94 An African Initiative at the Philadelphia Museum of Art By Kristina Van Dyke ART on view FIG. 1 (left): Installation view of Look Again with Kongo nkisi in the foreground. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout, 2016. FIG. 2 (bottom): Installation view of Look Again showing a detail of the goldweight collection. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout, 2016. FIG. 3 (right): Installation view of Look Again showing the wall of Kota reliquary fi gures. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout, 2016. Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art is one of fi ve exhibitions that comprise a wider initiative called Creative Africa at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) during the summer of 2016. While four of the exhibitions explore more recent forms of cultural expression, including architecture, fashion, textiles, and photography, Look Again provides a historical anchor for the project. It features more than 150 works of art produced between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries in West and Central Africa, borrowed almost exclusively from the collection of the Penn Museum (formerly called the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), the exhibition’s co-organizer. I was invited to be the guest curator of the exhibition, which I developed over a period of two years in close collaboration with John Vick, project assistant curator at PMA.1 Though the PMA has acquired a handful of African sculptures and textiles over the years, it has not actively collected art from the continent.2 Founded in 1876, the museum’s holdings focus on art from the last two millennia produced in European and Asian contexts, as well as more recent American ones. PMA’s decision not to collect African art was formalized in the 1930s and ’40s in a series of agreements with the Penn Museum. Both institutions committed to building complementary as opposed to overlapping collections that they would actively lend to one another. In essence, they aspired to create an encyclopedic collection for the city of Philadelphia spread across two institutions.3 The Penn Museum, founded in 1887, includes around one million objects from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacifi c Islands. By the time the agreements between PMA and the Penn Museum were made, it had established the core of its presentday African collection, numbering over 20,000 FIG. 4 (right): Power bundle. Culture uncertain, South Africa. Before 1912. Purchased from W. O. Oldman, 1912. Horns, glass beads, lizard foot, leather thong. W: 36.5 cm. Penn Museum, Philadelphia, inv. AF3945. Photo courtesy of the Penn Museum.
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