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BACKGROUND

Course context

Art of Central Africa investigates the indigenous artistic practices of the peoples of Central Africa. In class I focus on a large corpus of art objects, anything from beautifully finished wooden carvings to intentionally assembled heaps of unrecognizable stuff; from ancient remains to material collected during the colonial period to indigenous practices that continue today. The course also deals with performance art, e.g., ritual procedures, festival arts, and masquerades.

Art of Central Africa is a 300/500 level course and involves beginning, advanced, and graduate art history students, fine arts majors, and students signed up through the African Studies department.  Typically, 70 students enroll.  This large, mixed student body presents a challenge:  African Studies students often lack the skills for interpreting visual culture, while the art history students typically know less about Africa and are not familiar with the interdisciplinary nature and methodology employed in a non-Western, non-Asian art history course. 

Teaching a course on Central Africa presents other challenges, as well.  The scholarship on Central African art tends to be in French; it is therefore accessible to few students. In addition, the scholarship on Central African art is often not current because it has been dangerous to conduct recent fieldwork in much of the region.  Much of the scholarship still resonates with colonial values and focuses on connoisseurship and classifying objects rather than creating an understanding of the context for artistic production.

Course goals

Aside from the goal that the students acquire the basic knowledge of the artistic repertoire of the major ethnic groups of Central Africa, the basic enduring learning goal revolves around cultural sensitivity towards an "Other." Students should have no doubt about the necessity to approach artworks of an "Other" through a thorough understanding of the cultural context of artistic production. How does standard (Western-derived) art historical methodology apply to or not apply to artworks made in Africa? What methodologies do African art historians use, and how might these be useful to historians of Western art history? How does an investigation into literature, anthropology, social sciences, economy, or politics provide a basis for cultural understanding?

On a more sophisticated level the course's overriding aim is to investigate how Central African people's basic attitude towards those types of objects and performances, that Western people might label "works of art," differ substantially from Western ideas about aesthetics. Furthermore, the course asks how alternate models of aesthetics might inform aspects of the Western art world. Can we discern specifically African conceptions of art /aesthetics and specific African models or attitudes towards creativity? How might these enrich the cultural vocabulary of a global art culture? What shifts in the power structure of the art world would have to occur to allow the integration of such concepts?

The subject matter of the course, as well as many of the specific questions addressed during lectures, is quite removed from the students’ everyday concerns.  As a means to spark the student’s interest and to draw them in, I designed the web project to provide hands-on experiences with artworks and to cater to the students’ savvy and apparent preference for working with technology.

Website project goals

I chose to focus class around the virtual museum project for three reasons.

• First, art history courses typically require a research paper as a final project.  However, I have found that students don’t often achieve a mastery level of scholarship on their paper topic. Students tend to cite websites without seeking primary literature, and they may never read the instructor’s comments on final versions of the paper.  Web-authoring, on the other hand, requires a high level of scholarship.  Students must use primary literature and often personally contact a leading scholar. They must seek the most recent information available, as the website will likely serve as a resource for the public.
• Second, a web-based gallery serves to make the African collections more visible to the public and to other scholars.  Thus, students provide a service to KU and the museum by researching and providing background for the art objects. 
• I also believe the website offers students experiences that will inform their career decisions in the field of art history.  By exposing them to all phases of the discipline—research, curatorial tasks, and visual presentation —students can make a more informed career choice.  In addition, students also learn professional skills such as reading sophisticated texts, researching, writing and editing, along with enhancing their technical know-how in the field through scanning images, assembling a PowerPoint presentation, web authoring, subduing one’s ego during team work, public speaking, and handling museum objects.

Furthermore, the website helps achieve overall course goals by providing a forum where students explore and develop a thorough understanding of the context of the artwork of an “Other.”  Students do this by acquiring in-depth knowledge of the repertoire of artworks in the region from which their focus object originated.

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