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Collaborating Across Continents: Developing a Contemporary Masquerade Exhibition for North American and African Audiences
Fri, August 2nd at 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Join the New Orleans Museum of Art for a presentation on contemporary West African masquerade, in advance of the upcoming exhibition New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, opening at the museum in April 2025.
The program will include a panel presentation and discussion with the exhibition’s curators; a first look at immersive documentary film clips from Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Cameroon; a signature West African-inspired cocktail; drumming performances; an opportunity to meet Dr. Aimé Kantoussan, Research Director of the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar; and a virtual presentation from Cameroonian artist Hervé Youmbi.
Additional members of the New African Masquerades research team will present their developing scholarship and discuss the project’s ethical methodologies and foundational artistic, community, and institutional collaborations.
This program is free with advanced registration.
About New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations
In New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, an international team of scholars and artists present the stories of four individual masquerade artists, their motivations, artistic choices, and the patronage and economic networks with which they engage in order to make clear that masquerade is fundamentally contemporary. The show offers fresh research models for contemporary masquerade, bringing to the fore issues relating to restitution, ownership, and research ethics. This is the first major exhibition on contemporary West African masquerade artists to focus on individual creators rather than the typical presentation of masquerades as products of entire cultures, which undermines the nuanced and layered stories that individual artists and masquerades tell.
The exhibition team is led by Amanda M. Maples, Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at NOMA. Co-curators include Jordan A. Fenton, Associate Professor of Art History at Miami University Ohio, and Lisa Homann, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Aimé Kantoussan, Research Director at the Musée des Civilisations Noires/Museum of Black Civilizations (MCN) and Hervé Youmbi, a leading contemporary artist in Cameroon, are research collaborators and contributing authors.