“There is no one single answer for how African art gets to Iowa. Art travels in very complex ways,” Cory Gundlach, curator of African art at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, said.
This complexity is the focus of the Stanley Museum’s first-ever student-curated exhibition, “Alternate Paths: New Object Histories from Africa to America.” Open until Feb. 23, the exhibit is a subversive retelling of the decades of challenging history behind the museum’s African art.
Twenty-five of 37 of the objects displayed belong to the Stanley. Gundlach has an intimate understanding of the collection and hopes the exhibit can inform patrons as well.
“The most important private collections were Max and Elizabeth Stanley’s. In the late ‘70s, Betty Stanley was traveling in Ganta, Liberia, and she bought the first objects in her African collection. Together, they developed one of America’s, if not the world’s, most impressive collections of African art. Around 600 objects were left to the university as a bequest,” Gundlach said.
Stemming from the interest of Betty Stanley, these few objects elapsed to become the central resource for teaching African art at the UI for over 40 years.
Gundlach is part of the long lineage of UI-based art history scholars who interacted with these objects and derived from them groundbreaking findings.
“My Ph.D. supervisor was Christopher D. Roy, the University of Iowa’s first full-time professor of African art history. He was among America’s first generation of experts in African art history, trained by Roy Sieber,” Gundlach said. “In 1957, Dr. Sieber was the first in the United States to get a Ph.D. in African art history, and he got it here, at the University of Iowa.”
Shortly after, Sieber would take his skills to the Indiana University Bloomington. Allison Martino at Indiana’s Eskenazi Museum of Art invited Gundlach to closely study the role of Roy Sieber as a bridge between the universities’ African art collections. In this effort, they developed a graduate, hybrid course titled “Curating African Art in America.” The class met twice a week over Zoom with four students from Iowa and eight from Indiana working collaboratively.
“This course was about the arrival of historical African art involving a set of circumstances specific to the colonial period in Africa,” Gundlach said. “Allison and I drafted the introductions, but it required the students to develop thematic panels, sub-themes, and a final presentation for the exhibition.”
Monica Vree, a Ph.D. student focusing on French gothic architecture at the UI, took part in the course. Despite her discipline and African art sharing few similarities, she joined the course after being a teaching assistant for the African art general survey.
“We each had three to four object labels. These were done independently,” Vree recalled. “I was drawn to the Ci Wara headdress because it has figural forms, like an antelope with a person on top, but it’s also one of the earlier African art objects the university acquired in the ‘50s. It is a mythical creature associated with agriculture.”
Navarro Nehring is the Stanley Museum’s graduate curatorial research assistant. His object was a Senufo-style female figure.
“It comes as a pair with a male counterpart. It’s an unusual example of an object,” Nehring said. “The purpose of these figures in their original context was to summon anyone who committed an offense to the sacred forest for judgment.”
Nehring and Vree’s peers also took their research beyond culturally contextualizing them. Amelia Goldsby is a graduate student studying 18th and 19th-century French art and said she enjoys working with object files.
“I researched the Lobi Beer pot pretty extensively. Just like other projects, we started with secondary sources, like scholarly books and exhibition catalogs from other institutions,” Goldsby said. “What’s exciting about ‘Alternate Paths’ is that we encountered provenance information by interacting with the museum’s object files. They have information about every object and how it came to them. That was more primary research that was done in collaboration with the Stanley staff.”
“Alternate Paths: New Object Histories from Africa to America” is the first African art exhibit to be traveling and student-curated. More importantly, it is the first to include provenance information on every object.
How these objects and their histories are acquired is also unique. Nehring’s object garnered the interest of the esteemed art dealer Karl-Heinz Krieg.
“The Senufo-style female figure was collected from the elders in a village of Kuto. Typically, collectors just traveled to the capital cities and had runners retrieve pieces from the villages, but Krieg directly purchased it,” Nehring said.
Provenance looks at this very chronology of ownership, diverting from the traditional African art life cycle. “Alternate Paths” tells a non-cyclical history, where objects are not being created, used, and replaced, but becoming materially permanent.
“[The life cycle] approach to African art is very anthropological, and it was popular among curators in America in the 20th century. Our response is not a continuation of the same old status quo, where you ask, what does this object mean in a ritual context? ” Gundlach said. “It uses provenance research to recontextualize African art because it asks about the ownership and the ethical implications of approaching the objects.”