Intervening the Canon:

Susan Vogel and the Museum for African Art

A thesis submitted by

Kelsey L. Petersen

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

Art History and Museum Studies

Tufts University

May 2019

Advisor: Peter Probst

© 2019, Kelsey L. Petersen

 ii

ABSTRACT

This thesis traces the biography and curatorial work of Dr. Susan Mullin

Vogel in the socio-historic, theoretical, and intellectual context of late twentieth

century New York City, offering the first comprehensive overview of Vogel’s

career. After describing Vogel’s international upbringing and entry way into the

field of African art history when it was still so novel in the United States, I

examine her curatorial work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum

for African Art. While the major events and museological decisions in Vogel’s

life are described, I also discuss the changing field of African art in the later

twentieth century, detailing Vogel’s exhibitions set in this key temporal context.

Through studying her work, art historians and museum curators can better engage

with challenging questions concerning identity, authenticity, ethnography, and the

museological colonial legacy, as many of her exhibitions tackle these questions

head on.
 iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As the aphorism goes, it takes a village (to write a thesis). I could not have

completed this project without the support of my advisor, Peter Probst. His

guidance, patience, and kindness have been invaluable to me. I am additionally

grateful to my other readers, Professor Andrew McClellan and Professor Kamran

Rastegar, who both so generously volunteered their time to serve on my

committee and who provided helpful edits and suggestions.

An incredible community of women scholars of African art history

supported me over the length of this project, and helped shape it to its current

form today. They include the late Polly Roberts, Jean Borgatti, Kathryn Gunsch,

Christa Clarke, Amanda Gilvin, and Karen Milbourne. Thank you so much for

taking the time to meet with me; your participation and the conversations we

shared were integral to this project’s success. I thank you for your generosity,

suggestions, validation, and most of all, encouragement.

I am especially grateful for the financial support of the Department of Art

and Art History at Tufts University, which completely covered all travel-related

research expenses. Thank you also to the generous funding provided by Tufts

University’s Graduate Student Research Competition Committee. I owe special

thanks to Chao Chen at Tisch Library who granted me the opportunity to start my

preliminary thesis research last summer through the Tisch Library Graduate

Student Research Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities. Having the time to dig

into the library’s archives and follow my research leads was an absolute pleasure.
 iv

I am profoundly grateful for my parents and brother – Armand, Margaret,

and Bryce – thank you for keeping me grounded through every step of my

graduate school experience and for always being there for me. To my family,

friends, cohort, co-workers, and anyone who has listened to me talk about this

project over-enthusiastically for some time now, this is for you. I especially want

to thank my circle of strong women: Ariane Mousalimas, Caitlin Dong, and

Earnestine Qiu – I can’t express what your constant support, inspiration,

encouragement, and most of all, good humor, has meant to me. For Lee and Larry

Buxton, thank you for your wise words, endless art puns, and all the coffee.

Finally, I am indebted to Susan Vogel herself, who so generously gave me

her time, permission, and encouragement so I could better tell her story.

~In loving memory of Polly Roberts~

 v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………iii

List of Figures………………………………………………………………vii

Introduction: Navigating the Field of Art History…………………………...1

Susan Vogel and African Art Discourse……………………………..6

Methodology……………………………………………………….. 12

Literature Review…..………………………………………………..16

Chapter One………………………………………………………………...20

The Formative Years: Living Abroad………………………………21

Côte d’Ivoire circa 1960s…………………………………………...24

The Museum of Primitive Art………………………………………28

New Transitions: From the IFA to the Met………………………...34

Interlude: Baule Fieldwork…………………………………..…..…38

A New Wing, Exhibiting Challenges………………………..….….41

Conclusion………………………………………………………….45

Chapter Two………………………………………………………………...47

Introduction…………………………………………………………47

Opening of the Center……………………………………………....50

New York City Art World………………………………………….57

Perspectives and ART/artifact…………………………………...…61

Postcolonialism and Africa Explores.….…………………………...66

Postmodernism Discourse and Exhibition-ism…..…………………73

Conclusion………………………………………………………….79
 vi

Chapter Three……………………………………………………………….81

Introduction…………………………………………………………81

Yale University Art Gallery and the Baule Show…………………..82

Transition to Film, circa 2000s………………………………….…..86

Vogel’s Cultural Capital and Self-Curating Tropes…………………88

The Field Today……………………………………………………..93

Impact, Reflections, and Conclusion………………………………..97

Figures………………………………………………………………………101

Bibliography………………………………………………………………..113
 vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Susan Mullin Vogel.…………………… ………...................................2

