Exhibition News

Yayoi Kusama, Queen of Polka Dots, Opens Museum in Tokyo

Yayoi Kusama, The New York Times
September 26, 2017

"Even the restrooms are covered in polka dots.

Yayoi Kusama, the celebrated Japanese artist whose compulsively repetitive images have drawn huge crowds and critical acclaim around the world, is opening a museum in Tokyo that could only be hers. The unmistakable touches include large red polka dots and mirrors in the elevators and a bulbous mosaic pumpkin sculpture on the top floor.

“Until now, I was the one who went overseas,” Ms. Kusama, 88, said, sitting in a wheelchair in front of her painting “I Who Have Arrived In The Universe” at a media preview of the Yayoi Kusama Museum on Tuesday. “But I now recognize that there are more people coming to Japan to come to see my work,” she said, reading from a statement in a binder covered in — what else? — red polka dots. “And that is why I decided to establish a place for them to see my work.”

Ms. Kusama, who lived and worked in New York for 16 years at the beginning of her career and was friends with the artists Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell, with whom she had a relationship, has had retrospectives at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Tate Museum in London."

More here. 

Multimillion-dollar project to update, restore and conserve historic hall at American Natural History Museum

Marsha Lederman, The Globe and Mail
September 25, 2017

"The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians is the American Museum of Natural History's oldest hall. A centrepiece on the New York museum's main floor, it is a treasure trove of totem poles, masks, rattles and other objects – most of them from Indigenous peoples in Canada.

On Monday, the museum announced a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to update, restore and conserve the hall and enrich the interpretation of its exhibits. Representatives from the Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Tlingit communities were to be in New York for the announcement.

"We've been talking about this possibility ever since I arrived at the museum in 2001," said Peter Whiteley, the museum's curator of North American ethnology, in the division of anthropology, in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "This hall, while it did have some cosmetic changes in the late fifties and early sixties, is pretty much the same as it was in 1910, so we are absolutely thrilled that this is happening."

The renovation will see a number of items currently on display come down, with other pieces brought in from the museum's collection – all done in consultation with First Nations.

The hall, which opened in 1899, is a museum highlight and a top tourist destination, but it was also a game changer in the field of anthropology, with its revolutionary approach by anthropologist Franz Boas. This is where Boas made his argument for cultural relativism in museum interpretations of Indigenous cultures – with objects from each nation viewed within the context of that nation's particular culture. Boas grouped the works by nation rather than chronology or function. So you don't find a hodgepodge of spoons or masks from different communities grouped in one case. Crucially, this was a challenge to the prevailing approach of representing societies in evolutionary terms – on a trajectory from "primitive" to "advanced."

"It's an absolutely iconic hall in the history of anthropology – in the history of American intellectual life," Whiteley said."

More here. 

Exhibition on Swahili arts will feature objects shown in the U.S. for first time

Jodei Heckel, Illinois News Bureau 
August 25, 2017

"The first major traveling exhibition in the U.S. on the arts of the Swahili coast of Africa will premiere at Krannert Art Museum this fall.

“World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean” looks at the movement of objects and people between the Swahili (East African) coast, the port towns on the western Indian Ocean, and the eastern and central regions of Africa. A key part of the exhibition is considering their cultural and aesthetic influences on one another. It will include objects loaned from the National Museums of Kenya and the Bait Al Zubair Museum in Oman that will be exhibited for the first time in the U.S., as well as artwork loans from 15 additional museums and significant private collections.

The objects in the exhibition were loaned from the National Museums of Kenya and the Bait Al Zubair Museum in Oman, as well as other museums and private collections.

The exhibition opens with a public reception at 6 p.m. Aug. 31 and remains at the museum through March 24. The exhibition will then travel to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in summer 2018, and then to the Fowler Museum at UCLA in fall 2018.

The exhibition “asks the question, ‘Where does Africa begin and end?’ After all, Africa and the Swahili coast have been global for millennia,” said Allyson Purpura, Krannert Art Museum’s curator of global African art, and co-curator of the exhibition with Prita Meier, a former University of Illinois faculty member who is now an art history professor at New York University.

