Sightlines

New modes of displaying and viewing African art and material culture.

At the heart of SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa is a design-focused question of how to present historical and contemporary works alongside one another. Through the use of a long wall designed by the architectural firm AD–WO for the 2023 exhibition, Bard Graduate Center invited visitors and interlocutors to engage with African art in a variety of ways.

As part of the exhibition, the department of public humanities and research at BGC worked with curator Drew Thompson to craft a vigorous and lively series of public programs, inviting guests to create their own sightlines. Participants mary adeogun, JJJJJerome Ellis, Jessica Lynne, Annissa Malvoisin, Maaza Mengiste, and Okwui Okpokwasili offered their vantage points, illuminating various aesthetic, functional, and symbolic uses of the metalworks on view, and highlighting the modes of historical analysis and storytelling behind the contemporary works.

This book gathers those sightlines with photographs of the exhibition installation and other illustrations selected by the authors. An introductory essay by curator Thompson grapples with current debates on the display of historical and contemporary art of Africa and the Black diaspora. Exhibition designers and curatorial advisers Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood present a visual essay on the inspiration for and the ideas behind their long-wall display. The book also features an interview between Admassu, Thompson, and Wood.

SIGHTLINES marks a different approach to scholarship around exhibitions in two immediate ways. First, it showcases how visitors engaged with the exhibition through its design and display of objects. Second, it provides an opportunity to highlight the kinds of research and cultural insights that a collaborative and design-focused curatorial approach provides. The publication is the first Bard Graduate Center book to explore the visual and material culture of Africa and the Black diaspora, delving into the history of the metalworks as well as larger debates on collecting practices, museum display, gallery education, and provenance.

Drew Thompson writes on the subject areas of African, African-American, and Black diaspora visual and material culture, the history of photography, Black modernism, and museums as (de-)colonial spaces. Art curating is a critical component of his scholarship and teaching.

Jessica Lynne is a writer and critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, the Believer, Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and Oxford American, where she is a contributing editor. She is the recipient of a 2020 research and development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is the inaugural recipient of the Beverly Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association. Lynne is an associate editor at Momus and, alongside Rianna Jade Parker, coauthor of the forthcoming publication, Image and Belief: An Unfinished History of Black Artists.

JJJJJerome Ellis is an animal, artist, and proud stutterer. Through music, literature, performance, video, and photography he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, he lives in Norfolk, Virginia with his wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis.

mary adeogun studied textiles, garments, and dress culture at Bard Graduate Center, receiving her MA in 2022.

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award.