A rise in social justice movements around the world over the last fifteen years has led to new questions about museum collections of African art in the Global North. Provenance, or the history of ownership, lies at the heart of ethical concerns that surround African objects in museums today. Who are the artists that made them? How did they get here? And how do the material qualities of the objects address these questions and interact with the space they inhabit in museums today?

Since the late 20th century, many curators have used the idea of the “life cycle” as a framework to organize African art exhibitions in the United States. Among the most influential were Roy Sieber at Indiana University and his former student Christopher D. Roy at the University of Iowa. The life cycle paradigm situates African art in a ritual context, where an object’s role in cycles of behavior determines its artistic meaning and significance.

This exhibition departs from the life cycle paradigm to pursue alternate paths for considering the histories of African objects. It examines the interventions that people have made to objects over time and the implications of such departures from the object’s initial making. Organized into three zones, this exhibition explores artistic agency as well as ethical and material dimensions of African art collections from the University of Iowa and Indiana University, where innovative and collaborative research on African art remains a strong legacy.

Curating African Art in America: Connecting Collections in Iowa and Indiana

This exhibition grew out of a partnership between the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University and the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa. Curators of African art Cory Gundlach (Stanley Museum) and Allison Martino (Eskenazi Museum) co-taught the course “Curating African Art in America” during the spring 2024 semester, during which students contributed to this exhibition.

The course brought students enrolled at both Indiana University and the University of Iowa in conversation with one another, using a synchronous hybrid learning platform. Class discussions explored museum representations of Africa in the United States, with attention to provenance research, the ethics of collecting, and curatorial strategies. Students worked collaboratively on this exhibition as they researched objects in the collections of both museums and experimented with display strategies. The course instructors and additional museum staff also contributed to realizing this exhibition.

Support for the course at the University of Iowa was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Student Curators