History of Art

I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art @ Penn with some friends this afternoon, to see the current exhibition of "The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now," as well as the accompanying multi-artist performance project, "Endless Shout": http://icaphila.org/ I thought that some of the langauge of this vision might speak to/help incite some of the interactivity that we are aiming for in our own exhibit @ BMC:

Please read this powerful story about the artist Kerry James Marshall painting black figures into the canon:
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/kerry-james-marshall-artist.html

There's a trace of the exhibit--along with some interesting
continuing "back and forth" talk--archived on Serendip @
/oneworld/backtalk

@ the end of that thread, see esp. Michelle Obama on "Museums and Racial Relics":
www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/opinion/charles-blow-of-museums-and-racial-relics.html

            The art piece I selected is a Dan Tribe ceremonial spoon from West Africa. I felt compelled to research this art piece because I first saw it pictured on a card that I had taken from the front desk of Canaday Library. On the back of the card, there is a description of the spoon, which helped me locate it in the TriArte database. Although I was able to find the spoon in the catalog, I noticed that the description on the back of the card differs from the description on the database. The card tells us that it can be dated back to the late 19^th century, but the database tells us that it is from the early 20^th century. The card says that the spoon is from Liberia, but the database says that it is from Côte d’Ivoire.

video of the ceremony and the ndoli jowei

http://sierraleoneheritage.org/videogallery/video.php?name=Sowei

video of the naming process of the ndoli jowei

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW8-Ni-MeN4

Rosa Nanasi Haas

Exhibiting Africa

Monique Scott

Oct. 21, 2016

Edun Ara Oshe Shango (Axe Dance Wand)

this was my second time at the Barnes... the first being this summer while the Nari Ward exhibition was up. i went for the opening reception/dance performance and it was wonderful. i have a bunch of photos i'll try to upload later (having tech issues rn). that experience was drastically different from our visit this past week; I didn't even go into the upper-level galleries when I came in the summer.

The NMAAHC was SUCH an incredible experience. I've never been in any institutional space and felt so full, so home, so real. I hope that we can bring some sort of architectural meta-narrative into our exhibit like that of the NMAAHC. I don't mean a progress-driven, linear story, but maybe a multi-layered, multi-temporal way of moving through the space, not just in our display of the pieces. I also had a conversation with Alliyah in ed class about incorporating some innovative lighting techniques in our exhibit... i want us to think deeply about orienting the audience... a self-reflexive confrontation? how can we do this? I wanna workshop ideas.

"A primitive race, transported into an Anglo Saxon environment and held in subjugection to that fundamentally alien influence, was bound to undergo the soul stirring experiences which always find their expression in great art"

- Albert Barnes