historical developments in African art forms are few and far and the review was launched in part out of the with the of attention to historical context in African Arts and In many has not been on African artistic of the immediate or to such as (see But that may as art historians and other scholars new research and produce more For in Barbara Blackmun had very to draw when a in to for the family on the following (Fig. The was a But when agreed to for at a in (Fig. we could a literature on that the in historical perspective if the history of African art is in and classrooms so that Africa can become in of its inclusion offer students the opportunity to African artistic practices, and that provide them with new ways of looking and is "African its place in the that african arts/arts d'afrique as "graphic and plastic arts" in a collection of identified by artist, and in the today's African artists can be in such as Art which them into the discourse of global modern and contemporary art and on the of are we Arnold Rubin's of as art within a cultural And if we write articles in Art that showcase African studies of art historical are we to Arnold Rubin's vision of Africanist art history as recently wrote that he Rubin would be to that contributors to African Arts still hope to the discipline of art history, even if we are of how this can be

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

This thesis is situated in the field of digital cultural heritage and uses 3D scanning and printing as both a method and a provocation to reveal the curatorial process while simultaneously examining how the technology affects museum practice from the perspective of the museum curator. 3D scanning and printing (henceforth 3DSP) has become a keen area of interest among museum practitioners and researchers. The ever-increasing accessibility of 3D technology opens up new possibilities for audiences and curators alike, with the potential to establish new structures of practice and engagement. Yet despite the growing interest in 3DSP, very little is known about how integration of 3DSP does and could affect museum practice and its traditional methods of working. This thesis will investigate how and why 3DSP is affecting the practices and traditions of the museum from the perspective of the curator, a member of staff who is arguably the first and primary engager with museum objects. The research undertaken for this study will focus on two museums, Museums Sheffield and The British Museum, to provide an account of how 3DSP affects curatorial practice when it is first introduced and an account of cases where 3DSP is already in operation. The reader is first introduced to the concept of the 3DSP and its surrounding literature in the contextual review. The chapter acknowledges that 3DSP is relatively new within the museum sector and that such a novelty impacts on the breadth and depth of heritage sector literature on 3DSP. The contextual review thus provides a background to museum discourse before discussing the changing role of the museum curator. The literature concerning 3DSP in the museum is positioned and examined as a tool for simultaneously frustrating and supporting the role of the museum and its curators. With the above arguments in mind, the thesis then moves on to discuss the methods and data used to examine 3DSP in the museum. Drawing on curatorial museum-based methods conducted over the past 3 years, this thesis details the perceived effect of 3DSP on museum practice and traditions. Daily tasks, such as planning exhibition concepts, accessioning and object research are reinterpreted as methods for this study, with the aim of understanding not only the role of the museum curator, but also how 3DSP impacts on the practice of museum curators. By situating 3DSP at the heart of this study and working with pre-existing 3DSP projects, this study provides real-world practice examples of how the integration of 3DSP affects the museum. At the centre of this thesis are three discussion chapters which examine the data gathered from an Acclimatisation Study and two curatorial residencies at Museums Sheffield and The British Museum. The chapters examine the curatorial positionality of 3DSP, where 3DSP sits with the museum structure and politics, and finally the digital implications of introducing 3DSP into the museum. Across all three chapters there is an attempt to position 3DSP within the wider narrative of digital cultural heritage, examining, for example, 3DSP’s effect on our current understanding of authenticity and authority. The first of the discussion chapters focuses on the curatorial intention and seeks to understand the perceived role and position of 3DSP in the museum. The chapter examines how participating curators from Museums Sheffield and The British Museum and their curatorial departments have responded to 3DSP and how their curatorial position could either work with or against the framework of the museum. In the second discussion chapter the focus is on where 3DSP objects sit within in the museum. The chapter reveals the changes, frustrations and enrichments 3DSP has brought to curatorial practice and makes comparisons with alternative replicas, which have formed part of museum practice for decades. The material and immaterial properties of 3DSP museum objects are discussed in the chapter and applied to how curators believe this impacts on the object’s sense of authenticity and authority. In the final discussion chapter, the focus is on the digital challenges and benefits of introducing 3DSP into the practices of the museum. The chapter explores how curators responded to the introduction of 3DSP and furthers discussions from the first chapter. Within this chapter are examinations of how 3DSP affects copyright law, debates concerning how to treat data points added by the scanning software, and data storage concerns. The conclusions, detailed in this thesis, reveal complex and shifting perceptions on the role and position of 3DSP within the museum that is interlinked with the museum’s practice and traditions. Preconceptions exist about the use of the replica and its potential frustration of 5 museums’ objects’ authenticity as well as the transformations of digital objects and their use beyond the collection.

