BELOW: Two views of the new Encounters installation. Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. CERÁMICA DE LOS ANCESTROS Washington, DC—The National Museum of the American Indian is planning to mount a new exhibition that illuminates Central America’s diverse and dynamic ancestral heritage through a selection of more than 120 objects. For thousands of years, Central America has been home to vibrant civilizations, each with unique and sophisticated ways of life, value systems, and arts. The ceramics these peoples left behind, combined with recent archaeological discoveries, help tell the stories of these dynamic cultures and their achievements. Cerámica de los Ancestros: Central America’s Past Revealed examines seven regions representing distinct Central American cultural areas that are today part of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Spanning the period from 1000 BC to the present, the ceramics featured—which have been selected from the museum’s collection of more than 12,000 pieces from the region—will be augmented with significant examples of work in gold, jade, shell, and stone. These objects illustrate the richness, complexity, and dynamic qualities of the Central American civilizations that were connected to peoples in South America, Mesoamerica, and the Caribbean through social and trade networks sharing knowledge, technology, artworks, and systems of status and political organization. The exhibition will be on view March 29, 2013–September 1, 2014. ENCOUNTERS: THE ARTS OF AFRICA Champaign, IL—Last October, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign opened a reinstallation of its African gallery under the title Encounters: The Arts of Africa. A newly renovated and redesigned space, the gallery invites visitors to experience the objects not only as visually compelling works of art in their own right, but also as objects of encounter—objects that can “tell” stories about the broader social contexts and often fraught global histories through which they have journeyed. The gallery’s thematic groupings and visitor-activated iPad videos of artist interviews, masquerades, and descriptive vignettes assist in the telling of those stories while drawing out resonances among the objects on view. Encounters features artworks predominantly from West and Central Africa, most of which were donated to the museum by the Richard J. Faletti family and Cecilia and Irwin Smiley. Displayed in conjunction with these traditional pieces are works by several African and African American studio-based artists, creating dialogues that blur the boundaries between “traditional” and “contemporary” art practices. Also featured are a number of outstanding artworks lent by museums and private collectors that complement the visual and narrative power of the objects with which they have been partnered. MUSEUM news Female figure/vessel. Greater Nicoya, Lenea Vieja area, Costa Rica. AD 800–1200. Terracotta, clay slip, paint. National Museum of the American Indian, 22/8837. Photo: Ernesto Amoroso, NMAI.
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