Figure 2. Museum of Primitive Art (1958)………… ……………………..….....31

Figure 3. Map of Baule region, Côte d’Ivoire……………………………….…..39

Figure 4. Ijebu Yoruba Janus headdress…………………………………………41

Figure 5. Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1982)…42

Figure 6. The Center for African Art, exterior (1984)………………....………...51

Figure 7. The Center for African Art, interior gallery (1984)…………………...52

Figure 8. Museum of Modern Art’s “‘Primitivism’” in 20th Century Art”………54

Figure 9. Museum for African Art, SoHo (1992)………………………………..60

Figure 10. Vigango in ART/artifact, “Contemporary Art Gallery” (1988)………65

Figure 11. Kigango in ART/artifact, “Diorama” (1988) ………………………...65

Figure 12. Kiosk informational post, Africa Explores (1991)………... …..…….68

Figure 13. “Urban Art” (green gallery) in Africa Explores (1991)………………69

Figure 14. “Museums Provide Access to Art,” Gallery 2, Exhibition-ism………..77

Figure 15. “Museums Present the Truth,” Gallery 3, Exhibition-ism…………....78

Figure 16. “Art Museums Never Change,” Gallery 4, Exhibition-ism…..………79

Figure 17. Baule: African Art/Western Eyes (1997)………………………....…..84

Figure 18. Film still from FANG: An Epic Journey (2001) ……………………..87
 “From the nineteenth century, History was to deploy, in a
temporal series, the analogies that connect distinct organic
structures to one another…History gives place to
analogical organic structures…This event, probably
because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our
comprehension.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:

An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences, New York, 1966

Introduction: Navigating the Field of Art History

On September 16th, 1987, in celebration of the National Museum of

African Art’s new opening on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the

Smithsonian Institution hosted a symposium. Titled African Art Studies: The State

of the Discipline, the conference was organized to address the state of African art

as an area of study in the United States, while considering the role of the museum

in the discipline. Where did the field of African art history begin, and how? What

was its current state, and more importantly, where was it headed in the future?

How did museums fit into the conversation? Panelists included eminent

Africanists and anthropologists such as Roy Sieber, Suzanne Preston Blier, Simon

Ottenberg, and Rowland Abiodun, all who reflected on the various methodologies

and theories that dominated their field of African art in the last twenty years. At

the time of the symposium, postmodern theories were slowly gaining ground in

museological contexts, and more scholars were engaging with its ideas. Despite

this, the Smithsonian symposium participants were adamant that “nowhere in

African art studies has the ‘crisis of representation’ surfaced.”1

1
Henry John Drewal, African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.:
National Museum of African Art, 1990), 50.
2
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New
 2

Contrary to this assertion, the Center for African Art in the Upper East

Side of Manhattan was embracing such representation crises in its frequently

rotating exhibitions that challenged the public’s assumptions about Africa and

African art. For the Center and its curators, the “crisis of representation” was at

the heart of the institution’s mission. As postmodern conversations and related

symposia started to increase towards the end of the 1980s, so too did other

museums begin to realize the importance of questioning display politics, as the

Center had prioritized since its opening. Although the Center for African Art had

only been open for three years at the time of the Smithsonian symposium’s

occurrence, within ten years the institution and its executive director, Susan

Mullin Vogel, would produce and display some of the most discussed traveling

African art exhibitions, including Perspectives: Angles on African Art (1987),

ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Museums (1988), and Africa Explores:

Twentieth Century African Art (1991). Each exhibition considered the way

African art is shown or interpreted in the West, rethinking typical museum

displays by using self-questioning paradigms.

