Presentations will take place via the video conferencing app ZOOM. Please register in advance in order to access the program.
This illustrated lecture presents an opportunity to discuss the dissimilarities between African and Western approaches to curatorial methodologies of contemporary art from the African continent. Beginning with objects of African cultural expression entering into the collections of art museums in the United States in the late 1800’s, University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate Kymberly S. Newberry, will consider modern day dilemmas of contextualizing African artworks once they are placed in US museums.
While curating is a privileged endeavor, it can present great dilemmas and be viewed as a form of…translating.
According to German writer and philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, the translator ‘must broaden and deepen his own language with the foreign one.’ For the curator, the task of properly and respectably placing African art into Western museums, maintaining the essence, and original meaning of the artwork…translating, can be a complicated undertaking.
Newberry will also offer her perspectives on radical shifts in the various roles of the museum during these critical times of social and political change, and their responsibilities as spaces of empathy that together with community co-construction can heighten our sense of connectedness through the grace of art.
Presented by Kymberly S. Newberry, PhD student, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Image: Cheik Ledy, Non! Comprendre, acrylic on canvas, 1995