Readers of this journal are well-versed in the challenges of presenting African art in a long-term museum exhibition with collections spanning many geographies and periods. We Write to You About Africa at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) addressed these challenges by acknowledging the limitations of museum exhibitions, while still presenting an impressive collection and diverse visual experiences. A short-term exhibition, entitled Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution, provided a deep dive into the topics of restitution, repatriation, and provenance. The thematic approaches of both installations engaged with multidisciplinary university audiences to stimulate discussions about racism, violence, and activism.For the main exhibition, curators Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma drew inspiration from Dawson Weber's Postcard from Algiers (2021), especially the artist's framing of postcards as portals into other worlds (Fig. 1). The introductory text compared postcards and art collections, which the curators suggest are bothThe exhibition presented a series of “snapshots” of artworks from Africa, with material drawn primarily from UMMA's collections and complemented by loans from other University of Michigan collections.Separated into two spaces, one room addressed objects’ provenance and colonial histories (Fig. 2). For example, a pwo mask illustrated a familiar provenance case of an object removed from its place of use by a European ethnologist—without record of who made the work—and its subsequent movement through Euro-American collections. Nearby, a sejen (bird) sculpture from Côte d'Ivoire collected by a Peace Corps volunteer and a tabwa nfukula chest drum commissioned by a United States-based scholar exemplified how artists navigated changing markets. A map accompanied each label, indicating the works’ known movements.This first room also examined the ongoing legacies of colonial collecting in museum practice. Many of the works would now be considered among the “canon” of African art: headrests, chief's staffs, and an imposing nkisi (Fig. 3). The labels interrogated how authenticity has been determined in Euro-American museums—from collectors’ preference for wooden objects, a penchant for sacred objects, the separation of Egypt from the rest of Africa, and the rejection of anything representing European influence. William Adjete Wilson's No. 8, Colonization (2009) addresses the long history of the exploitation of African people, while echoing historical appliquéd textiles. Conspicuously absent from this section were discussions of looted works and the ongoing debates about restitution—which were located in a separate (temporary) exhibition in the museum, and discussed below.The exhibition's second part, “I Write to You from Africa,” quoted the artists themselves in the labels (Fig. 4). With collections from both studio and workshop artists, drawn from across campus and including a selection of works from the diaspora, this section provided a local view of the University of Michigan's many research and educational initiatives. Jon Onye Lockard's analyses of Black urban environments, Mary Sibande and Shani Peters's reimaginations of history, and William Kentridge's commentary on humor connected to themes from across the university's curriculum. In this long-term exhibition, De Becker and Uduma harnessed the possibilities of a university museum to its strongest potential. The objects and labels introduced viewers to the many challenges of researching and collecting African art. They prioritized the viewpoints of artists as they approached these histories and realities from all angles, both thematic and visual. Almost any course or public audience could find something of interest in this section.While the main galleries presented material from a broad thematic range, Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution focused specifically on the processes of researching provenance and facilitating possible repatriations (Fig. 6). The curators and design team constructed this small gallery space with such visual impact that the viewer could not help but appreciate the complexity of these issues. A timeline stretched from the opening text and wrapped around the gallery walls. It began in 1868 with the British troops’ plundering of material from Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) and continued until 2021. It included major raids and looting of African objects, groundbreaking exhibitions of this material in Europe and the United States, the history of past calls for objects’ returns, significant policy regulating returns, and recognizable cultural shifts (such as a clip from the film Black Panther [2018] and a segment from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah [2018]). The interspersal of images, ephemera, and multimedia helped to vary the learning experience as one moved through the timeline. A second timeline then described UMMA's ongoing research concerning the provenance of the exhibition's eleven works (Fig. 7). On display in the center of the room, the objects were grouped into four thematic areas: objects looted from Benin Kingdom, southeastern Nigerian shrine figures possibly removed during the 1967–1970 Biafran War, minkisi power figures from Central Africa, and a muzidi figure from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that may have once contained human remains.The research timeline began September 8, 2021. In the first step, curators reviewed object files. Often, these files included a rough estimate of a date of creation, a country of origin, and some information about the donor. By December 2021 and my second visit to the exhibition, the timeline had grown to include further information on provenance, notes on style (helpful for attribution), correspondence with specialists, acknowledgement of archival dead ends, and comparisons with similar objects. The short descriptive cards left me hungry for more information, but accurately illustrated the many ways that research proceeds—including the frustrating moments when you must stop and consider new directions. UMMA has also created an online portion of this exhibition that follows the in-progress research.While I was first drawn to the text and timelines, the objects themselves were the stars of this exhibition (Fig. 8). Viewers could see all sides of the objects: a special mount allowed viewers to see previous collection numbers on the back of a fragmentary figure of an Oba (king) from the Benin Kingdom. In this small but dense exhibition, labels encouraged visitors to take in all of the visual information, from text to physical properties. Some may criticize this exhibition for its lack of clear directives regarding the objects’ eventual return. Yet even talking about these issues in the gallery is progress, and as previewed in the opening text, this is only just a beginning of a process: “We hope that by beginning to address the injustices of colonialism, we can strengthen existing relationships and create new ones, with partners in Africa.” The long-term exhibition would be strengthened by the inclusion of some of this material, once Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution has closed. Together, these pendant exhibitions used resources and opportunities specific to a university museum to create innovative experiences that boldly challenged museum standards and offered opportunities for cross-disciplinary discourse. The exhibitions highlighted themes that are at the forefront of much research today, but not always emphasized in museum display: provenance, restitution, collecting histories, and racial justice. Rather than offering concrete solutions, the curators presented research as an ongoing process. Much like a great university course, the exhibitions functioned as a starting point for further learning and action. I look forward to future updates from UMMA about the results of this project.

