CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Krannert Art Museum will display African art in a new light – literally and figuratively – beginning Thursday (Oct. 11), with an opening reception for the installation of about 70 artworks from the museum’s holdings, including four new contemporary acquisitions, in the museum’s freshly renovated gallery. The installation will include loans from the Smithsonian Institution, the art museums of the University of Iowa and the University of Wyoming, and the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois.
Allyson Purpura, the curator of the African Gallery at Krannert Art Museum, said changes to the updated gallery highlight the art itself. A new feature includes the addition of five iPads which offer videos that allow visitors to explore more deeply the connections among the pieces, she said.
The 1,300-square-foot African Gallery is the first of a series of several galleries at the U. of I. museum to be updated. Kathleen Harleman, the museum director, has worked with the New York-based architectural firm of Rice + Lipka to update the flooring, display cases and lighting in the gallery. Heavy colonial-style wood display cabinets have been replaced by clean white walls and Plexiglas cases, and amber-hued incandescent lighting has been replaced by cooler halogen and LED bulbs. Allyson Purpura, the curator of the African art, said these changes highlight the art itself.
“We have made the gallery as light and simple as possible to reduce any extra visual noise,” Purpura said.
Another new feature of this installation is a series of five iPads mounted in different sections of the gallery. Each iPad will have a menu of videos, most under four minutes long, featuring an interview with an artist, or a narrative vignette or footage of African masked dancers, showing visitors the same art they see before them in its home context – “taunting, advising, counseling and entertaining” spectators in Africa. These videos, created with images and film footage shared by Purpura’s colleagues in the field, are meant to entice visitors to explore more deeply the connections among the pieces, she said.
“We tried to use technology in ways that enhance the art, rather than compete with it,” she said.
Chief’s Stool (detail) late 19th-early 20th century Wood, brass tacks, beads.
Gallery mechanics aren’t the only update in this installation; Purpura also has arranged the artwork in a way that provides broader social context to each piece.
“Until recently, most non-Western art in galleries was organized by culture, nation, time period or by style,” she said. “A lot of art museums today are showing their collections in thematic installations that are more engaging for the viewers and provide different ways of thinking about the art.”
One section of the gallery, for example, called Reading the Body, will feature a ceramic vessel by Magdalene Odundo – a contemporary artist from Kenya now living in England. Although her sculpture is abstract, visitors will see how it echoes the human forms, depicted in the more traditional figural works that surround it. The iPad in this section of the gallery will contain an interview with Odundo and show her at work in her studio.
Other new acquisitions in this installation are “Migrations II,” a painting by Ethiopian artist Wosene Worke Kosrof; “Seven Lines From Djawartu,” a suite of paintings by Senegalese calligrapher Yelimane Fall; and a photograph, “Dan Mask,” by the late Nigerian-British artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose theatrical photos of Africans were described by The New York Times as work that “unraveled the very notion that such a thing as ‘African’ even existed.”
An exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography, “Rising Dragon,” also opens Thursday at Krannert Art Museum. Organized by the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y., and curated by Miles Barth, the exhibition showcases 36 artists who use photographic techniques to reveal Western influence in individual gestures, contradicting China’s carefully crafted public image.
A reception for the public begins at 6 p.m., followed by live African dance music by Les Vainqueurs, led by Lebon Mikandu.
