In Recent Years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major subject of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on
the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art
museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art, from the late 1800's to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for
understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States.
Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barn-Foundation, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle
Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art.
Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke review the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues: defining aesthetic criteria for
African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of "primitive art"; broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and
culture in understanding and presenting African art. They point to the influential role of particular curators, scholars, and collectors in developing a canon of African art in the United
States and elucidate the close relationship between museums and the growing field of African art history through the middle and late twentieth century.
Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the
ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and
African communities that have a stake in how collections are presented; and the place of contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.
