Power & Purpose - Museum Exhibition Guide

"Baule: African Art/Western Eyes," which opened at the Yale University Art Gallery, on August 30, is the first museum exhibition to offer a comprehensive look at the arts of the Baule people of Ivory Coast. It presents approximately 140 artworks, drawn from 60 public and private collections, through a variety of installation approaches that allow them to be seen both in the distinctive ways intended by their creators and in the traditional Western museum manner. By Susan Vogel

This essay evaluates how the field of African art history deals with the
problem of cultural and discursive changes deriving from its canonization of specific objects of African art by interrogating the Mbari architecture of the Owerri-Igbo, a ritual complex of distinctive practices that is largely extinct, and whose archival inscription and contemporary interpretations are thus open to debate.

What is African time? Or perhaps we should ask instead,"What time is Africa's?" Is it now? Has it passed? Where, and when, is African art history? By John Peffer, African Arts, 2005.

In the African context, shrines are cultural signposts that help one understand and read the ethnic, territorial, and social lay of the land. The contributions gathered here by Allan Charles Dawson demonstrate how African shrines help to define ethnic boundaries, shape group identity, and symbolically articulate a society's connection with the land it occupies.

Everyone knows the powers and values of secrecy, and everyone knows its dangers. Secrecy, with its ability both to conceal and to reveal, is "rooted in the most basic experience of what it is to live as one human being among others, needing both to hide and to share, both to explore and to beware of
the unknown" (Bok 1982:28) By Mary H. Nooter, African Arts,1993.

“Invented” out of a history of colonial displacement and the modernist art movement, African art has long been valued for its supposedly precolonial and tribal qualities. Objects made within a traditional context are deemed as authentic, whereas others made for sale, often imitating traditional styles, are deemed as fake. While such a distinction continues to be upheld and perpetuated by different actors in the transnational African art trade, I argue that the regenerative vision of time and diversified geography of interactions have begun to challenge the pervasiveness and inconvertibility of authentic and fake in African art. Specifically, I use my study of the African art market in Lomé and a Chinese collection and display of African art in Beijing as starting points to look at the constructedness of authenticity, and the time and space of the fake. The aim of this article is to show the effects of market commoditisation and changing geographies of participation in reinforcing and destabilising the distinction of real and fake in African art.