Now, over thirty years later, these thematic exhibitions and their contents

are still heavily debated, admired, taught, cited, and contested. Vogel, founder of

the Center, is the individual responsible for their production, a curator who invited

her audiences to conceptualize African art through a narrative lens other than the

ethnographic or anthropological (Figure 1). Studying the work of Vogel while

tracing the historiography of the field of African art history can provide key

insights into how the field operates today. That is, to understand the placement of
 3

African art in the canon of art history, one must look to the contested scope of her

intellectual pursuits in the field.

Today, the field of art history is an interdisciplinary terrain in which to

study the world’s past and present visual artistic expressions, while considering

the varying sociopolitical, religious, philosophical, economic, emotional, and

physical environments in which an artwork, monument, or object was created. As

a discipline, the field brings to mind scholars such as Vasari, Riegl, Wölfflin,

Panofsky, or Gombrich, individuals who wrote extensively about art using

iconographical, formalist, social-history, or connoisseur approaches. Fields of art

history cover any given geographic location in the world, and also any time period

or medium, including subjects as diverse as ancient Near Eastern archaeology,

early Christian and Byzantine architecture, South Asian ceramics, 18th century

European paintings, or the history of modern photography and film. Through

these various fields of space, time, and culture, and any corresponding

interpretation of such spaces, as Foucault observed in his approach to organizing

human knowledge, the history of art emerges.2

While traditionally fields of art history developed alongside the formation

of national identities, such as 19th century French art or Mexican High Baroque

art, since its inception, the field of African art history has always been in a

continuous state of flux and transformation. At its beginning, African art was

synonymous with ethnography, and later, anthropology, fields that examined

human cultures and customs throughout the continent. Moreover, the field of

2
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New
York: Vintage, 1966), 231-232.
 4

African art was originally a German one.3 Starting with the ethnographer Leo

Frobenius’s numerous colonial collecting expeditions throughout the continent to

Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, 1915), the first critical monograph

that discussed and showcased African sculpture using a formal analysis method,

the field’s conception can be traced to early twentieth century German scholars

who pursued their intellectual and collecting interests in Africa.4 Upon returning

to Europe, many of the objects and photographs colonialists had taken from the

continent arrived in ethnographic museums throughout Germany, France, and

England.

Their placement among other “exotic” world artifacts in ethnographic

museums was a common display approach. Since the 17th century, European

nobility and wealthy families placed various collections of manmade and natural

objects – including taxidermy and geological samples, fossils, flora and fauna,

and cultural materials from other continents – in Kunst- and Wunderkammer,

curiosity cabinets that were arranged and classified in a way intended to

overwhelm the viewer. Quantity, over quality, was displayed in a way that

communicated one’s social status. Many Afro-Portuguese ivory works, for

example, ended up in Wunderkammer; even the Medici family and Albrecht

Dürer owned several in their collections.5

3
For more on the development of the field, see Peter Probst, From Einstein to Enwezor:
A History of African Art History (forthcoming).
4
Sebastian Zeidler, “Negro Sculpture,” translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, October
107 (Winter 2004): 122-138.
5
Eugenia Soledad Martinez, “Crossing Cultures: Afro-Portuguese Ivories of Fifteen- and
Sixteenth Century Sierra Leone” (MA thesis, University of Florida, 2007), 26.
 5

At least in the mid-twentieth century, the field created more problems than

provided answers (it was not until the era of postmodernism that scholars began to

ask the critical questions in an attempt to solve said problems). For instance, the

field of African art history in the 1940s-1960s attempted to categorize African

artworks using anonymous designations, such as workshop names, styles, and

cultures. The “Sapi” categorization for saltcellars from Sierra Leone reveals

nothing about the people who created it; upon their arrival in West Africa in 1462,

Portuguese merchants gave the name “Sapi” for the first people they encountered.

Similarly, several royal Luba wood sculptures have been attributed to “the Buli

Master,” a title provided by European scholars who collected several “Buli”

works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 There was also the

continued problem of “tribal” and “primitive” designations, or other problematic

adjectives such as “unchanging,” “collective,” or “timeless.”7

In the 1950s-60s, African art history transitioned from Europe to the

United States when American anthropologist Melville Herskovits studied African

art as a field. The 1970s-1980s saw a rise in the number of scholars conducting art

historical field research on the continent or its diaspora, and the 1990s showed an

correlating interest in postmodernism, a key critical theory of the time that

challenged the notion of art. Today, the field of art history has entered a new

terrain, “the global contemporary,” in which contemporary African art is at the

6
“Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed December 29, 2018,
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1979.290/.
7
Abiodun, Rowland, Henry John Drewal, Adrian A. Gerbrands, et. al, African Art
Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art,
1990), 122.
 6

forefront of biennials, the international art scene, art markets, recently published

monographs, and other emerging scholarship sources.

