ACASA

3 November 2023 – 17 EAT/10 EDT/7 PDT

Registration is now open! Through 2 November

This webinar is exclusive to ACASA members and will be held virtually over Zoom. Use the button at the bottom of this email to join or renew your membership. You must log in to your member account to register.

Register for the Webinar

Understanding Museum Audiences and African Arts Provenance

Highlighting provenance—the ownership history of a work of art or other object—has been growing in museums as part of important conversations about collecting and exhibiting African cultural heritage. But how much do museum visitors understand about provenance, and what is their interest in it? Do museums present provenance in a way that is engaging and easy to understand? The Department of Research and Evaluation of the Cleveland Museum of Art has undertaken audience evaluations in 2021 and 2023 that seek to answer these questions. These digital and in-person evaluation projects center on the museum’s African arts gallery, and a September 2020 reinstallation of eight works from the Benin Kingdom that include full provenance on their gallery labels in addition to on the museum’s website. As one of the few museums with an R&E department, this research represents a unique perspective on visitor viewpoints about provenance and an important tool for enhancing communication.

In this webinar, CMA’s Hannah Ridenour LaFrance (Research Manager, Department of Research & Evaluation) and Courage Kusena (Past Undergraduate Intern, Department of Research and Evaluation) will discuss the goals, methods, and findings of these evaluation projects. Facilitating the conversation, Kristen Windmuller-Luna (Curator of African Arts) will discuss the history of sharing provenance information at CMA, and consider how insight gained from evaluations of museum visitors’ engagement with and understanding of provenance can be implemented in future exhibitions.

This webinar is exclusive to ACASA members and will be held virtually over Zoom. Use the button at the bottom of this email to join or renew your membership.

Join or Renew your Membership

2024 ACASA Curatorial Excellence Award
Call for Submissions – Due January 15, 2024

The submission window is now open for the 2024 Awards for Curatorial Excellence. Submissions must be received by January 15, 2024. The awards will be presented at the 19^th ACASA Triennial, to be held in Chicago from August 7-11, 2024.

The Awards for Curatorial Excellence recognize the important contributions to the dissemination and understanding of African and African Diaspora Arts made through exhibitions. Exhibitions related to permanent collections, loan shows, commissioned works or community interventions organized by museums, galleries, cultural centers, and exhibition spaces of all sorts are eligible. Up to two awards for curatorial excellence will be given. Runners up may also be recognized.

Eligibility

The exhibition should have opened between Sept. 1, 2019 and Sept. 1, 2023.

Exhibition eligibility: Both nominator and nominee(s)—if different–must be ACASA members in good standing. Join ACASA

Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered.

Submission Process and Materials

Eligible exhibitions should be uploaded by the nominator to this form with the submission materials listed below. All submission materials must be received by January 15, 2024.

All submissions should include the following materials:

1. Cover page indicating title of exhibition, dates, venue(s), curator(s) names
2. Synopsis of exhibition (one-page)
3. Sample publication where applicable. This can include PDFs of take-away brochures, exhibition preview article or other means of documentation and distribution of project. If no publication was possible, please submit a bibliography of 5 key sources germane to the show’s thesis or points of departure.
4. Sample didactics (labels or other interpretive materials, such as on-line description, that demonstrate the exhibition’s intellectual content and curatorial vision. Not to exceed 3-pages)
5. Visual documentation: up to 5 still digital images, at least one of which must show installation, context or performance space; up to 2 videos or links, not to exceed 3 minutes in length to document performance or time-based projects.
6. Link to or documentation of innovative uses of technology or interactive engagement
7. Description of institution, organization or entity originating the exhibition (for example museum, independent art space, pop-up…, including mission, history, collection (if applicable), size, staff, budget, audience and other information pertinent to understanding the context in which the exhibition emerged.
8. Documentation of community response. Up to three (3) examples that demonstrate various perspectives. These might include emails, sample entries from audience response books, or social media postings and not just critical or press reviews.

Assessment Criteria

For consideration for this award, the awards committee will consider exhibitions that:

1. Generate new scholarship across the humanities or beyond
2. Open new perspectives on the field
3. Collaborate with and/or contribute to local or stakeholder communities
4. Demonstrate innovative approaches to exhibition design and presentation
5. Expand understandings or uses of technology

Please contact Caroline Bastian, ACASA Project Manager, for any questions or comments at bastian@acasaonline.org.

The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce themes for residential grants and fellowships for pre-docs, post-docs, and scholars at the Getty Center and Villa for the 2024/25 academic year.

Applications will open on July 1, 2023. Applications are due by October 2, 2023.

AFRICAN AMERICAN ART HISTORY INITIATIVE GRANTS
The African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) will support two fellows to generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. As part of the larger scholar year cohort, AAAHI Fellows have opportunities to present their research and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary group of peers. While proposals do not have to address the concurrent annual theme, they may highlight any salient intersections with it.

This residential program provides financial support and housing to scholars who are expanding critical inquiry of African American art and its frameworks. Projects that propose engagement with Getty’s growing collections of archival and primary source material related to African American art history—particularly post-World War II—are welcome. However, relevance to Getty holdings is not a project requirement. We invite applications from scholars who focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions. Applicants should indicate how their project would align with AAAHI’s aim to make African American art history more visible to the public and accessible to the scholarly community worldwide.

