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10 Framing Practices Artists’Voicesandthe PowerofSelf-Representation cHRIstIne mUllen kReAmeR “Who is Olu Oguibe?” An artist! is the answer, not an Igbo or Uliist or whatever else. No one asks “who is Jeff Koons?” and David Hockney is not studied as a Cockney artist. —OLU OGUIBE qTD. IN SIMON OTTENBERG, neW traditions FroM nigeria In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford raised the problem of cross-cultural translations, challenging the notion of ethnographic authority and asking the fundamental question: “Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity or authenticity ?”1 This question has great relevance to discussions of museum exhibitions as narratives about cultural production from Africa and to considerations by African artists on and off the continent. Since the mid-1980s there has been a shift in the strategies museums adopt to enhance participation and to ensure that museums remain responsive and relevant to the communities they serve. Of particular interest is the extent to which those who are the focus of an exhibition play a role in their own representation. Increasingly, museum professionals recognize the benefits of exhibition models that rethink the singular, authoritative voice of the museum and embrace the telling of complex, multivocal narratives resonant with the realities of lived experience. This chapter considers the questions of representation and interviewing as they have been employed in ethnographic research and as they are used in the creation of exhibitions of African art, particularly as strategies to incorporate the voices of those represented. I examine museum exhibitions as specific contexts for the dis- frAMinG prActices 147 semination of those narratives, and I draw attention to selected museum exhibitions that can serve as useful models for presenting Africa’s so-called traditional arts. With regard to contemporary African art, exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, where I have worked since 2000, are illustrative of an equally important commitment to ensure that the voices and perspectives of contemporary artists are incorporated into exhibitions featuring their work. The creation of any exhibition, regardless of its subject matter, requires familiarity with a vast body of literature that is used to frame the approach a curator or a team adopts in selecting and interpreting objects and ideas. Scholarship on the arts of Africa has typically drawn upon research methodologies employed over the years in such distinct disciplines as art history, anthropology, history, folklore, philosophy , and so on. Research results have reflected the prevailing disciplinary perspectives , and their limitations, about Africa at particular points of time, and these perspectives influenced the ways that African peoples and cultures were represented in scholarly research and in museum exhibitions. Over time, this interdisciplinary approach has resulted in the production of discursive, dynamic, and complex narratives about African creativity. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to present a historiography of fieldwork methodologies employed in the study and interpretation of the arts of Africa.2 The discipline certainly has been influenced by the approaches employed in the field of anthropology, cognizant of its earlier evolutionary paradigm for documenting peoples and cultures and the “epistemological, methodological, ethical, and political implications” of anthropological field research.3 Along with art historical methods, Africanist art historians have employed participant-observation, surveys , questionnaires, oral histories, and interviews—grounded in fieldwork—to uncover the forms, contexts, meanings, and intentions of “traditional” and “contemporary ” artistic practices in Africa.4 In regions without long-standing written methods for archiving information, these research strategies have been particularly relied upon to place so-called traditional art forms within historical, cultural, stylistic, and aesthetic contexts. Oral histories and interviews are two research methodologies that are particularly relevant to museums that collect and exhibit African material culture. These field methods personalize the collection and analysis of data, requiring one to take into account not only the timing and conditions of interviews but also the personalities , motivations, and subjectivities of interviewers and interviewees at particular points in time. Interviews offer firsthand perspectives of those engaged in the production of culture, yet these insights are by no means objective, informed as they are by “the preoccupations and prejudices of those engaged in the act of representing .”5 One of the more potent sites where the dynamics of these issues play out is the museum exhibition—a scholarly undertaking that involves research and draws in part on the methods of fieldwork. Of relevance to this chapter are exhibitions of African art, where the voices of Africans and people of African descent [18.223.172.252] Project MUSE...

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