To better understand these rapid changes that were occurring decade by

decade, this thesis will look at a significant figure in the field of African art

history, Susan Vogel, as a case study to examine how fields of art history develop

over time. The study of African art history in the United States and beyond cannot

be considered without also examining Vogel’s breadth of scholarship, which

ranges from Baule aesthetics to the contemporary work of El Anatsui. She has

worn multiple hats in the fifty years of her research, including curator, professor,

executive director, museum founder, writer, editor, producer, and documentary

filmmaker. To understand the emergence of her curatorial, and later, film choices,

we must first look to her personal narrative and biography. Vogel’s entryway into

the field came about as a result of several defining life experiences, from being

raised outside the United States, to her undergraduate studies that led her to her

husband, Jerome Vogel, and ultimately, Africa. Before we can reach this point in

her story, we first have to go back to her beginnings.

Susan Vogel and African Art Discourse

Since her emergence in the arts of Africa scholarship in the 1970s, the

intellectual ideas of the art historian, curator, and filmmaker Susan Vogel have

been favorably reviewed, bitterly critiqued, and heavily discussed in panels,

symposia, journals, undergraduate courses, and graduate seminars. She is the

author of nine frequently referenced museum catalogues, and her essays have
 7

been published in The Art Journal, African Arts, Artforum, and Nka. She has

produced five films over the past fifteen years and her curatorial work has been

exhibited internationally in large art institutions, including the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum, the Tate Gallery,

and the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, among others. Students of art

history, museum studies, and of world arts and cultures often study Vogel’s

curatorial work in introductory and seminar classes, learning about her reflective

exhibitions. Africanists of her generation and younger have lambasted her work,

but have also called her “brave” and “fearless.”8 Signifiers aside, who is Susan

Vogel? Although art history and academic periodicals, newsletters, and

newspaper art sections have reviewed most of her projects in isolation, as of yet,

there exists no source that critically examines her life and work together.

Through the use of a tightly focused lens, this thesis will take the form of a

close analysis of Susan Vogel’s life and curatorial projects, and aims to situate her

relevance and impact in the field of African art history and the canon of art

history itself. However, rather than a offering a monograph of Vogel’s life, this

thesis will also explore the various states the field of African art history has

experienced over the past seventy-five years, while also considering its position

today. To study African art and its display in museum contexts is to also study

Vogel’s avant-garde ideological frameworks and curatorial authority. Vogel’s

museum career was shaped in part by the postmodern and postcolonial debates of

the late twentieth century; because of that, I will analyze Vogel’s exhibitions

8
Sidney L. Kasfir, “Taste and Distaste: The canon of new African art,” Transition 57
(1992): 69; Christa Clarke, interview by Kelsey L. Petersen, digital recording, Medford,
October 2018.
 8

using temporal, spatial, cultural, and political frameworks, because the location

and time period of her career is just as crucial as the untold story itself. Through

tracing these modes of understanding, I can better discuss Vogel’s discourse and

her role in twentieth and twentieth-first century African art scholarship.

I frame this thesis as an intellectual biography, investigating Vogel’s early

life and education, career as a young adult, the circumstances that sparked her

career transition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the opening of her own

museum, the Center for African Art in 1984 (later renamed the Museum for

African Art), and finally, her transition as director of Yale University Art Gallery

and into film studies. As I will argue, conducting this close study of Vogel’s

intellectual work can reveal how the field of African art transformed so

dramatically in the last thirty years alone. The representation ideologies put forth

by Vogel vis à vis the Museum for African Art in the late 1980s and through the

early 1990s have shaped the field into its state today. Without her carefully

curated insertion into this narrative, the current state of the discipline would be a

different terrain entirely.9 I intend to critically unpack each stage of Vogel’s

career, considering key events, theories, people, and places along the way.

