Arts of Global Africa: A Curatorial [Re]Vision of a Museum’s Legacy

all images courtesy the Newark Museum of Art

Since my earliest days as a student of African art, I have been interested in the history of collecting and exhibiting Africa’s arts in the West and, by extension, the politics of representation. This research interest has been, for me, not just academic. My curatorial practice has been shaped by a historical and theoretical understanding of Western museums and museology. This, in turn, has heightened my awareness of institutional contexts and how curators contribute to the production of knowledge about, and reception of, African art. The unconventional history and collection of the Newark Museum (renamed the Newark Museum of Art in 2019) in New Jersey, where I served as a curator for sixteen years, afforded me the latitude to challenge the temporal and geographic boundaries that have long defined Africa’s arts in museums. This essay looks back at how I responded to, and sought to redefine, Newark’s material and conceptual legacies through strategies of collecting and display that focused on modern and contemporary arts of global Africa.

I came to the Newark Museum in 2002 from the Neuberger Museum of Art, where I served as the first staff curator of African Art.¹ The Neuberger was my first curatorial position after several years of fellowships at the National Museum of African Art and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and a string of adjunct teaching appointments at George Washington University, the Corcoran School of Art, and Rutgers University). The Neuberger is part of Purchase College, a progressive arts school located in affluent Westchester county and one of the many campuses of the State University of New York system. Established in 1974, the museum is largely known for its collection of modern and contemporary Western art, the core of which was donated by philanthropist Roy R. Neuberger. A major gift of central African art from Lawrence Gussman, a local patron who began collecting after meeting Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Gabon in the 1950s, led to the establishment of a permanent curatorial position for African art in 1999.

The Neuberger’s collection, though relatively small, was representative of the “classical” African art seen in many US art museums. Such collections have historically focused on tradition-based masks and figural sculptures from West and Central Africa, an enduring canon largely shaped by Western taste over the course of the twentieth century. In addition to the Gussman gift, the Neuberger’s holdings included a group of West African objects collected by Aimee Hirshberg and donated the year the museum opened. The museum’s support base also had a number of long-time collectors of “classical” African art, most notably Marc and Denyse Ginzberg, who donated works to the museum as well.

The masks and figural sculptures in the Neuberger collection, while offering formal connections with the museum’s holdings of modern and contemporary Western art, seemed to me a limited representation the continent’s artistic creativity. In my relatively brief, three-year tenure at the Neuberger, I focused on acquisitions and exhibitions that expanded the typological, temporal, and geographic boundaries of the collection. This included introducing textile-based works like a Yoruba Egúngún masquerade costume as well as examples of mid-twentieth century South African arts of personal adornment into the collection. I organized an exhibition that focused on the artistry of African shields, a genre whose utilitarian nature had largely excluded it from the canon, and another that presented recent paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof, the Neuberger’s first exhibition of a contemporary artist from Africa.² Considered in retrospect, these modest efforts presaged the curatorial strategies I later pursued at the Newark Museum.

Arriving at the Newark Museum in 2002, I found an entirely different institutional context and historical legacy than that of the Neuberger, one that encouraged a creative engagement with—and my rethinking of—the collection. The Newark Museum was established in 1909 by John Cotton Dana, one of the most innovative museum practitioners of the past century. Building on the precedent of the South Kensington Museum in London (now...