Opening Program: Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African Arts

Link to join: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/93467504045

Join us to hear from exhibition curators, participating artists, and other key players who make possible our multifaceted presentations of world arts and cultures.

This talk will introduce the ongoing investigations underpinning Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African Arts. Exhibition curator Carlee S. Forbes will consider the works on view alongside additional examples drawn from this Mellon-funded research project. She will elucidate how African objects featured in the exhibition moved from their places of creation to communities and countries near and far; address the changing late-19th and early-20th-century cultural, economic, and political settings in which these objects circulated; touch on the acquisition activities of different actors through whose hands these works passed; and explore the shifting notions of value and authenticity as African material moved through a range of markets and contexts.

IMAGE: Attributed to the family of Sokan Akinyoke (Ikoto Quarter, Abeokuta, Nigeria), Ere Egungun (helmet mask), before 1911; wood, pigment, laundry bluing, metal screw; Fowler Museum at UCLA, X65.8237; Gift of the Wellcome Trust