Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking African Art at Middlebury

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In the still silence of the gallery, it is tempting to yield to an authority of place; to succumb to an illusion that a display of African art is a neutral and transparent act that conveys only the values and beliefs of the works’ makers and users, and not of those who gathered and placed them on view.

This illusion is the focus of this exhibition. It will highlight how unequal, and at times violent, encounters among Africa, Europe, and the United States have long configured Art History’s understandings of African art, and how our interests and epistemologies infuse, shape, and distort our representations of Africa in the museum.

a wooden power figure
Anonymous (Kongo-Vili peoples, Republic of the Congo or Cabinda Province, Angola), Nkisi Nkondi (Power Figure), 19th century, wood, metal, fiber, goat horn, 24 ¼ × 12 ½ × 8 ½ inches. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Purchase with funds provided by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Art Acquisition Fund, 2018.014.

Like the belly of our Kongolese Nkisi Nkonde, its curators envision this exhibit—which will feature a selection of historical and contemporary works from our permanent collection—as a mirror in which both Africa and the Global North are reflected, and as a complex zone of cross-cultural contact that has the power to reveal, educate, and effect change.