Organized by the Museum for African Art on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, African Art Is… will celebrate key themes in African art from various cultures and eras. The exhibition will feature more than 75 works from 14 African countries. Highlights will include Dogon ladders, Yoruba figures, Bwa ceremonial masks, popular art memorializing Congolese hero Patrice Lumumba, and recent paintings by South African artists that illustrate contemporary African perspectives on the global experience.
Since 1984, the Museum for African Art’s exhibitions have profoundly changed and deepened people’s understanding of Africa and African art. It was founded in the belief that „traditional African art, an eloquent testimony to the richness of Black culture, is one of mankind’s highest achievements.” The Museum is the only independent institution in the United States devoted to organizing and circulating exhibitions of traditional and contemporary African art of the highest aesthetic and scholarly quality.
Over the last twenty years, the Museum for African Art has proposed many alternate endings to the open-ended phrase „African Art is… . ” We have suggested that African art can be „ … part of everyday life”; „ … a way to communicate with the spirits”; „ … a reflection of an artist’s vision”; and a range of other proposals. This spectrum of possible meanings, conveyed through more than forty exhibitions and accompanying publications up to and including the present show, African Art is… . , has been explored in accord with the Museum’s mission: to make African art accessible to many different audiences, helping them both to feel this work emotionally and sensually and to understand it intellectually. None of our exhibitions and accompanying publications has attempted to present a total view of African art; instead, we have tried to look at African art from a wide spectrum of directions and to propose radically disparate approaches to it. Taken together, these varied and sometimes even contradictory approaches have created new ways to understand and appreciate a body of art that is moving and immediate but that also makes special demands on Western audiences. They have also shown us that the way we look informs what we see.
African Art Is… collects choice segments of these forty-odd earlier exhibitions in order to juxtapose the approaches they have taken in one place and moment. The show begins with a fundamental question: are African objects artworks or artifacts? A vignette from the 1988 exhibition Art/Artifact questions Western methods of museum display and installation that remove objects from their original contexts of use and elevate them to the status of art. This fundamental issue arises because most African art was not originally made to be looked at in the way that Western art is admired in museums; questioning how we classify and define objects, then, is a theme that the Museum has continually revisited. | 
