This year, KAM’s Global African Community Forum is being co-organized with the Center for African Studies and the African Students Organization to explore the themes of Reckoning, Restitution and Repair.
The goal of this multi-day participatory program is to center African perspectives in critical conversations about the fraught colonial histories of museums and the global politics of collecting, restitution, and return. We hope this initiative will spark new thinking about the place of art in (re)building communities at home and abroad, about the life histories of objects, and about the ethics of museum practice as we reckon with the dislocation, interpretation, and collective care of African objects.
Friday, Oct. 13th 11AM-12:30PM, Krannert Art Museum Encounters: Arts of African Gallery
Reckoning, Restitution, Repair: A Community Conversation
On the following day, a participatory panel discussion imagining what decolonizing a museum can look like, using objects from KAM’s Encounters: The Arts of Africa gallery as points of departure, will be facilitated by Fatou Jobe (grad student, sociology), Toyosi Morgan (grad student, theatre), Hermann von Hesse (assistant professor art history), and moderated by Terri Barnes (director of the Center for African Studies.)
The program has been made possible with generous support of the following cosponsors:
The Center for African Studies through the US Department of Education’s Title VI NRC Program, Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, The School of Art & Design, Program in Art History, Department of History, Department of Anthropology, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives, The Office of Minority Student Affairs, the iSchool, the Bruce B. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center, and the Humanities Research Institute Supplemental Event Fund. In-kind sponsorship generously provided by Dixon Graphics & Weiskamp Printing.
GACF Planning Committee: Teresa Barnes, Fatou Jobe, Byron Juma, Toyosi Morgan, Julia Nucci Kelly, Joseph Obanubi, Allyson Purpura, Rachel Storm, and Hermann von Hesse.