Reviews 215 within the text, or in footnotes, in order to promote readability. More often than not, however, frustration rather than ease results from this lack of specificity. In a similar vein, the brief critical bibliography that rounds out the volume is general in nature and disappointingly uninformative. Dénier is at her best in drawing conclusions from her thematic review of the persistent,dispersed allusions to British culture in Stendhal’s life and writings.Far from being the object of a systematic,didactic discourse,Stendhal’s England is constantly evolving, fluid enough to encompass inconsistencies and contradictions . More than a mirror of reality, it is an intellectual construct. Although Count Stendhal may be of limited use to scholars who want to further explore the topic, it brings together facets of British culture that make England, in his writings and life, the counterpoint and complement of his imaginary creation of Italy. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett Diop, Babacar Mbaye. Critiques de la notion d’art africain: approches historiques, ethno-esthétiques et philosophiques. Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7539-0190-2. Pp. 292. 22 a. The genius of Diop’s text lies in its simple organizing premise: continuity. Though not an earth-shattering claim in the study of other subjects, Diop’s assertion for African arts tackles head-on a firmly-entrenched intellectual tradition. In seeking unity, he frequently returns to important sticking points (the question of utility, craftsmanship, contact, and spirituality) in relation to the text’s three main divisions. The first section, “Approches historiques de la création artistique en Afrique noire,” enriches our understanding of the categories in which African arts have been typically divided—ancient, traditional, and contemporary. Rather than rejecting the classifications , the author proposes a rereading of such art critics as Apollinaire, Matisse, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Senghor in order to weave connections. For the ancient period, Diop revitalizes the links between Sub-Saharan Africa and Egyptian antiquity.He reexamines the aesthetic framework that has been used to evaluate African artisanship in the traditional arts category. The author shows how critics have overemphasized European contact. At the same time, he exposes the amplification of utility and the underappreciation of the role of beauty. According to Diop, contemporary art in Africa suffers at the hands of critics who habitually disconnect it from its own historical roots simply because Western art categorizes works as contemporary based on the break of the postwar period. The second part,“Critique des différentes lectures des Arts négroafricains ,” examines the evolution of Eurocentric aesthetics as it has been applied to the study of African plastic arts. Diop demonstrates how value has slowly been assigned to African art production, as evidenced by the labels “art nègre”, “art primitive,” and “art tribal”—each carrying with its aesthetic classification a network of philosophical biases. Following Jean-Godefroy Bidima’s argument in L’art négro-africain, Diop then underscores the fanciful perception of elements that had suddenly given African arts an aesthetic status in the West, thanks to their association with modern themes of “dehumanization ,”“alienation,”and“authenticity.”He deftly leads the reader to“l’analyse ethnoesthétique,” which examines the question of beauty and utility through Kant, Senghor, Mauss, and Delange. Diop ends the second part on Eurocentric aesthetics with an inquiry into the formalist approach by connecting Baumgarten, Hume, and Hegel to Alassane Ndaw, Roger Somé, and Iba Ndiaye Diadji. The third section of the text investigates African aesthetic theories by Senghor, Mveng, and Bidima. Each of the three chapters in this final unit treats the standard themes of “Négritude,”“crossings,” “marginalization,”and“globalization,”with the goal of developing a unified aesthetic theory. While Diop frequently returns to the past, he just as often looks to the contemporary arts scene within and outside the continent. This study speaks with clarity on a subject whose sources are complex and varied.As each chapter peels away layers of culturally biased criticism, the natural links between the ancient-traditionalcontemporary periods do indeed emerge. Not only does Diop’s study serve as an excellent introduction to African plastic arts, it provides insight into all its arts traditions. Mount...