Chapter One provides the temporal context to understanding Vogel’s early

experiences. It begins by examining Vogel’s childhood and young adult years,

considering the life experiences that led her to the path of African art history

when it was still so novel in the United States. At the time she entered graduate

9
In our conversation about Susan Vogel and her impact on the field of African art
history, Kathryn Gunsch, Teel Curator of African and Oceanic Arts at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, stated that almost all African art exhibitions she has encountered
references Vogel’s display techniques in some way.
 9

school in 1969, only three individuals had earned their PhDs in African art

history: Roy Sieber, Robert Farris Thompson, and Herbert Cole, from the

University of Iowa (1957), Yale University (1966), and Columbia University

(1968), respectively.10 What opportunities enabled her to enter this male

dominated terrain?11 Chapter One also examines Vogel’s progressing career

developments, starting with her first role as library assistant at the Museum of

Primitive Art, working under the supervision of the Museum’s director and her

graduate school advisor, Robert Goldwater, the American scholar known for his

“Primitivism in Modern Art” dissertation (1937), which traced the relationship

between modern paintings and sculptures with African and Oceanic arts.12

Vogel’s work with Goldwater at the Museum of Primitive Art directly led her to

her role as associate curator for the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, and from this conservative exhibiting institution, to

the decision to open her own non-collecting museum, the Center for African Art.

This chapter examines the factors that empowered her to do so.

10
Although Robert Goldwater’s name is often synonymous with the study of African art,
his PhD focused on modern art (in fact his dissertation is arguably the first to examine
modern arts). Similarly, Douglas Fraser specialized in Torres Straits sculpture from
Australia during his graduate studies, only turning to the study of African art later in his
career.
11
Vogel may have been the second woman to earn her PhD in African art history in the
United States, after Jean Borgatti (UCLA, 1976). Sidney Kasfir was the third (School of
Oriental and African Studies at University of London, 1979; dissertation “Visual Arts of
the Idoma of Central Nigeria”), followed by Suzanne Preston Blier (1981) and Mary Jo
Arnoldi, Monica Blackmun Visonà, and Kate Ezra (all 1983).
I am unaware of women scholars outside the United States studying African art history at
this time; however, it should be noted that Enid Schildkrout earned her PhD in social
anthropology from Cambridge University in 1970, with a focus in Nigeria.
12
David L. Shirey, “Robert Goldwater, Critic, Dies; Led Museum of Primitive Art,” New
York Times, March 27, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/27/archives/robert-
goldwater-critic-dies-led-museum-of-primitive-art-praise.html
 10

Chapter Two looks at the opening of the Center, investigating the donors

who played a major role in the Center’s founding. It also considers the major

exhibitions she curated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, before her

transition to Yale University Art Gallery in 1995. Postcolonial writings and essays

put forth by scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Okwui

Enwezor, and Olu Oguibe are continuously referenced to this chapter, as the field

of African art history was consistently in dialogue with such postcolonial theories.

Chapter Two also considers postmodern discourse by Thomas McEvilley, since

many facets of Vogel’s career engaged with postmodern ideas of the time.

Considering her exhibition frameworks through the lens of sociologists such as

Howard S. Becker prove useful as well because her story takes place in the

specific constraints of the New York City art world. Although Vogel has stated

how her work has always been more about the heart and connection than about

theory, any examination of the display of African art from the 1980s and 1990s

must be considered using this discourse.13 Moreover, despite her assertion, it is

clear that she has engaged with theory throughout her writing, research,

fieldwork, and films, as I will elucidate in the chapters to come.

