|
Title:
|
Decolonizing African Art
|
|
Creator:
|
Regis University Library - Archives and Digital Collections
|
|
Date:
|
2024-12-04
|
|
Description:
|
This exhibition shares the name of a fall 2024 course taught by Dr. Khristin N. Montes. Students, either individually or with a partner, selected an object from the African art collection of the Regis University Archives and Special Collections. Beginning with formal, iconographic, and material analyses of the pieces, students conducted in-depth, original, art historical research culminating in labels that correspond to each object. Each student dedicated several hours both in and out of class to researching their object and writing their own labels. In the spirit of decolonization, this exhibition aims to support African cultural agency by representing and describing African objects more faithfully to cultures.
Historically, African art has been viewed through the lens of the colonizer. Moreover, African art has traditionally been viewed as inferior to Western art. Historically, African iconography and aesthetics were only found significant to the West in the context of Modern Art when Modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, used African iconography and aesthetics in their own work—attracted to the geometric forms and their interpretation of African art’s visual qualities as “exotic.” Along with works from the Indigenous Americas and Pacific islands, African art was then defined by the West and Modern artists, as “Primitive Art.” Though derogatory in its evaluative comparison of culture, this term was used even within the last decade to describe and classify African art. For most of modern history, African visual and material culture has been misrepresented by those who collected, exhibited, and appropriated its forms and symbolisms. The goal of this exhibition is to attempt to break the pattern of colonized representations and descriptions of African art by instead employing well-researched methods for describing African art based upon their original cultural contexts.
|
|
Subject Object:
|
Art, Africa
|
|
Coverage Spatial:
|
Denver (Colorado, USA)
|
|
Rights:
|
IN COPYRIGHT - EDUCATIONAL USE PERMITTED
|
|
Contributor:
|
Montes, Khristin
|
|
Contributor:
|
Hamilton, Paul
|
|
Contributor:
|
Miller, Hannah
|
|
Contributor:
|
Revare, Frank
|
|
Source:
|
Regis University Library - Archives and Digital Collections
|