EXTINCTION GRANTS

In this moment of extreme environmental decay and monumental epidemic loss, the Getty Scholars Program invites applications on the pressing topic of extinction and its bearing on the visual arts and cultural heritage. Scholars are asked to contemplate how representational practices are deployed to cope with the precarious survival of plants, animals, and humans; the ever-present specter of species-level extinction and resource exhaustion; and, at the most extreme pole, the brutality of mass atrocity. On another level, atrophy, decay, and obsolescence constitute the temporal dimensions of certain artistic practices, especially as creative approaches, technologies, media, formats, and ideals become outmoded or superseded. The finality of disappearance may also portend a certain amount of hope for rebirth, innovation, or recovery. We invite proposals on these topics from art historians and those from related to disciplines.

Please find the full call for applications and theme text on the Scholars Program webpage: gty.art/scholars

The African Critical Inquiry Programme has named Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa as recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Chen, a South African student in the Department of Historical Studies, and Ncube, a Zimbabwean student in Social Anthropology, are both pursuing PhDs at University of Cape Town. Sousa is an Angolan student in History and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Support from ACIP’s Ivan Karp Awards will allow each of them to do significant research for their dissertations. Chen will work in Dutch archives for her dissertation, Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838). Ncube will conduct fieldwork in Zambia for her project Mapping the Ethics of Care Associated with Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Healthcare Infrastructures in Zambia. Sousa’s award will support her research at Angolan museums for her project “Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture.

Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP Workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.

About Vanessa Chen’s project:

Despite the documentary record of the early history of Chinese convicts, exiles, and ‘free blacks’ at the Cape (1654 – 1838) being fragmentary and scattered in multiple places, it is and should be seen as significant in the making of South Africa’s social history. Researchers have undertaken the task of bringing the stories of this subaltern group to the forefront, however, they have not reckoned with the making of this collection of documentary sources. Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles, and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838) works to do so, and to re-curate these sources as an archive in and of itself. Chen’s dissertation examines the history of the extant documentary archival slivers that speak of Chinese presence at the colony alongside non-documentary materials, tracing and accounting for their presence and absence. She has already worked with archival sources in South Africa, and next will do on-site research at the National Archives of the Netherlands. Her final archival work will be in Indonesia. In the Netherlands, she will locate and collate records for document analyses, consult with archivists regarding the records’ biographies – their movement and reshaping to and from different repositories across time – copyright regulations and accessibility and negotiate permission to digitise and include the records in an eventual digital curation. Chen’s dissertation will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the nature and extent of the Cape Chinese archive, address deficiencies of colonial archiving, and underscore both the importance of representation and what can be made despite of the lack thereof.

About Min’enhle Ncube’s project:

Mapping the Ethics of Care will be the first in-depth ethnographic study on the ethics of care associated with artificial intelligence adopted in healthcare infrastructures in Zambia. Artificial intelligence software is increasingly being adopted to support healthcare infrastructure, raising issues underscored by postcolonial quandaries, neoliberalism from Copperbelt mining, and other developmental paradigms. Through eighteen months of research in Zambia, Ncube will investigate the creation of AI tools, the implications of adopting these into the healthcare infrastructures, and how this contributes towards the ethics of care in the area. The project will examine whether machine learning, its inputs of big data, and software development support or challenge the diversity and inequalities in southern Africa. Ncube’s project is a part of a larger strategic programme, Future Hospitals: 4IR and Ethics of Care in Africa, at the Institute for Humanities in Africa that reflects critically on data and AI’s implications for care infrastructures on the continent. Ncube will use epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2011) as a framework to interrogate technology infrastructures, their epistemology, the fundamentals of ‘intelligence’ and its relevance in a post/neo-colonial landscape of care. With a dearth of literature on ethics associated with AI in the Global South, Ncube’s research addresses this gap in the context of broader anthropological inquiry in Zambia, which includes works from colonial-era and postcolonial Zambia (or Northern Rhodesia). It builds on scholarship regarding the anthropology of ethics and technology while fostering connections with past anthropological work to further the development of anthropology and social science in the region. The research also advances anthropology’s relevance in innovation praxis on the African continent.

About Suzana Sousa’s project:

“Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture is concerned with the nation-building process in Angola after its independence in 1975, a process that occurred through arts and culture. It examines the history of cultural nationalism in the country and the political narrative that has engaged this history to legitimise the nation. This also involves exchanges between politics and visual culture in the context of civil war and the construction of national identity. The process of making the nation was enacted through cultural policy, national arts organisations, and museums that maintained an affinity with colonial ethnography. Sousa engages with the development of visual arts and the making of museums in the aftermath of the civil war. She argues that the policies and practices promoted by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) have continued to be entrenched in colonial categories and distinctions. Her research seeks to understand these complexities and contradictions through fieldwork in two museums in Angola, the Dundo Museum and the National Anthropology Museum. The latter was founded a year after independence in the country’s capital and the former is a colonial enterprise from 1936 located in the east of the country, in an area administered by the mining company Diamang. The museums’ locations, Luanda and Dundo, are also an entry point to the diverse constructions of identity within the nation.

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Information about the 2023 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards for African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programmes will be available in November 2022. The application deadline is 1 May 2023.

For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.