History of Art

First off, my apologies for posting so late. This has been a rough weekend for me, starting before we even went to the museum and as I tried to write plenty of times, I simply could not find the words. However, I was reflecting back to our time spent in the Penn Museum, and I started to see parallels, connections, and points of entry. So here I go:

http://www.penn.museum/exhibitions/special-exhibitions/imagine-africa

http://www.penn.museum/sites/imagineafrica/about/

thinking about a crowdsourced exhibit, in terms of feedback and interactions between viewers and what that entails. whiteboards? movable boards? some ideas for our exhibit?

This is just a taste of more to come!

This week we looked at two foundational texts of museum representations of Africa written by, Susan Vogel and Arthur Danto. While their arguments and perspective are important to positioning ourselves in questioning the museum’s intentions in displaying Blackness; particularly Africa. Whereas in the Wilson and Geismar readings we look ahead to the future. For all texts we believe it is important to analyze the ideas as much as the word choice each author chose to articulate those discussions. It is found in the way these articles are formatted, but also a way for us to begin thinking about the way we plan on describing the objects and curate our story through the labels found in the exhibition.

        Museums are unique spaces that have the ability to promote their works and exhibitions as both entertaining and educational. In Reinventing Africa, Coombes details the crucial role that British and other European museums played in the creation of stereotypes of Africa from 1890 to 1913, which were upheld by both public and private agendas. Coombes begins this history in Benin, where Brits attacked and took over Benin City because of a trade dispute, and ultimately imperialism. This conquest was a critical example of the “civilizing” influence of Britain in African societies. The concept of degeneration, meaning in this case the loss of moral qualities deemed normal or desirable, became a common topic in the British public sphere in regards to Benin.

For Reference