Purpura said the Indian Ocean has long been a major trade highway between East Africa, the Arab world and Asia, and the exhibition emphasizes the interconnectivity of those cultures and the influence they have had on one another."

More here. 

New York’s Museum of Sex Plans an Ambitious Expansion (and a Tryst With Musée d’Orsay)

Sarah Cascone, artNET News
 

"As the Museum of Sex (MoSex) turns 15, it’s experiencing some growing pains—perhaps inevitable for a teenager—needing to enlarge its footprint to accommodate more visitors and house more artworks. But executive director and founder Daniel Gluck is facing these challenges head on, with ambitious plans for an expansion and new partnerships with a wide range of cultural institutions, as the museum looks to expand its curatorial scope over the next four years.

Founded in 2002, MoSex celebrates New York City’s sexual diversity, and showcases the best scholarship on sex and sexuality—the first institution of its kind in the US. “The original vision for the Museum of Sex really hasn’t changed over the years,” stated Gluck in a email to artnet News. “What has grown is our ability to execute.”

“Our goal is to simultaneously feature exhibition in the arts, sciences, and social anthropology at any given time. We’ve recently focused more in the arts, while most of our previous exhibitions had focused on social anthropology. In the next four years we hope to refocus in these areas, exploring areas such as religion, wartime, the Weimar, and the singularity,” he added. “There are countless subjects we wish to explore within our exhibitions and programming. Sexuality is a subject that everyone can connect with, a uniquely powerful way to broaden understanding of human culture.”

With a nearly endless amount of subject matter to potentially cover, it’s no wonder that the museum is looking to expand, having already grown from 10,000 to 22,000 square feet. In the upcoming expansion, yet to be finalized, Gluck plans to add new galleries, an event space and auditorium, and a screening room."

National Museum of African Art Presents Largest Selection of Its Permanent Collection in One Exhibition

300 Works of Art Seen Through Seven Perspectives

“Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa’s Arts” will open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art Nov. 4. The exhibition will be the largest long-term presentation of the museum’s collection in over a decade and the first to offer broad thematic connections between works across the full spectrum of times, places and media represented in the museum’s holdings. “Visionary” aims to get visitors to look with fresh and focused insight and, in so doing, to see artworks—and each other—with new eyes.

“Visionary” is organized around seven viewpoints, each of which serve to frame and affect the manner in which Africa’s art are experienced. With a room devoted to each viewpoint, the installation presents the museum’s collection from the perspective of collectors, scholars, artists, patrons, visitors, performers—and the museum itself. A range of interactive experiences within the gallery will connect visitors to the role such perspectives play in shaping the understanding of an object.

The exhibition will feature over 300 works of art, organized around the central activity of 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 new contexts shift how we see art works. “Visionary” represents a broad range of Africa’s creative visual expressions. It will occupy the entirety of the museum’s multistory, second-floor gallery, covering nearly 6,000 square feet—re-anchoring the permanent collection at the heart of our programs and visitor experience.

A Critical Understanding of Edward Curtis’s Photos of Native American Culture

Hyperallergic, Sarah Rose Sharp

"Can one come to a revelation through a visit to an art museum, or is it something that can only be arrived at through a more intensive personal journey? This is the question that emerged for me as I visited the Muskegon Museum of Art for Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian, a massive installation of the 30-year-plus ethnographic survey of surviving Native American culture by turn-of-the-20th-century, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis.

The North American Indian is a seminal and controversial blend of documentary and staged photography — one which contributes to much of the foundational imagery and, often-stereotypical, understanding possessed by white America about some 82-plus native tribes that the United States eradicated over a century of colonization. Much has been made about the complexities, contradictions, and conflicts of interest in Curtis’s masterwork, by Native and non-Native scholars. Some argue that in staging photographs and, at times, adding props or accessories, Curtis took liberties with the concept of ethnography, both imposing and reinforcing white notions of Native American appearances and culture. Others argue that without Curtis, there would be hardly any extant imagery of the cultural heritage of the tribes he worked with.