In recent years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major focus of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States. Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of primitive broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art. Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

Peter Stepan. Picasso's Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis. Translated from the German by Paul Aston and Karin Skawran (Introduction), Robert McInnes (Chronology), and John Gabriel (Preface, Catalogue). Munich: Prestel, 2007. 149 pp. Photographs. Illustrations. Index. $85.00. Cloth. - Volume 50 Issue 2

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

October 01 2020 A Propos Macron and the Restitution of African Arts: A German Case Study Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson has workled as a consultant with the African ceramics collection of His Royal Highness Franz, Duke of Bavaria since receiving her PhD in African art history from the University of Iowa in 1999. She has taught an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, served as curator of African, Native American, and Oceanic arts at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and at the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University. She has also organized over forty exhibitions and published internationally on global arts, often focusing on the cross-over between historical and contemporary practices. Since returning to her birthplace in Hawaii in 2014, she works as an independent art historian, curator, and consultant. bthompson@africanartresearch.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson has workled as a consultant with the African ceramics collection of His Royal Highness Franz, Duke of Bavaria since receiving her PhD in African art history from the University of Iowa in 1999. She has taught an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, served as curator of African, Native American, and Oceanic arts at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and at the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University. She has also organized over forty exhibitions and published internationally on global arts, often focusing on the cross-over between historical and contemporary practices. Since returning to her birthplace in Hawaii in 2014, she works as an independent art historian, curator, and consultant. bthompson@africanartresearch.com Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California.2020The Regents of the University of California African Arts (2020) 53 (4): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00545 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Barbara Thompson; A Propos Macron and the Restitution of African Arts: A German Case Study. African Arts 2020; 53 (4): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00545 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search When French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, he announced his plans to temporarily or permanently return French state-owned African cultural possessions to their original source nations (Macron 2017). Museums with African art collections were sent into a tailspin as heated debates ignited across the world following the speech. Macron subsequently engaged the Senegalese economist and philosopher Felwine Sarr and art historian Bénédicte Savoy to write a formal report with restitution recommendations. Released in 2018, their report concluded that all cultural possessions in French museums acquired before 1960 without evidence of full consent from their original owners or guardians should be returned to Africa (Sarr and Savoy 2018),1 “essentially advocating the unconditional and comprehensive return of all such possessions”... © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California.2020The Regents of the University of California You do not currently have access to this content.

