Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s current exhibition, Africa Forecast: Fashioning Contemporary Life, presents a small but dynamic assemblage of twenty designers and artists who blur the line between fine art and fashion from across the globe. Co-curated by Spelman Museum’s own Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Dr. Erika Dalya Massaquoi to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the institution, this exhibition embodies the curatorial commitments[…..]

Museums are constantly devising new platforms to present their permanent collections. Interventions and mining-the-museum have become commonplace curatorial strategies, and institutions frequently turn to contemporary artists to animate, recontextualize, and bring visibility to canonized cultural objects. Disguise: Masks and Global African Art is Seattle Art Museum’s latest attempt to draw connections across temporal, geographic, and cultural lines. Leveraging the museum’s collection of African masks, the[…..]

Three powerful women dressed in patterned sundresses, jewelry, and club-ready makeup are seated on a jumble of printed fabrics, fake flowers, and gold spray-painted fruit. Their pose is a familiar one, mimicking Edouard Manet’s scandalous—at the time—Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1862-3), except in this one all posers are clothed, female, black, and staring at me as though they were sussing me up—trying to discern my[…..]