Never at Rest: African Art at the University of Wisconsin

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All photos courtesy of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, except where otherwise noted

When it opened on October 21, 2011, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison displayed the first permanent installation of African art in the University’s history (Fig. 1). The gallery’s forty-two works, representing about one-fifth of the museum’s total collections, were assembled through piecemeal donations and the concerted efforts of faculty members. They stand as testaments to the shifting acquisition and pedagogical priorities of various institutional stakeholders over the previous six decades. While some of these works would find pride of place at any major museum, many also display long histories of adaptation in and out of the continent and/or could be classified as forgeries, reproductions, or works intended for the tourist market. Others are products of ongoing cross-cultural or cross-historical dialogues, or come from contexts that otherwise fall outside of typically valorized time periods for more canonical examples of their types. Though recent scholarship continues to interrogate the prevailing hierarchies of artistic and intellectual value attached to objects with similar histories (Ogbechie 2011; Forni and Steiner 2015), museums often choose to not knowingly display such works or label them as such. Yet the curators of the Chazen’s installation (including the two authors of this essay) were largely bound by the collections at their disposal; collections that largely differ from still-prevailing expectations about authenticity, aesthetic quality, and cultural purity that drive the majority of museum exhibitions of African art.

This essay presents a history and analysis of African art at UW-Madison in order to consider the lessons to be learned from a collection that, like many university museums and art galleries—in particular, smaller institutions and/or those with restricted acquisitions budgets—was built more with an eye toward pedagogical utility than with acquiring the finest works available. We find this discussion to be particularly important in the context of teaching-oriented university museums, which carry a special responsibility to raise questions of theory and method.¹ As such, in this essay we ask the following: What responsibility do permanent installations of African arts in university museums have to channel, engage, or collide with recent scholarship? How can, or should, they push and/or restrict the shifting boundaries of African artistic and cultural history? And finally, what kinds of objects and curatorial practices can be brought to engage such questions? In what follows, we trace the history of the teaching, exhibition, and collection of African art at UW-Madison, and also provide a critical analysis of works in its collections, to consider the lessons it may present for the future of teaching-oriented collections of African art in university museums.

DEVELOPING A COLLECTION: 1962–2009

For nearly eight decades after it began collecting art in 1885, UW-Madison lacked a permanent art gallery in which to exhibit its collections.² This changed in 1962, when Mrs. Bryan Reid and Baird Brittingham’s transformative donation provided funds for the construction of what would become the Elvehjem Arts Center when it opened in September of 1970.³ The gift spurred the University’s commitment to expanding the new museum’s collection. Collectors of African art around the country took notice: a Chokwe pwo mask from the collection of Lester Wunderman, for example, is one of fourteen African works the New York-based advertising executive gifted to the Elvehjem in 1962 (Fig. 2). In a letter accompanying his donation, Wunderman cited the University’s art history department and its newly created African Studies Program and argued that “these objects might serve a more fruitful purpose [in Madison] than in some city such as [New York] with its heavy concentration of museums and galleries.”⁴ Like many established mid-twentieth century collectors, Wunderman’s collection focused on masks and sculptural forms from western and west-central Africa: a personal collecting choice ultimately informed by discourses of modernist primitivism which privileged wooden, ritually or locally used masks and sculptures...