Dates:
Location:
Markell Gallery
This exhibition highlights how the arts of Central and West Africa represent social themes across time.
Enjoy the online version of this exhibition.
This online exhibition shares the work of Bowdoin students and faculty who have worked with staff, and is structured to reflect the exhibition’s conceptual development into four thematic and geographic sections—Power Objects: Central Africa; Representations of Womanhood: West Africa; Projecting Power: Akan Society; and Unpacking African Art: Beyond Africa. Within each section of the online exhibition, we share an introduction to that area and short texts about the included artworks prepared by the students.
Selected Objects
"Two-Faced (Double Visage) Faces of Mask series," 2015-2017, mixed media (film still), by Hervé Youmbi, Cameroonian, born 1973. Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
"Two-Faced (Double Visage) Faces of Mask" series, 2015-2017, wood, hair, beads, hide, pigment, and cloth, by Hervé Youmbi, Cameroonian, born 1973. Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Bakota Reliquary Figure with Base, ca. 1900, by an unidentified artist. Museum purchase, Florence C. Quinby Fund, in memory of Henry Cole Quinby, H'16. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
About
This exhibition highlights how the arts of Central and West Africa represent social themes across time. It places historic art alongside art made in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to explore ideas of power, gender, and cultural appropriations. By displaying such diverse artworks together, this exhibition offers new ways to understand the aesthetic, political, and historical contexts of Central and West African art.
This exhibition brings together works from the Museum's permanent collection and loaned objects from the Wyvern Collection.
This exhibition brings together works from the Museum's permanent collection and loaned objects from the Wyvern Collection.
Programming
David Gordon, Professor of History, Bowdoin College, and Allison Martino, Raymond and Laura Wielgus Curator of the Art of Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous Art of the Americas at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University Bloomington, discuss the exhibition in this program, presented on March 17, 2021.