Art of Central Africa at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

In terms of arts and entertainment, Indianapolis, Indiana, is known for its automobile race, its International Violin Competition, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (IMA). African art scholars and aficionados alike associate the city and its museum specifically with businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997), the namesake of the museum's suite of African art galleries (Fig. 1). To this day, his vast collection, mostly donated in 1989, constitutes the bulk of the museum's more than 1,700 African holdings, making it among the largest of its kind in the country and one of the few truly encyclopedic African collections anywhere in the world (Figs. 2–3).¹ Thanks to his vision and the efforts of the museum's longtime (and now emeritus) curator Theodore (Ted) Celenko, it collected and exhibited the arts of northern Africa and contemporary African art long before many other museums or private collectors...