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Who we are:
MUSAA emerged from ACASA’s 2021-2024 initiative, the “Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices Working Group” (CCRBP). It addresses pressing issues of visibility, accessibility, transparency, and accountability of African art collections in U.S. museums by creating a new digital tool—accessed through the ACASA website—that will provide an aggregated resource to search for African objects across U.S. museum collections. The digital aggregator will prioritize the needs of Africa-based users, including in museums, research centers, and communities, and be developed according to leading open access, ethical computing, and sustainability standards.
Tens of thousands of African objects are housed in the collections of public, private, and university museums in the U.S. Objects from the same community or culture, or of a specific type, are scattered across these collections and the diverse museum landscape in the U.S. makes locating related sets of African objects challenging. U.S. museum websites are idiosyncratic and their online databases have no consistent format. Moreover, museum websites are typically not open to external input, for instance from individuals in an object’s community or country of origin. Fact-finding conversations with Africa-based museum professionals and other scholars were undertaken in 2020 by a group of African art specialists in the U.S., leading to the establishment of the CCRBP. These dialogues revealed that the most commonly-identified challenges to accessing information about African objects in U.S. museums for research and teaching included: difficulty finding which U.S. museums have African collections, connecting to their websites, and searching within their online databases. MUSAA’s aim to streamline online research will be a fundamental starting point to facilitate significant activities related to the responsible stewardship of African objects and global scholarship on African art, such as provenance research, knowledge sharing about objects, initiating restitution and repatriation claims, and fostering communication and collaboration between Africa-based users and U.S. museum staff.
MUSAA’s Goals:
The primary goal of the MUSAA digital aggregator is to create a portal accessible via the ACASA website about African art objects held in U.S. museums and make them searchable using a formal data model, standard metadata, and controlled vocabularies. The project will be guided by consultation with U.S. and African museum and cultural heritage professionals and African art scholars. The tool will further connect users directly to object records on the websites of participant museums where they will be able to access an object’s entire record.
Significantly, the project will build a robust community contribution layer that will allow users to communicate with institutions about works currently under their care, including correcting or sharing metadata information about objects, and making inquiries or requests about them. Museums will be encouraged to seek and make public in the digital aggregator different kinds of knowledge about objects under their care, including that provided by origin and descendant communities, cultural institutions, and governments whose objects and ancestors are represented in U.S. collections.
For inquiries about MUSAA, please contact: bastian@acasaonline.org
Co-chairs:
Kathleen Bickford Berzock
Candace Keller
Members:
Elizabeth Adeyemo
Kate Anderson
Andrea Čakars
Soukoume Daillo
Taiko Djomatchoua
Martin Elouga
Carlee Forbes
Beth Fischer
Shannon Gilbert
Amanda Gilvin
Allison Martino
John Warne Monroe
Aida Dia Ndeye
Costa Petridis
Salamatou
James Sule
Mohamed Buya Wayu
To learn more about MUSAA, how to get involved, or share any questions or comments, please email Caroline Bastian, ACASA administrator, at bastian@acasaonline.org or fill out the form below
