ART on view
86
VISIONARY:
FIG. 1 (above):
Face mask.
Nuna artist. Boucle du
Mouhoun Region,
Burkina Faso.
Mid 20th century.
Wood, pigment, metal. W: 60.5 cm.
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution, gift of Walt
Disney World Co., a subsidiary of The
Walt Disney Company, inv. 2005-6-47.
Photo: Franko Khoury.
In our ever more image-soaked age,
it becomes increasingly diffi cult to take the time
to stop and truly look, carefully. A new installation
of the permanent collection of America’s
premier museum dedicated solely to the visual
arts of Africa aims to get visitors to look with
fresh and focused insight and, in so doing, to see
objects—and each other—with new eyes.
On November 4, 2017, the National Museum
of African Art, in Washington, D.C., will unveil
its most comprehensive long-term presentation
of its collection to date with Visionary: Viewpoints
on Africa’s Arts. An international leader
in collecting, researching, and exhibiting Africa’s
global art from antiquity to the present day, the
National Museum is the Smithsonian Institution’s
home for a collection that includes nearly
12,000 works by African artists.
Visionary marks a turning point in the museum’s
interpretation and exhibition of its permanent
collection. Developed jointly by Kevin Dumouchelle
(curator), Christine Mullen Kreamer
(deputy director and chief curator), and Karen
Milbourne (curator), the installation will feature
more than 300 works spanning the National
Museum’s fi fty-plus years of collecting. It will
emphasize visual and conceptual links between
works by twenty-fi rst and twentieth-century
African artists and those made by their artistic
predecessors. A broad range of artistic media
held by the museum will be represented, including
sculpture, metalwork, assemblage, ceramics,
costumes, drawing, jewelry, painting, performance,
photography, printmaking, and video.
More than thirty named artists, from Olówè of
Ise to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, will be featured.
The new installation will take over the entirety
of the museum’s central, multistory second-level
gallery, anchoring the permanent collection at
the heart of its programs and visitor experience.
Visionary will be organized around looking—
looking closely at issues of technique and creative
expression, looking broadly at the varied
lives these assembled objects have lived, and
looking critically at how artworks convey visual
meaning. The main title, Visionary, evokes key
central messages—insight, innovation, leadership,
and transcendence. Using a careful selection
of objects to express basic principles of connoisseurship
and formal analysis, the installation