Mint Museum Randolph's revamped African art exhibit

KYLIE MARSH | THE CHARLOTTE POST

This mask is part of the newly refurbished African art exhibit at the Mint Museum Randolph campus. Below: a hand-crafted vase on display at the exhibit.

Lisa Homann called the Mint Museum Randolph’s former exhibition on African art “beige on beige.”

In addition, it was located toward the back of the building, only accessible through a long hallway.

Homann, associate professor of art history at UNC Charlotte, guest-curated the revamped and newly reopened exhibit, incorporating colorful walls, spotlighting, and objects with a variety of different purposes, to engage and entice audiences.

Homann, an art historian, focused her research on the art of a region called Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Western viewers often tend to look at African art as relics of the past and misinterpret the continent as backward or stuck in the past. Homann said North American institutions are beginning to do more to combat these assumptions.

Provenance, a word referring to a detailed history of an object, is an overarching theme guiding the curation of the exhibit.

There have been recent discussions in the museum world about who gets to own artifacts and if they were legitimately acquired by the institutions that have them on display. Homann  commissioned works after developing a long relationship with artists like David Sanou. However, she wants viewers to understand there is still much that is unknown about the works, and art on the continent itself.

“Those debates and questions have been going on since the actual colonial era. This is not something that people just found out about in 2020,” Homann said. “There have been requests from African monarchs, nation-states, individuals, to repatriate works that were most definitely ill-gotten: looted, coerced out of hand.”

Homann explained that many collections of African art and artifacts owned by United States institutions were probably acquired in the 1970s and ‘80s, following large scale independence in Africa starting in the 1960s.

“Africa has depth of artistic and conceptual accomplishment that’s not on display, in part because archaeological works, if not scientifically excavated, and if they are real ancient works, they’re often either looted or illegally exported,” Homann said. “In the absence of that information, I don’t want to put those things on display, because I think that’s an unethical move.”

Instead, many of the didactics (the panels of text on walls labeling and giving more information about the objects on display) explicitly express what is unknown about the works in the Mint’s collection. To add, Homann said, the Mint has never had an Africanist curator.

“I used terms like ‘unrecorded artist’ rather than attributing a single object to every single person of an ethnicity cross time and space, which is just more honest, she added. “These are really basic moves that we can make to pay attention to the transparency of what do we actually know and what do we not know, decentering the authority of the institution.”

The exhibition spans several rooms by theme, like global connections, everyday items, and ceremonial items. These themes prime audiences’ thinking about these items’ uses and cultural significance. Why might these objects be created? What was the time, attention, skill, and detail that it took to create these objects? What do these objects communicate about the values of their culture of origin?

“An object in one room can just as well belong in another room,” Homann said.

For example, the objects on display for ceremonial purposes feature masks, adornments used for ancestral veneration, and garments worn for protection and fortune while hunting. Some of the objects are used for events that range from the metaphysical and spiritual to the secular and political, like weddings, funerals, harvest celebrations, and rallies for political candidates.

The point of privilege of viewing these works at the Mint is twofold: viewers are exposed to objects that are used for cultures they may never get to encounter in their daily lives; and on the flip side, the artists have the privilege of sharing their work and the value it has that goes beyond just a dollar amount.

The room featuring everyday objects highlights expertise of contemporary African artists in techniques like layering, carving, weaving and beading. On one end of the room, large wax prints show telephones, televisions and cars in bright colors against backgrounds with organic shapes and lines.

Homann said these can be interpreted like pop art, making clear the connection between Western artists’ inspiration from African art. The textiles could be interpreted like pop art, made popular by American artist Andy Warhol, and masks were a heavy sense of inspiration for Spanish paint Pablo Picasso.  

Materials for import and export between Africa and the Western world like brass, glass beads, and prints are highlighted in the global connections room, along with these textiles. These wax prints were originally made by Dutch colonial producers to appeal to Indonesian consumers, Homann said.

Rejected from the Southeast Asian Market, African soldiers took a liking to them for their organic forms and bright colors. These textiles are ubiquitous on the African continent today, and, although they’re considered “traditional African prints,” they display the cultural exchange of art on a world scale.

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