Rather than reconsidering Vogel’s exhibitions from the late 1980s and

early 1990s, which have already received significant attention and discussion in

scholarship, Chapter Two instead investigates the decisions that led to the

production of the contentious show Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African

Art (1991). I examine Perspectives: Angles on African Art (1987) and

ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Museums (1988) as two case studies of

13
Email communication with SV
 11

exhibitions that in part inspired the production of Africa Explores via the use of

multiple voices of interpretation. Finally, Chapter Two will examine the Museum

for African Art’s ultimate reflexive show, Exhibition-ism: Museums and African

Art (1994). Exhibition-ism is one of the few exhibitions Vogel curated that has

received considerably less scrutiny in the scholarship – probably because of her

transition to Yale University Art Gallery at the time of its opening – and I will

discuss its contents and display mechanisms at length.14

The final chapter traces Vogel’s new director role at New Haven, where

she debuted BAULE: African Art/Western Eyes, a work of scholarship that won

her the African Studies Association’s Melville J. Herskovits Prize for original

research in African studies. After two years at Yale, Vogel returned to graduate

school, this time to earn her Master’s of Fine Arts in film studies at New York

University’s Tisch School of the Arts. This chapter examines the factors that led

to this decision.15 In considering Vogel as a professor and mentor at Columbia

University over the course of her curating career, I will also consider her

influence on Africanist scholars such as Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, Christa

Clarke, Kathryn Gunsch, and Karen Milbourne. Looking back to her lifelong

career, this chapter explores her centrality to the discourse of the politics of

representation to understand her overall impact and continued influence on

14
I have found only one review of the actual Exhibition-ism exhibition, by Roberta
Smith, in the Art in Review section of the NY Times, from October 28, 1994. All other
reviews relate to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, published by the Museum for
African Art in 1994 prior to the exhibition’s opening. For this review, see
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/28/arts/art-in-review-661481.html.
15
It should be noted that this thesis prioritizes the discussion of Vogel’s exhibitions,
rather than her films. A longer discussion of her films’ significance and impact is very
much still needed.
 12

African art exhibitions today, while considering the current state of the field of

African art history, a trajectory that must be examined while considering Vogel’s

work or any “non-western” art, for that matter.16

This research project addresses the scope of Vogel’s work and its

implications, contributing to museology discourse and the politics of representing

“non-western” art. In presenting the work of Susan Vogel through this critical

lens, I hope to contribute to the slowly expanding art history canon, one that is

still evolving. The field of African art has always been and will continue to be a

contested terrain, in the past year especially, and more discourse is needed about

its state today.17 Ultimately, I intend for this thesis to provide an encompassing

glimpse into the life of a woman whose name is often synonymous with current

exhibition display politics concerning African art.

Methodology

This project’s conception and preliminary research began in 2015, while I

was still an undergraduate art history student at UCLA. I studied with the late

Polly Roberts, an Africanist art historian who worked for Vogel at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art and later with Vogel at the Museum for African Art

in the 1990s. Professor Roberts taught about Vogel’s display tactics in her

16
Most recently I encountered evidence of Vogel’s continued influence in the current
exhibition From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present, at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Similar to past exhibitions at the Museum for African
Art, each gallery wall was covered in questions that invited visitors to consider the
reasons African art objects were on view before them. In the last gallery of the exhibition,
Vogel’s 2001 film, Fang: An Epic Journey, was also playing on repeat.
17
For more on recent African art-related controversies, please see Chapter Three, which
examines the state of the field today.
 13

lectures, which I first engaged with during her “Curating Cultures” course, a

seminar that explored the dilemmas and challenges of representing non-Western

arts in Western museum settings, while also discussing the politics of display.

Now as an art history and museum studies graduate student with a focus in

the arts of Africa, many of the alternative modes of representation that Vogel

chose to employ stand out to me for the way they invited audiences to question

how objects have been inserted into particular narratives. In typical art

exhibitions, for instance, curators and preparators carefully adjust spotlighting to

highlight the works on display, in a way that does not distract the visitor from his

or her viewing experience. Vogel, however, encouraged the manipulation of light

to disrupt one’s normally familiar interaction with objects on view in a museum

setting. Similarly, many of her exhibitions have used sounds to help place visitors

in a different mental environment outside of the museum, fostered tactile

engagement to enhance object learning, or distorted space via the use of pedestals

to provide visitors with a more intimate viewing encounter. I considered many of

these representation techniques in a seminar paper, “Intervening the Canon: The

Work of Susan Vogel from 1984-1994,” from which this thesis project began to

take shape.