Botanic gardens collect, care for, distribute and display living organisms, preserved plant specimens, and their derived artifacts. As cultural collections, they are used for research, conservation, education and cultivated as living collections that provide tangible and intangible amenity. Curation is an integral consideration of this melee, which informs the content and confers value, through framing the public presentation and interpretation to further the mission of the host organisation. This paper reviews the evolution of western botanic gardens as institutions of power, inferred by knowledge. Exploring the key externalities that have informed their collection acquisitions since their renaissance origin while exploring the epistemic function of the curator’s role. Looking to provide insight into how these collections can better be directed towards the prescient externalities that result from an imbalance of the human social and wider ecological system. The framework of a Sustainable Development is reviewed as the dominant sustainability narrative and top-down transformative solution pathway. While Nature-based Solutions are identified as potential tools to help mitigate and adapt to emerging challenges from anthropogenic climate change and continuing biodiversity loss. Finally, the concept of a Just Transition is identified to inform policy and direct practice from a bottom up and top-down process, to ensure equality for all stakeholders independent of their economic means or collection interests. An approach that could bring benefits for species conservation while providing a new lens for botanic garden research and curatorial practices. These include acknowledging the benefits of Indigenous and western knowledge systems and making intrinsic values work; integrating intrinsic values of the more-than-human. The case for botanic gardens to be considered as centres of knowledge or ‘Hortus apertus’ is made to acknowledge the continual evolution of these institutions, and revaluation of their role in a time of global change.