The Curtis exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art raised, for me, compelling questions around our individual and institutional tendencies to justify the art that we find interesting. It is undeniable that the 723 portfolio images lining the walls of the Musekegon’s galleries — as well as a 20-volume edition gathering 1,500 additional photos and ethnographic research carried out by Curtis in cooperation with tribes west of the Missouri River — represent a remarkable accomplishment. They are fascinating photos, and managed to chronicle what Curtis called, “the lifeways and morays of all the tribes who were still relatively intact from the colonialism and the invasion of Anglo culture.” Beyond ethnography, many of them are also formally beautiful works of art."

Royal Ontario Museum apologizes for racist 1989 African exhibit

The Star, Jackie Hong
November 9, 2016
They waited 27 years for an apology.

And on Wednesday night, the African-Canadians who had decried the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1989-1990 exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa, as racist and demeaning finally got one.

The show featured artifacts taken from the continent by Canadian missionaries and soldiers.

“. . . Into the Heart of Africa perpetuated an atmosphere of racism,” ROM deputy director of collections and research Mark Engstrom said to a crowd of dozens who attended the reconciliation between the museum and the Coalition For the Truth About Africa, who had protested the exhibit in 1989 and 1990.

“The ROM expresses its deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism. The ROM also officially apologies for the suffering incurred by the members of the African-Canadian community.”


CFTA chief spokesperson Rostant Rico John accepted the apology.

“We want our community to know: the ROM did not slip or slide, nor hide. They came forward and showed themselves and worked with us,” John said, explaining that the reconciliation process began back in 2014.

“. . . I would like to formally accept, on behalf of the African community in Canada here, the apology of the ROM,” he said to applause and cheers.

The event, which opened with a Ghanian priest in traditional robes performing a group prayer, also saw speeches from CFTA members Afua Cooper and Yaw Akyeaw, who flew in from Ghana, where they recalled protesting Into the Heart of Africa outside the museum and the hardships demonstrators faced when they spoke out about the exhibit, including arrests and racism.

Both accepted the ROM’s apology and commended the museum’s effort in righting a wrong.

The event also gave a peek into what was to come; ROM director and CEO Josh Basseches said that over the next five years, the museum was committing to several initiatives to improve its relationship with the African-Canadian community, including introducing two internships for black youth interested in museums and creating more programs that focus on African or diaspora themes.

The ROM will also mount a “major exhibition,” planned for 2018, that “addresses the exclusion of blackness from mainstream Canadian historic narrative” through the work of seven contemporary black artists, Basseches added.

More here.

9/11 Museum to Open Its First Art Exhibition in September

Colin Moynihan, The New York Times
July 14, 2016
Continue reading the main story
For two years, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, built at ground zero, has presented visitors with a collection that reflects the moments of horror and heroism 15 years ago when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.

Now the museum is moving beyond its array of mainly historical items to include for the first time an exhibition of artworks created as a response to the attacks of Sept. 11.

The show, “Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11,” opens Sept. 12 in the special exhibits gallery, the inaugural use of that space. It will include “Tumbling Woman,” a bronze sculpture by Eric Fischl; some 840 pieces of a nearly 3,000-piece painting installation by Manju Shandler representing each victim of the attacks; and four pieces by Ejay Weiss that mix ash from the site with black acrylic paint and that are meant to evoke the collapse of the towers.

The exhibition is evidence of the museum’s interest in complementing its collection of artifacts and archives and an acknowledgment that expanding its scope could add visitors.

“There was always the idea that the museum would have a series of temporary exhibits,” Alice M. Greenwald, the museum’s director, said by phone on Tuesday. “It’s a way to bring people back to the museum for a second time, and it’s a way to bring in people who might not choose come otherwise.”

It is also, she added, a way for the museum to present a new perspective of Sept. 11. Although the museum included one commissioned work, by the artist Spencer Finch, when it opened in 2014, it has functioned mainly as a repository for material that documents the attacks on the World Trade Center.

