Art/Artifact: African Art, Western Eyes

A provocative exhibition of African art that questions how functional and ritual objects became classified as “art.” Superb works were chosen from the Buffalo Museum of Science, Hampton University Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, and were presented in four very different environments to which African art has been relegated over the last century of collection in the West: 1. A nineteenth-century “curiosity room,” 2. A modern anthropology museum, 3. A fine arts museum, and 4. A stark contemporary gallery. Building on the controversial 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Primitivism and Modern Art,” this exhibition dealt with the question of how we look at objects from cultures whose classification systems differ from our own.