Second Careers explores the connections between historical African art and contemporary practices through a selection of exemplary highlights from the museum’s African collection and loaned works. CMA objects from nine cultures in Central and West Africa—male and female figures and masks, masquerade costume, a hunter’s tunic, and a prestige throne—are juxtaposed with large-scale installations, sculptures, and photographs by six leading contemporary African artists. The exhibition considers the status of canonical African art objects when they begin their “second careers” upon entering museum collections.
The DMA’s Conservation and Arts of Africa departments, in an exciting and cutting-edge collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center, will present CT scans of a Senufo helmet mask from the Museum’s African art collection. This kind of mask is worn like a helmet by a medium at initiations, funerals, harvest celebrations and secret events conducted by the powerful male-only Komo society, which has traditionally maintained social and spiritual harmony in Senufo villages in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Visible attachments on the mask include a female figure, cowrie shells, and imported glassware. The CT-scans reveal unexpected materials beneath the surface and objects contained in the attached animal horns that empower the mask.
In 2020 it will be exactly one hundred years ago that Antwerp, in full colonial time, acquired its Congolese museum collection. What are the stories behind the Congolese objects? And how did they end up in the port city? The exhibition focuses on a hundred unique Congolese works and examines their significance for various Congolese peoples. You learn about the impact of Christian missions on Congolese culture and about the view of Congolese people on the 'white' (global).
PAD, pioneering event for Art and Design aficionados and collectors, has been reinventing for the past 20 years the Cabinet d’Amateur and the notion of eclecticism, anticipating the aesthetic aspirations of its time. Season after season, it offers an intimate cocoon to those who have made decorative arts and design the core of their collection, driven by passion and heritage. Every edition evolves in aim to create an unprecedented dialogue between modern art, historical and contemporary design and jewellery. This year will give greater room to Primitive Art, and will highlight the vitality of raising such perspectives. The engaging aspect of PAD is its invitation to enter a personal collection, conceived by a selection of local and international art dealers – all of whom are leaders in their fields, eager to address each passionate collector in a unique manner. In this salon, mind is enlivened and imagination is exhilarated, as entering a place where the contemporary taste for 20th and 21st Century decorative art is born.