About 1,000 items from the museum’s collection of more than 11,000, including surveillance footage of the hijackers passing through airports; digital copies, projected onto walls, of homemade posters seeking missing people; and a fire truck with a burned-out cab are displayed in the almost entirely subterranean museum, built where the foundations of the Twin Towers were carved into the earth. That material, sometimes resembling evidence presented in a criminal trial, can have an overwhelming effect on visitors.

More here.

Exhibition Announcement: Oonyawa: From Museum Back to Country, South Australian Museum

Oonyawa: From Museum Back to Country at the South Australian Museum 

PR: "The Lead, South Australia," Samela Harris, 11 December 2014

"A series of fortunate coincidences have led to stories, voices and images from Far North Queensland being gathered together in a new exhibition by the South Australian Museum.

Archival cultural materials held by the South Australian Museum were conveyed to their Wik, Wik Waya and Kungu traditional owners from Aurukun on western Cape York in Queensland to jolt the memories of the old and create them freshly for the young.

A group of these far-flung elders, artists, community members and youth have now brought their new knowledge and new images back to Adelaide to create the exhibition - Oonyawa: From Museum Back to Country.

That a large strand of their history lies in Adelaide and not Brisbane is the first fortunate coincidence and is due largely to two extraordinary anthropologists and linguists. One is the late Ursula McConnel from Queensland, and the other is the remarkable Dr Peter Sutton, author and senior research fellow of the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide. 


Ursula McConnel puts Daisy Bates in the shadows as an intrepid adventurer living and learning among the Aboriginal people. She walked vast distances through the 1930s, was an expert horsewoman, a linguist and photographer who recorded the people of the vastly isolated world she shared with them.


Although from Queensland, she had Adelaide links among academe and in particular her close friend the distinguished Dr Helen Mayo,. So she chose to bestow Adelaide with some of her photographs and collections of sacred Aboriginal artifacts." 

More here. 

Now Accepting Exhibition Announcement Submissions

The Museum Anthropology Editors, Tony Chavarria and Dr. Maxine McBrinn, and Blog Intern Lillia McEnaney are now accepting submissions for exhibition announcements. 

 If you would like your exhibition covered on the Council for Museum Anthropology's blog, please send an email to mua4web@gmail.com or directly to Lillia.

 Please feel free to include press releases, images, and curatorial remarks in addition to the basic exhibition announcement. 

 Although we cannot guarantee the posting of all shows, we will do our best to publish information about exhibits that we feel are most relevant to the readers of Museum Anthropology. 

Seminole Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum exhibition featured on NPR



Camera-man – The Seminole through the Lens of Julian Dimock
December 7, 2012 through December 9, 2013

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum on Seminole lands has two temporary galleries. One space features the artistic talents of Seminole tribal members. The other space, the WEST GALLERY, is now showing this photography exhibit, which was featured on a story on NPR. 

You can find the story titled "Meeting Florida's Seminoles Through Rediscovered Photos" here at NPR All Things Considered for April 7, 2013. 

Or you can go to the museum's website here and click on exhibitions.

Exhibit description: In 1910 the American Museum of Natural History in New York City provided funds for anthropologist Alanson Skinner to organize an expedition to South Florida’s Seminole Indians. He and photographer Julian Dimock spent two and a half weeks visiting Seminole camps, collecting items and taking more than 100 photographs, all preserved on glass negatives that were donated to the American Museum a decade after the expedition.

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum has organized a photographic exhibit printed from these glass negatives, complimented by the 1910 expedition artifacts from the American Museum of Natural History. Reproduced in black and white, the images relate the adventures of the Dimock and Skinner among the Seminole Indians and reveal fascinating aspects of Seminole Indian life deep in the interior of south Florida at a time when few whites ventured into the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp.

The exhibit entitled Camera-man: The Seminoles Through the Lens of Julian Dimock will open December 7, 2012 to run through December 9, 2013. An opening reception is planned for Friday, December 7, from 2-4 p.m. during which guest curator Dr. Jerald T. Milanich will speak. Milanich is curator emeritus of the Florida Museum of Natural History and the author of Hidden Seminoles: Julian Dimock's Historic Florida Photographs, a book on the photographer.