ABSTRACT
In 2009, the Newark Museum in New Jersey unveiled Party Time: Re-imagine America, a site-responsive installation by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE set in the museum’s 1885 Ballantine House. Shonibare is well-known for his subversive, often humorous explorations of race, class, and cultural identity. Although he has long addressed the intertwined histories of the West and Africa, especially those of the Victorian era, Party Time was Shonibare’s first work created specifically for a period environment and is an early example of the recent trend of artistic interventions in historic houses.
This chapter offers an account of the conceptual development of Party Time from the perspective of the commissioning curator. Shonibare’s fascination with the history of the house, built for a prominent Newark brewing magnate, led him to stage an imagined scene of a raucous late nineteenth-century dinner party in the opulent interior of the Ballantine House dining room. Playful yet pointed, Shonibare’s exaggerated display of indulgence casts a new light on America’s Gilded Age and its present-day resonances, complicating and challenging dominant narratives about race, class, and cultural authority.
