In Amalgam, the spring 2019 exhibition Theaster Gates created for Paris's Palais de Tokyo, the artist focuses on the 1912 evacuation of interracial individuals from the island of Malaga, southeast of Brunswick, Maine. Casts of face masks—including ones in styles recognizable as Bamana, Baule, and Songye, as well as ones that merge features of different genres—appear throughout the exhibition as markers of the African ancestry of Malaga's early-twentieth-century residents. The installation Island Modernity Institute and Department of Tourism shows face masks displayed in cases as well as in and around a cabinet. A neon sign in the cabinet announces, “In the end nothing is pure” (Fig. 1). Gates's statement highlights the absurdity of wanting to assure racial purity on Malaga or anywhere. Placed in proximity to the casts of face masks, it also serves as a reminder that the use of cultural or ethnic group names to...
Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa Unavailable
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi is Associate Professor of art history at Emory University. Her scholarship draws on extensive fieldwork in West Africa as well as archival research and object-focused study in Africa, Europe, and North America. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and 5 Continents Editions published her first book, Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa. The CMA released the book in 2015 in conjunction with a major international exhibition organized by the museum. [email protected]
Yaëlle Biro is Associate Curator for the Arts of Africa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She completed her dissertation in 2010 at the Sorbonne on African arts' commercial networks during the first decades of the twentieth century. Her exhibition African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde focused on the reception of African arts in America in the 1910s-20s and received the AAMC 2012 Outstanding Small Exhibition Prize. Her book Fabriquer le regard: Marchands, réseaux et objets d'art africains à l'aube du XXe siècle was published in 2018 by Les Presses du Réel. [email protected]
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi is Associate Professor of art history at Emory University. Her scholarship draws on extensive fieldwork in West Africa as well as archival research and object-focused study in Africa, Europe, and North America. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and 5 Continents Editions published her first book, Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa. The CMA released the book in 2015 in conjunction with a major international exhibition organized by the museum. [email protected]
Yaëlle Biro is Associate Curator for the Arts of Africa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She completed her dissertation in 2010 at the Sorbonne on African arts' commercial networks during the first decades of the twentieth century. Her exhibition African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde focused on the reception of African arts in America in the 1910s-20s and received the AAMC 2012 Outstanding Small Exhibition Prize. Her book Fabriquer le regard: Marchands, réseaux et objets d'art africains à l'aube du XXe siècle was published in 2018 by Les Presses du Réel. [email protected]
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Yaëlle Biro; Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa. African Arts 2019; 52 (4): 1–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00495
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