ART on view African Art in Motion The New African Galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts FIGS. 2a&b: Mask. Luba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. 19th century. Wood, pigments. H: 49.5 cm. Gift of Stephen, Peter, and Michael Pflaum in memory of their grandfather, Arthur G. Cohen, MIA 53.14. 74 FIG. 1: Installation view of the new African galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. An ancient Egyptian striding figure (c. 300 BCE) stands between art from the Yoruba people and Central African metal blades. Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. By Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers Egypt is part of Africa, of course, but ancient Egyptian art was long considered anything but African. When I began at the MIA in 2008 as its first curator of African art, ancient Egypt had been under the purview of the curator of Chinese art for more than three decades. As the Egyptian antiquities were finally passed to the proper department in 2009, it was clear to me that any new installation of African art would have to present a more holistic view of the continent’s artistic production (fig. 1). What follows is a history of the MIA’s African art collection and how the recent redesign of its African art galleries has transformed the way we see and think about these objects. Founded at the end of the nineteenth century, in 1915 the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) moved its infant collection of paintings and sculptures to a purpose-built neoclassical building whose majestic entry stairs lead up to an imposing colonnaded portico. The following year, the MIA acquired some 698 ancient Egyptian artifacts from the museum at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia. Though the MIA deaccessioned more than ninety percent of it in 1958 in order to acquire contemporary art, this group constitutes the first African art to enter the museum’s collection, even if it likely was not noted as such at the time.
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