A longstanding challenge of curating African art is connecting traditional objects with audiences more attuned to the spectacle of the contemporary. To that African art historians must add an additional challenge: The vast territorial and historical scope of the continent and the colonial legacies of many collections further complicate the presentation of such material in the staid context of the museum. This latter problem, of course, was at the heart of Frederick Lamp's See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art over fifteen years ago, which sought to resituate sculptural and decorative art in the rich haptic and sonic contexts in which it was conceived (Lamp 2004). The ongoing exhibition Heroes: Principles of African Greatness does a similar kind of work, adding new layers of interpretation and context to art from the past two centuries (Fig. 1).
Heroes,...