Website: Experience Write a blog post reaction to Wednesday's lecture on African Art. What did you learn? What was especially interesting to you? What questions do you still have? What are you most excited to see when we go to the VMFA? (15 min.)
Karen Getty is the Senior Tour Services Coordinator and Educator for the African Collection at the VMFA:
I absolutely loved this lecture and learned about all the various aspects and departments of the VMFA. I particularly loved how her team works with volunteers, bookings, and overall tours and focuses on that outreach component of her job. I also loved learning about how the African collection came to be where the donors had a lot of power and were responsible for the growth of African Art in around 1976 because of the political and social awareness at the time: colleges offering courses, civil rights activists, and how black culture had inspired and highlighted African art and aspects. Richard Woodward was the founding curator of the African Art exhibit at the VMFA and was able to build the collection from the ground up and long-term curator for the VMFA. I thought it was especially interesting learning about the significant patrons like the Nooters and DeLawters who give to the collections and make them what they are because I had always questioned how Art museums acquired their work so this was very useful to me to learn. I loved learning about the Dikenda and the diamond shape and how it works in African culture and its meaning between the north (maturity), east (birth), south (the realm of ancestors), and west (gateway to death). I also didn't realize how comprehensive the VMFA's art collection is and how incredible it is to have in our town. When talking about African Art, Getty focused on diversity, the variety of religions, how there is so much African art that you can't all call it one type of art, and ancient civilizations and their wealth and how they came about. I love how traditional African art is functional and reference places in the life cycle; how many of the objects cannot be referenced to in the past tense because they are still produced and used today. (Western Aesthetics vs. Non-Western Aesthetics: Conceptual art before there was conceptual art).
When we go to the VMFA I am not most excited to see one singular work, but instead to see a variety and look for those differences and how they're unique from one another. I want to see and understand more of the scale and culture of Africa that shines through a large, but in reality, a small, handful of all the treasures African Art has to offer.
Questions I still have: What is the most shocking thing Ms.Getty has learned through working with African Art? What does African Art mean to her personally? How does the VMFA choose to display/exhibit its pieces when they aren't able to identify them very well?
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