ABSTRACT
‘Africa, whatever it is, is everywhere/Holland Cotter recently wrote in the Sunday New York Times. The exhibitions of the British Museum’s African collections that immediately preceded the new installations in the Sainsbury Galleries were a series of rotating, temporary, special topic exhibits staged at the Museum’s off-site ethnographic branch, the Museum of Mankind in London’s Burlington Gardens. The Homiman Museum’s ‘African Worlds’ is also an object-centered exhibition that borrows aspects of its installation approach from the art museum, and, like the Sainsbury Galleries, it too introduced a radical shift in design. In a lecture delivered at New York City’s Museum of Primitive Art in 1959, Robert Redfield provided a classic statement of the spatial and temporal distance that the high modernist discourses of both art criticism and anthropology constructed between Africa, presented as a series of bounded and local cultures, and the West, represented as mobile and cosmopolitan.