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

In her First Word, “African Restitution in a North American Context: A Debate, A Summary, and a Challenge” (African Arts 53 [4]: 10–15), Amanda M. Maples presents a well-researched and compelling argument for museums in North America to join together and develop a process of restitution regarding Africa's archaeological and colonial-era heritage. I would emphasize that this initiative must embrace a process of true partnership and inclusion that involves, from the start, the participation and insights of African colleagues working on and off the continent.In 2019, I attended Columbia University's Restitution Debate symposium; I co-organized, with National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) colleagues Kris Juncker and then-director Gus Casely-Hayford, an October 22 double panel listening session to solicit ideas and strategies from invited colleagues from Africa as part of a two-day Yale-Smithsonian symposium devoted to global cultural heritage preservation; and I presented a paper on December 3 at a conference on restitution organized by the University of Ghent. Rather than characterizing the restitution debate as heated and divisive, as Amanda asserts, my own observations suggest that the debate is impassioned—as it should be given the importance of Africa's arts to the world and to the histories and heritages of Africans living on and off the continent—and that colleagues working in museums in North America and Europe are genuinely seeking approaches and processes to guide the restitution of colonial-era collections. Indeed, our colleague Costa Petridis, who attended the Ghent conference, and I were slated to co-chair a Museum Day roundtable session on restitution at our June 2020 ACASA Triennial Symposium, which has now been postponed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains our hope that this roundtable will initiate a coordinated effort to articulate approaches and guidelines for US museums in the moral imperative that must drive the process of restitution of Africa's heritage.Based on these meetings, and my own readings on the subject, I find myself circling back to a persistent question: Isn't the issue of restitution more about equity, inclusion, decision-making power, and true partnership—areas of intellectual and professional engagement that have historically excluded the equitable participation of Africa's museums, scholars, public intellectuals, and community spokespersons? These areas, in my opinion, encompass the process of restitution, which is distinct from a relevant outcome of that process, namely the action of repatriation—the return of African objects to their places of origin.As the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report points out, objects of African cultural heritage are also forms of access to knowledge and memory that are disrupted for future generations when objects are removed from their places of origin. Memories, histories, meaning-making, traditions, as well as the making of new traditions and memories are disrupted by the absence of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.Recognizing that there is not yet a rulebook on how to mount and implement claims of restitution and that it is not a “one size fits all” proposition, what are some of the approaches and strategies we might consider to move this initiative forward? The first is for us to embrace an open, honest, and transparent dialogue with our African peers about the realities and enduring impact of colonialism and the role of restitution in addressing this history. And then, we must listen much more than we speak, ensuring that stakeholders who have long been denied a voice in these matters are truly heard.Repatriation of objects must remain on the table as a possible outcome of the process of restitution, without descending into a discussion about what a museum in Africa might lack in terms of trained personnel, adequate facilities, and sustainable funding. While important, these issues cannot be deal-breakers in processing claims of restitution. Such inclusive conversations would enable Africa's museums to speak for themselves, to express their urgent needs as well as their hopes and aspirations at being equal partners in the global circulation of knowledge, expertise, collections, exhibitions, and audience engagement, including access to collections by source communities. Further, these conversations would open up productive discussions regarding the sustainable development of Africa's cultural sector so that claims for restitution could be effectively made and implemented.One possible strategy that would benefit museums in Africa, Europe, and North America would be the creation of a consortium of institutions on and off the continent that would partner in the sharing of expertise and in strengthening Africa's cultural sector. Such a consortium could leverage its collective weight to encourage governments to dedicate more of their annual budgets to strengthening museums and the wider cultural sector. We could band together to convince corporations and foundations of the social and economic advantages—in terms of education, tourism, and job creation—in supporting the sustainable development of Africa's museums and other centers where changing forms of expressive culture are displayed, preserved, and cherished. Once funding is secured, and with sustainability as a critical objective, collaborations and partnerships defined by the priorities of our colleagues on the African continent could address a range of initiatives, including the training of successive generations of curators, conservators, and a host of other professions in the museum field. Working together on needs assessments, feasibility studies, and training programs deployed to areas of greatest urgency leverages scarce institutional funds and avoids duplication of effort and the appearance of institutional competition.Consortium-led working groups could address particular restitution issues—from legal definitions to ethical imperatives to sustainable funding and capacity building—or focus on collection-specific concerns, such as the relevance of museums to the communities they serve, or mass digitization and public access to collections. An example of the latter is the Digital Benin project (https://digital-benin.org/) undertaken by African partners in collaboration with the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg, under the direction of Barbara Plankensteiner (Museum am Rothenbaum 2020). The project proposes a global, digitized information system of object records and provenance regarding collections of Benin kingdom artworks, most of which were looted from the Benin royal palace in the 1897 raid mounted by British soldiers. Among the complaints voiced by African colleagues is the lack of object-specific information about colonial-era collections and where they reside. Such a digitization project would be the first step in broad-based information- and knowledge-sharing about a particular collections area.The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) may also provide guidelines useful to the restitution of colonial-era collections of African art. When NAGPRA was enacted, there were fears that implementing the legislation would lead to the depletion of museum collections, but that has not occurred. That might have something to do with the time-consuming process of mounting a repatriation claim, but it may have more to do with the process itself empowering Native Americans in the decision-making procedures regarding collections access, care, interpretation, and knowledge-sharing. As Amanda points out, there have been important strides in linking Native American communities with historical objects housed in museum collections. At the request of source communities, these have included the making of replicas to conserve fragile objects held by museums and by the communities themselves. There is also the possibility of communities borrowing objects from the museum for ceremonial use, something that requires the adoption of a more flexible museum mindset about object conservation that considers, for example, a resulting change in an object's condition as evidence of use, not damage. This opens up the possibility to work with partners on the continent to share digital and object collections and to create and circulate joint exhibitions. For example, NMAfA's 2014–2016 exhibition on the photography of Chief S.O. Alonge, the photographer of the court of Benin for sixty years, was developed by NMAfA archivist Amy Staples with travel and collaboration with our Nigerian museum colleagues in mind. After its two-year showing at our museum, the exhibition then opened in fall 2017 as a permanent exhibition at the National Museum in Benin City.It is possible that the decision-making processes developed with regards to restitution of colonial-era collections of African art and antiquities might result in favorable outcomes that enable museums in the West to retain selected objects in their care through joint-custody agreements, long-term loans, or other mechanisms that recognize the legitimate claims to ownership of contested collections but reflect, equally, the positive benefits of placing culturally significant works of art in museums around the world. In a BBC program aired in Ghent on December 2, 2019, the Oba of Benin noted that a limited number of Benin kingdom artworks displayed in museums outside of Africa can serve as effective “cultural ambassadors” demonstrating the kingdom's long and rich history and cultural achievements.In my opinion, it's a great time to be in the museum business and to be working at a museum focused solely on the arts of Africa across time and media. Without having the answers, but knowing that the questions must be asked and the issues must be raised, conversations on restitution offer all museums with colonial-era collections the opportunity to negotiate new ways of working better together with the source communities whose collections form part of our museum holdings. There is real potential to create a sustainable model of integrated museum practice that transforms Africa's cultural sector from within and builds its capacity to deliver its own solutions via sustainable and globally engaged museum practice.

Arts of Africa Gallery