The Art Institute of Chicago

African Arts, Winter, 2002 by Kathleen Bickford Berzock

The Art Institute of Chicago is a large and encyclopedic museum where mine is the only curatorial voice that prioritizes Africa in decision making. Indeed, you might say that that's what I get paid for. Other curators--we have more than twenty-five on staff--represent other interests, and together our work contributes toward a whole. I suspect that my situation is not unique and that my colleagues at other large museums have much the same experience. Within this context, many factors govern the kinds of artworks that are acquired and exhibited, either as part of the permanent collection or in special exhibitions. Preeminent among them are institutional organization, the need for support from the director and advisory committees, and the interests of curators.

In the case of contemporary African art, questions arise on all of these fronts. Regarding the internal organization of the institution, they include: Which department or departments should be responsible for contemporary African art? How do we avoid duplication department to department? And what are the collecting and exhibition priorities of each department? At the Art Institute of Chicago we have departments of Modern and Contemporary Art, Prints and Drawings, Textiles, and African and Amerindian Art, all of which have some claim to collecting and exhibiting contemporary African art. Historically there have been very few joint ventures that bring together the expertise of these distinct departments either for acquisitions or exhibitions, though this is changing. For instance, today I work closely with the Department of Textiles in advising on acquisitions, and in 1998 we purchased a contemporary textile from the LamaSarl textile cooperative in Madagascar. However, I have not worked closely with other departments on their acquisitions or exhibitions, though I believe that expanding such cross-departmental ventures would be very beneficial.

Also at play are existing expectations about what each of these departments should be collecting and exhibiting. In the case of textiles or works on paper, the parameters that define the collections are fairly obvious; but in the case of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art versus the Department of African and Amerindian Art, they are more slippery. The Art Institute's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art has acquired works by Yinka Shonibare and William Kentridge, two contemporary artists from Africa who are already well established on the international art scene. These acquisitions are displayed alongside examples of contemporary art in galleries devoted to such work. My department, the Department of African and Amerindian Art, has acquired two ceramic vessels by Magdalene Odundo. These are not currently on display, but have been featured in the African gallery and in small special exhibitions featuring the museum's permanent African collection. Like Shonibare, Odundo pursued advanced studies in England and continues to live and work there. However, because her work is three-dimensional, refers to functional form, and is made of terracotta, it is seen to "fit" in the African collection.

And who is making such decisions? At the Art Institute of Chicago, decisions about acquisitions are the joint responsibility of a host of people that includes a curator or curators, the director, members of a departmental advisory committee (made up of collectors and scholars who have a vested interest in a department), and sometimes members of other committees if they are supplying funds. Each of these individuals has an opinion about what use should be made of the museum's limited funds, and their opinions carry weight. It goes without saying that very few of these people have any specialized knowledge of African art history. In making decisions they are guided by the enthusiasm and informed arguments of the curator as well as by their own likes and dislikes, by their beliefs about what an African art collection or a contemporary art collection should look like, and by long-established collecting mandates--for instance that acquisitions must be of the highest aesthetic quality or that they must be of proven art historical value (both of these can be sticking points for the acquisition of contemporary art).

Finally, within these limitations it is of course the interests of curators that guide what potential acquisitions and exhibitions are brought up for consideration at a museum. It is here that expertise, point of view, and personal taste converge. My colleagues in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art are conversant in and look much more widely at transnational contemporary art than I ever will. Yet from my perspective they seem to be fairly narrowly focused on those artists of international stature who fill the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and other such major contemporary art proving grounds. There is little room in this formula for artists who are not transnationals or whose work does not fit into a postmodern dialogue. As an Africanist I know much more about and look much more broadly at contemporary Africa than my colleagues in Modern and Contemporary Art ever will. Yet my priorities have been and continue to be art made for use in local communities and not art for a national or international market. Ideally, both of our perspectives will broaden over time, and the massive fissures that now exist will narrow to cracks through which little can slip. Until then it is my belief that special traveling exhibitions must fill the gap! Such exhibitions are the best way to educate the largest number of people about contemporary art forms that remain largely unknown to them.