My research on the life and work of Susan Vogel for this thesis has

resulted from numerous interviews I conducted over the course of a year, with

Vogel herself as well as scholars of African art from Vogel’s generation and

younger. The individuals interviewed for this project include the late Polly

Roberts, Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA; Jean Borgatti,

 14

Consulting Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Fitchburg Art Museum;

Kathryn Gunsch, Teel Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston; Christa Clarke, Board President of the Association of Art Museum

Curators; Amanda Gilvin, Assistant Curator of Collections at the Davis Museum

at Wellesley College; and Karen Milbourne, Curator of African Art at the

National Museum of African Art.18

In May 2018, I conducted my first interview over the phone with Polly

Roberts to learn more about Vogel’s career in the early 1990s. Roberts agreed that

an intellectual biography about Vogel is needed, and validated my project’s future

potential as a possible dissertation, or even book. While there is much about

Vogel’s career to discuss from African Arts articles or her exhibition catalogues,

curators who have worked directly with Vogel or who have been impacted by her

work in some way can further elucidate her curatorial choices and legacy, for

better or worse, in the canon of art history.

Considering the subtle nuances in interpersonal communication, I

prioritized in-person interviews for my research. Of the interviews conducted,

almost all of them occurred in a quiet, private space conducive to a comfortable

conversational environment. It was to the interviews advantage that with almost

every interviewee I already shared a professional relationship; in this way there

was an established level of trust between interviewer and interviewee.

Prior to the interviews I conducted, I spent time researching the

interviewee to better understand the conditions or circumstances that led to her

18
Informal conversations about Susan Vogel and her work also took place during weekly
meetings with my advisor, Peter Probst.
 15

arrival in the field. The questions I prepared were all tailored to the individual

depending on her position and relationship to Susan Vogel. Although I brought a

list of typed questions to each interview, all of the meetings were more

conversational; this meant that questions I had not necessarily previously

considered often arose to the benefit of the interview experience. Through these

unexpected turns in the conversations, helpful details, facts, or other areas I had

yet to research and reflect upon, were revealed to me, providing me with a richer

angle from which to discern Vogel’s career.

Each interview (except for the phone interview with Roberts) was digitally

recorded using a portable audio recorder that I transcribed either by hand or

through the use of a private transcribing service.19 After every transcription’s

completion, the audio recordings were carefully reviewed to edit any subtle

language pronunciations or expressions; for instance, the transcription service I

used did not correctly transcribe field-specific words and phrases such as

“ACASA,” “D’mba,” “Senufo” or “Ouagadougou,” among other Africa-related

places and cultures often mentioned in each interview.

These in-person conversations have been critical to my research; not only

have they provided me with information about Vogel’s work not found in

published materials, but the fact that the research is stemming from individuals

deeply entrenched in the field has been instrumental. As a relative newcomer to

African art history (in comparison to the individuals interviewed who have been

in the field for at least a decade or longer), learning about Vogel and her impact

19
For the interviews that I did not transcribe by hand, I used the audio-to-text
transcription service Temi.
 16

from scholars who understand the constraints in which she worked has helped

widen the scope of this project.

As I am writing about a prominent scholar who is very much still active in

the field today, this thesis project has benefitted from my ability to reach out to

Vogel when any questions about her history or work arise. On the other hand,

writing about an individual who is active in the field has proven to be a careful

balancing act: as I strive to correctly divulge the events of Vogel’s life, I also find

myself writing more conservatively in apprehension of a negative response. 20

Like any biography, however, this project investigates Vogel’s intellectual career

while also analyzing the cultural and sociopolitical factors that framed her

discourse, as observed by myself, an individual who has been in the field of

African art history for four years.

Literature Review

Before a thorough investigation of Susan Vogel’s life, it is necessary to

establish what has already been written about her work in order to fill in the gaps

of her untold narrative and to reveal any limitations or questions left unanswered.

