Introduction

Determining what belongs in an art museum and what does not is the prerogative of the curator. Often given creative liberty to execute their choices, every curator has their own ideas, guided by scholarship, museum policies and personal taste. Primitive, modern, contemporary and diasporic were the prevailing categories into which African artworks were divided. The quest precipitated metamodernism, a practice inclusive of, yet transcendent of, conventional or modern categorizations, interpretations and curating of African art. Museums collected and curated that anthropologically frozen body of works under the terminological label of “primitive” or premodern studies. While the Metropolitan Museum has now changed the name of the department in which it houses African art from the Department of Primitive Art to the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the Americanization of African art studies remains problematic.