01/24/2023
CONTRADICTIONS AND CONUNDRUMS: AUTHENTICITY AND AFRICAN ART
Since the early twentieth century, when Westerners first began to collect African art as art rather than ethnographic curiosities, issues of authenticity have bedeviled the field. This is due in part to the how African art was acquired: typically, by individuals who were not concerned with keeping records of the locations, artist names, the works’ use, or age. In other words, African objects were stripped of all contextual information. Instead, collectors relied on the Western connoisseur’s subjective “eye” to assign authenticity based on appearance alone. This was complicated by art dealers who, when African art began to command high prices, commissioned works from African artists that duplicated popular works. In response, a definition of authenticity evolved: genuine African art was only that made by African artists, used by a traditional culture, and ideally created pre-colonization. This limited view denies the evolution, continuing creativity, and intentionality of African artists. Today, postmodern scholars share different ideas about authenticity in African art, asking questions such as, who determines authenticity? Who creates meaning? Who decides if an object is a work of art?
This exhibition’s goal is to problematize the issues that cluster around African art’s authenticity. Using Chatham’s collection, bequeathed to the University in 2001 with little information on the donor, Cheryl Olkes’s, collecting practices and no provenance (history of ownership), it examines themes such as physical signs of authenticity, aspects of African art that appeal to Westerners, and characteristics of deliberate fakes. Each theme has an introductory label, and each object has a text label describing its use and connection to the theme.
