Art History Students Curate Exhibit of African Art

By Vanessa Meikle Schulman and ARTH 495-599 Students 

Professor LaNitra Berger and her students curated the exhibit Dynamic Dimensions: Layered Meanings in African Art, which ran through April 2019 in Mason’s Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery. The exhibit was led by Berger, a historian of African and African American art, as the major project for the course ARTH 495/599 Objects and Archives in Art History: Curating an Exhibit. This exciting class, which has run previously under the direction of Michele Greet, is an opportunity for students to theorize and create an exhibit over the course of a semester.

Berger’s students curated the exhibit of African artifacts and artworks from the George Mason University permanent collection. Students spent two months using the Fine Arts Gallery as a laboratory in which to discover the essentials of researching and curating an exhibition. This project culminated in an intellectual exploration focused on the roles, functions, and meanings of pieces in the Mason African artifacts and artworks collection and furthered greatly needed scholarly research. 

Students learned about provenance, original functionality, and the formal features of African art, in addition to valuable technical skills needed to put together an art exhibition. These skills ranged from research and the writing techniques needed to produce wall labels, to properly displaying objects in a gallery space. 

This popular course is now an annual offering in the Art History Program given the wide interest in museum work demonstrated by Mason students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The class will be offered again in spring 2020 by Professor Robert DeCaroli, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler galleries, and in fall 2020 by Professor Christopher Gregg. Gregg and his students will be responsible for reinstalling and recontextualizing Mason’s collection of approximately
70 plaster casts of works from antiquity. The casts were acquired from the Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning in 2003 by art history Professor Emerita Carol Mattusch.