95 works and featuring sculpture, masks, jewelry, ritual wear, textiles, and utilitarian objects from nearly every major cultural area of the African continent. Most of the objects in the collection were acquired between 1891 and 1937, often in large lots supplied by dealers such as William Oldman, Henri Pareyn, J. F. G. Umlauff, and William Webster, among others.4 Look Again represents another chapter in the ongoing collaborative approach to collection sharing between the Penn Museum and PMA, which provides an important model for other museums that did not commit to collecting African art early on.5 Reframing the Penn Museum’s anthropological collection in an art historical context offered new perspectives on it not only for Philadelphia visitors, but also for the caretakers of the collection and Africanist scholars more generally. The collaborative exhibition development process undertaken by PMA and the Penn Museum provided opportunities for lively interdisciplinary exchange between social scientists and humanities scholars, a surprisingly rare occurrence within the study of African material culture. This exchange informed the shape and scope of PMA’s exhibition as well as thoughts on how the African collection will be reinstalled at the Penn Museum by Kate Quinn, director of exhibitions and public programs, and University of Pennsylvania professor of sociology and Africana studies, Tukufu Zuberi, after Look Again closes. One can imagine similar types of dialogs and collaborations developing between object-rich anthropological institutions and collection-poor art museums in the United States and Europe, animating collections and scholarly discourse about them as a result. The larger Creative Africa initiative suggests that PMA is thinking about how to create an African presence in the institution going forward, given its lack of collection and committed expertise. By inviting participation in the project from its own curators of photography, costume and textiles, and decorative arts, as opposed to outsourcing every exhibition to specialists, the PMA has opened the door for non-experts to explore African subjects and develop
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