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What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Sommaire
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art
Karen E. Milbourne
Résumé
We all have stories we tell ourselves. These are the narratives we create to shape who we are as individuals, communities and nations. Institutions play a role in the shaping of these narratives, but not all institutions are the same.
None of us can know for certain what image comes to the mind of another when it comes to picturing an institution–if it is a university campus, government building, museum, or something else altogether. But as Pierre Bourdieu has argued in relation to the art world, perception of what gets considered to be art extends beyond the relationship between an object and its aesthetics. It also includes concepts of value, classification and sociopolitical influence–the very things shaped by institutions. Bourdieu describes a field of cultural production with a “shared language” in which “the ‘subject’ of the production of the art-work–of its value but also of its meaning–is not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality, but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field.”1 This paper looks to how art world institutions like museums “produce” visions of who is an artist and what is an artwork. What is at stake is how the narratives formed within museums, galleries and other platforms promote, undermine, move and institutionalise existing gendered, racial, ethnic, class and generational power differentials.2
Within the artworld there are multiple types of institutions. There are those founded on empire building, like the British Museum, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Louvre and others, but we must remember that this is not the only kind of model. The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos), was founded in many ways as a response to such institutions. Rather than reinforcing narratives of political conquest and economic domination through displaying of the ownership of historical treasures, the CCA, Lagos has generated narratives grounded in the modes of the contemporary art world but predicated on the dynamism of diverse Nigerian approaches. Each model provides particular insights into the moments and eras that shape the past, and each plays a role in generating the narratives that will become our history for the future. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art is part of yet a different institutional model. It is worth examining its history, however, as it provides a lens through which to understand the times and some factors that influence who, and what, came to represent African art and artists over the past fifty-plus years, particularly within an American context.
1
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 261.
2
While this paper is not focused on a discussion of race, the history and legacies of racial constructs are inextricable from the history of exhibiting African and Black art anywhere. For an insightful analysis of the challenges of institutional approaches to exhibiting African American artists in the United States, see Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). In it, she addresses questions that are only further complicated and amplified for women artists of colour: Are they artists first, or Black first? Should their work speak to what being Black in a racialised world means, or should it speak to more personal demons? And do race (and gender)-based exhibitions just give the white (and male) world a chance to say, ‘Look what we did for you,’ with no intention of implementing institutional change?
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 261.
2
While this paper is not focused on a discussion of race, the history and legacies of racial constructs are inextricable from the history of exhibiting African and Black art anywhere. For an insightful analysis of the challenges of institutional approaches to exhibiting African American artists in the United States, see Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). In it, she addresses questions that are only further complicated and amplified for women artists of colour: Are they artists first, or Black first? Should their work speak to what being Black in a racialised world means, or should it speak to more personal demons? And do race (and gender)-based exhibitions just give the white (and male) world a chance to say, ‘Look what we did for you,’ with no intention of implementing institutional change?
