SESSION: Africa, Art History, and the (University) Museum: approaches to object-led teaching and display

African artworks, makers, and narratives are increasingly – if belatedly – a focus of British, European and American art markets and exhibitions, with attendant increases in the number of books focused on African art, and aspirations to create more undergraduate and postgraduate teaching courses around this area. At the same time, African material culture remains largely relegated to archaeological, ethnographic or anthropological museum collections, perpetuating its marginalisation within the history of art. Art history departments and museums are challenged to meaningfully integrate African visual and material culture into a broader array of university curricula and displays.

This session will explore issues and themes such as:

What creative methods can we use to teach African art?
How might more accurate conceptions of African art be embedded in University teaching and museum displays?
How might African collections, especially in local museums, be better utilised in history of art pedagogy?
How can archaeological and anthropological collections be integrated into a more complex understanding of African artistic societies?
How can Universities upskill teaching staff in the necessary intellectual frameworks to ensure that the study of African art is not limited by unsuitable art historical approaches and epistemological frameworks?
What resources are needed for researching and teaching African art?
Whose voices need to be heard in any such endeavour?
How can universities ensure that the teaching of African art does not further embed notions of ‘otherness’ or ‘exoticness’?
What creative methods can we use to teach African art?

Session Convenors:

Eva Namusoke, The Fitzwilliam Museum

Teresa Soley, University of Cambridge

Neal Spencer, The Fitzwilliam Museum

Speakers:

Harry Wilson Kapatika, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg

Towards a Pedagogy of African Aesthetic Epistemology: Epistemic Artefacts, Restitution, & African Indigenous Knowledge’s

Behind the need for the meaningful integration of African aesthetic and material culture into the broader array of university curricula, there is an outstanding question of the epistemological framework that is attendant with narratives of unreturned African artefacts. That is, if the fundamental theory of knowledge employed to define and describe African material heritage is not rooted in actual African expertise, theories of knowledge and concepts, then the interpretation of African art and artefacts will be foundationally flawed and epistemically deficient. In this presentation, I draw on a novel account of the African epistemic artefact, which refers to things that are produced to fulfil some epistemic end, as inextricably linked to some knowledge production process. I argue that by engaging with epistemic artefacts as a generative conceptual framework, some examples of African artefacts like ritual drums are epistemically significant in that they undercut colonial, reductive, and epistemologically ethnocentric readings of African Indigenous knowledge. I contend that the under-explored epistemic significance of Indigenous expertise and material culture in theorising knowledge contributes to a novel reading of the restitution debate. Moreover, it reveals an African aesthetic epistemology rooted in materialised forms of Indigenous knowledge, illustrating significant elements of the epistemic lifeways of African epistemic collectives that subvert traditional interpretations of the African history of ideas in art and epistemology. Thus, African epistemic artefacts offer a unique opportunity to develop an inter-disciplinary pedagogy which allows students and researchers confronted with African artefacts to “think through things” in a non-epistemically marginalising manner.

Chris Wingfield, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, University of East Anglia

Tribing and Untribing the University Museum – the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, the Sainsbury Centre, and the Ideology of Tribalismb Plastic Artists in 1971 Damascus

Established a century apart, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (est. 1884) and the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia (est. 1978) present, at first sight, two radically different frames in which object-led teaching relating to the arts of Africa has been pursued. The former might be connected to the colonial context of its creation and the globally comparative project established by the nascent discipline of Anthropology (including Archaeology), while the modernist frame of the latter apparently subverts such evolutionary framings, showing works of African art alongside modernist European works on a seemingly level playing field, in an institution ostensibly dedicated to the study of World Art.

What connects them, however, is their framing of African artefacts in terms of ethnic, or more properly ‘tribal’ identities. As long ago as 1971, Archie Mafeje, the Cambridge-trained South African Anthropologist, connected the ideology of tribalism to European colonialism, and particularly to practices of indirect rule. Half a century later, has it become any more possible for University museums in Europe to remove these tribal ‘blinkers’ when presenting historical collections from Africa? How might the acknowledgement of the continuing power of the ideology of tribalism in these institutions mark the beginning of its gradual undoing, a modest contribution towards the pursuit of what Benjamin P. Davis has recently called ‘Another Humanity’?

Lennon Mhishi, University of British Columbia

Louisa Minkin, University of the Arts London

African Belongings in Museums as Invitations for Re-Worlding

Through an exploration of ongoing work with African belongings and other forms of material culture currently in the custody of museums, we ask what kinds of invitations are being made when we encounter belongings as opportunities for re-worlding. In considering the kinds of relationships forged by researchers, artists, students and museum workers, we ask: Can ‘objects’ as belongings help us transgress the infrastructures of containment stabilised by their co-optation into the ethnographic, archaeological and art-historical? We draw from work we have done with projects such as Prisoners of Love and Reconnecting Objects to suggest that this orientation to African belongings might open up small ways of holding, touching, feeling, sharing and escaping containment: the haptic and affective, spiritual and temporally unstable encounters, which can become groundings for small acts of refusal and world-building, that are affective, but not overdetermined, by the object-orientation that the museum might hold sacred. In this vein, we also suggest here the concept of “museological common sense”, following Stuart Hall’s position on common sense, to argue that a re-worlding approach to African belongings might find better conditions of germination away from the museological common sense that undergirds containment and carceral practices as normative- in relation to African belongings, as well as to those of other peoples who have historically been subjected to a worlding shaped by colonial violence and extraction. This also becomes an opportunity to craft African art and museological futures that tend to the possibilities of making, and making other worlds, especially as we confront epochal shifts and other global dis-orders.

Kate Cowcher, School of Art History, University of St Andrews

Facing the Luxury of Amnesia: Teaching with and Learning from African Collections in Scotland

Barbadian-Scottish artist, Alberta Whittle, defines the “luxury of amnesia” as the ability to forget difficult or contested histories. Reflecting on her own experiences of walking through Scottish museums as a child, Whittle recalls witnessing such “luxury” in the selective curation of certain stories. For Whittle, colonial incursions in the Caribbean, from which Scotland distinctly benefitted, were often conspicuously obscured. Whittle’s conception of the “luxury of amnesia” is relevant, too, beyond the latter – to the many, diverse African collections, from Edinburgh to Campbeltown, that reveal (or conceal) centuries of entanglement between Scotland and the continent.

This paper introduces teaching at St Andrews focused on active, ethical engagement of Scotland’s Africa collections. Since 2022, the course “Scotland and the Arts of Africa” has aimed to introduce students to the arts of the continent and to the critical issues implicated in nearby collections. The course has collaborated with the McManus Gallery (Dundee), whose African collections are connected to Presbyterian missionary activity. Assignments are designed to introduce students to the myriad, urgent concerns regarding Scotland’s African collections, including, but not limited to, provenance research, the voices of diaspora and source communities, and related pressing issues, such as restitution. Teaching is designed to equip students to confront the “luxury of amnesia” in and beyond Scottish institutions. This paper does not purport to offer a “best practice” model; it shares teaching experiences from Scotland as a response to the call to reflect on how to meaningfully teach the arts of Africa.