Mission Statement:
Working Group on Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects: An Ad Hoc Committee of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association
The Mission:
The mission of the Working Group on Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects is to foster ethical engagement with origin and descendant communities whose objects and ancestors are currently represented in North American museum collections. The working group will produce best practices for collaboration, provenance research, and restitution and repatriation of Africa’s artistic heritage.
Who we are and what we do:
The CCRBP is a group of specialists in the field of African Art history and visual culture who engage directly with Africa-based institutions, professionals, and community members to develop resources to guide North American museums regarding their collections of African art and material culture.
Our commitment to ethical stewardship:
In order to respect the multifaceted importance of art and material culture to source communities, the development of a CCRBP best practices document will emphasize collaboration and communication with Africa-based peers and descendant communities in assessing and determining the futures of the collections. It will also encourage peer-to-peer support for provenance and restitution research and collection and exhibition strategies. The best practices and guidelines developed by the CCRBP will advocate for institutional commitment to prioritize research and disseminate information about African collections, and begin the work of restitution and repatriation with a field-wide framework of accepted practice that has been vetted with stakeholders on the African continent.
The Working Group will be comprised of a Steering Committee and Subcommittees that will:
- Articulate the ethically derived criteria and parameters for objects subject to potential collaboration, restitution, and repatriation.
- Identify existing best practices and relevant restitution plans developed by institutions worldwide as potential models for North American collecting institutions with African objects.
- Research the development of a centralized online resource to make public collections more visible and accessible to colleagues in Africa and worldwide.
- Compile a list of African and African Diasporic stakeholders in collaborative projects and restitution claims, and a list of North American museum collections of African art and the curators who steward them.
- Identify potential funding sources and institutional hosts for a long-term project to support collaborative projects between North American institutions and African stakeholders, including the restitution of objects.
- Propose a set of best practices for endorsement by ACASA membership.
Peer Groups will provide support for colleagues involved in research and exhibition development, to include:
- Terminology and exhibition strategies to contextualize the presentation of Africa’s arts and visual culture in galleries and on websites.
- Provenance and restitution research methods and case studies focused on African objects in North American collections.
Background:
The inaugural Steering Committee for the “Working Group on Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects” (CCRBP) emerged from a roundtable discussion held as part of Museum Day at the 2021 Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) Triennial Symposium, which was held virtually from June 16 through June 20, 2021. In Fall 2021, the group’s inaugural Steering Committee held four listening sessions for African and North American stakeholders to broaden the conversation. These meetings provided a virtual international forum for museum professionals to share the relevant work happening at their respective institutions as well as their concerns, experiences, and goals regarding restitution and its processes. On December 3, 2021, the inaugural Steering Committee and a group of North American museum professionals gathered again on Zoom to review the feedback and to discuss next steps for formalizing the CCRBP Working Group (WG). A survey was widely circulated to invite individuals in North America, Europe, and Africa to participate in the new CCRBP WG by volunteering to join a new Steering Committee, five subcommittees, and two peer groups. At the same time, the inaugural Steering Committee asked the Board of ACASA to accept the CCRBP WG as an ad-hoc committee, a shift in status that was approved in January 2022. A new Steering Committee of thirteen individuals from Africa and North America now has been assembled, and the subcommittees will be confirmed in April. At present approximately 65 individuals based in Africa, North America, and Europe have volunteered to be part of the CCRBP WG. The new Steering Committee is working on a draft of the mission statement for the CCRBP WG.