Art History 579
Honors Seminar in African Art: Exhibiting Africa: Ways of Showing, Ways of Knowing

This Honors seminar is being taught in conjunction with the first permanent African Art gallery in the newly expanded Chazen Museum of Art in October 2011. Students enrolled in this seminar will explore the (im)possibilities of representing African arts, cultures, and histories in a museum. Using the new African Art Gallery exhibit, students will be asked to evaluate the installation critically and consider different approaches to museum exhibitions (art-historical, anthropological, historical, virtual, etc.). You will be involved with the public programming that accompanies the exhibition (actual and virtual (audio) tours, lectures, scholars’ and artists’ presentations, films, music, dance, spoken-word performances, etc.). A 2-day fieldtrip (optional) to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Indianapolis Museum of Art is being planned.

We will begin by considering the current debates about museums and exhibitions, the theories and practices surrounding issues of representation. We start with broad discussions about the nature of museums, different museum perspectives and methods, issues raised in exhibiting objects from cultures, as George Stocking would say, “…whose similarity or difference is experienced by alien observers as in some profound way problematic,” for these are the objects of “others.” Then we will critically evaluate these issues with reference to representations of African arts, cultures, and histories in the new African art gallery as the focus of our assessments/evaluations, critiques, and suggestions for approaches in the future.

Prerequisites: Honors Student; permission of instructor.