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ART on view 76 people of the three-corner region attached objects to certain names or stories in order to increase profits. If they did sell names and stories along with objects, then artists’ and dealers’ abilities to study their audiences and meet expectations of their clientele may have surpassed the acuity of some of those same supporters. An untold number of historical circumstances and individuals have occasioned the creation, use, and circulation of eye-catching sculptures and other arts. Not automatons in a predetermined cultural sphere, threecorner region artists, patrons, and other community members have responded and continue to respond to specific individuals and specific circumstances when they engage in any activity, including creation, sponsorship, or promotion of the arts. Thus, a work’s correspondence to an art-historical style defined by cultural or ethnic group may reveal little, if anything, about that work other than how Western scholars and connoisseurs have categorized it. Rather, each object, assemblage, installation, or performance offers boundless possibilities for considering the historical dynamism, localized contexts, individual agency, and aesthetic concerns contributing to and shaped by that work’s production and reception. In recognition of the lack, inaccessibility, or speciousness of information regarding particular objects in collections, the exhibition’s publication, authored by Gagliardi, excludes entries for individual works. It does not confirm an object’s attribution as Senufo, nor does it offer speculation about a work’s biography. It also declines to promote or confirm an object’s reattribution, to identify an artist’s hand, or to estimate an object’s age. A reported provenance for an object reflects only information about the work’s history as provided by a former or current owner or as reproduced in a publication. This information always requires cautious assessment. Given the lack of specific information about many objects, labels in the exhibition draw on published interpretations of comparable forms documented in the three-corner region by scholars and other observers in order to provide necessarily tentative information about possibilities for objects’ creation, use, or circulation. Some of these texts also serve as starting points for the captions accompanying the illustrations in this essay. References provided within the captions reflect the larger aim of the exhibition and its related publication to inspire continued research that emphasizes particularities of singular objects, individuals, and observations.


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