Most resources that examine her exhibitions come from African Arts or The New

York Times periodicals from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Reading these

publications is a helpful starting point for better understanding the methodologies

used to write about Vogel’s work, even though many critiques and exhibition

reviews only focus on the highly contested exhibition, Africa Explores. In the

20
Vogel is currently conducting interviews and research for a forthcoming book about the
field of African art history in the United States.
 17

January 1993 issue of African Arts, for instance, Olu Oguibe and Francesco

Pellizzi both offer opposing critiques of the exhibition, with the former claiming

the show is “disguised colonial-ethnography-as-the-new-art-history,” and the

latter calling it “as handsome and elaborate as any ever produced by the Center.”21

Sidney Kasfir, the Africanist known for her controversial 1992 essay,

“African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,” examines Africa Explores

by identifying three problematic tropes inherent to the exhibition: the problem of

(art) history, the problem of exclusion, and the problem of expertise.22 Many of

these reviews are considered in Chapter Two, where I offer my own

understanding of Africa Explores, now twenty-seven years since it was first

showcased. Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith, among other art critics, have

reviewed and critiqued many of her traveling exhibitions for the New York Times,

including African Aesthetics: The Carlo Monzino Collection (1986), ART/artifact,

Africa Explores, and Exhibition-ism.

“Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps (1996),” by the

anthropologist Alfred Gell uses Vogel’s ART/Artifact exhibition as the setting for

his essay that explores the relationships between “works of art, art objects, or

‘mere’ artifacts.”23 Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in

Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism (1991)?” cites (and critiques)

Perspectives: Angles on African Art as an entryway into a discussion on

21
Olu Oguibe, “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,” African Arts 26, no. 1
(January 1993): 18; Francesco Pellizzi, “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,”
African Arts 26, no. 1 (January 1993): 22.
22
Sidney Kasfir, “On ‘Africa Explores,’” African Arts 26, no. 3 (July 1993): 16.
23
Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of
Material Culture 1, no. 1 (1996): 15-38.
 18

postmodernism and postcolonialism theory. More recent publications about Vogel

concern her monograph El Anatsui: Art and Life (2012), such as Sunanda K.

Sanyal’s 2014 Nka review, which asserts that Vogel “succumbs to a naïve view of

‘globalism’ as an uncomplicated utopia.”24 As the art history canon enters this

new turn towards the “global contemporary,” Vogel’s work has also entered a

new terrain in which to be critically considered. How can we understand Vogel’s

curatorial career and her politics of display in this new era of art history, and

where does it fit within the current field of African art history? Chapter Three

explores possible answers to these questions.

It should also be noted that Vogel’s name and work are often mentioned in

several contemporary artist monographs and related African modernism

discourse, including Elizabeth Harney’s In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and

the Avant-Garde (2004) and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism: Art

and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (2015). Each of these

contemporary volumes briefly and sporadically underscores Vogel’s contributions

to the field, considering her work in global contexts and international discourses

of modernity. Otherwise, literature that has been published in the past fifteen

years about Vogel addresses her films, such as the reviews of Fang: An Epic

Journey and Living Memory by Paul Stoller in the Winter 2004 issue of African

Arts.

24
Sunanda K. Sanyal, “El Anatsui: Art and Life,” Nka 34 (Spring 2014): 110-115.
 19

Rather than only focusing on specific exhibitions or films, this thesis will

consider all facets of Vogel’s scholarship in a compact place. 25 While I am

grateful for aforementioned published research, I intend to interrogate her

narrative one step further by considering these critiques in the context of the time

and place she was working because, I shall argue, we must understand this entire

picture to truly grasp the significance of her influence on the field, where it was

situated in historiography at the beginning of her career, and how we can

understand its place today.

25
As far as I’m aware, there are no undergraduate or graduate theses or PhD dissertations
that examine the scope of Vogel’s work. Karen Milbourne, curator at the National
Museum of African Art, is currently writing a Critical Interventions article about leading
women Africanists in the field, including a discussion about Vogel.
 20

Chapter 1

“The museum must allow the public to know that it is not

a broad frame through which the art and culture of the
world can be inspected, but a tightly focused lens that
shows the visitor a particular point of view.”

Susan Mullin Vogel, “Always True to the

Object, in Our Fashion,” 1991

The day before our interview, Susan Vogel emailed me directions on how

to reach her loft in SoHo. She instructed me to ring the intercom, wait for her

answer, and then meet her by the back of the building – the elevator entrance. The

next morning, at 9:55AM sharp, I rang the intercom as instructed. Vogel told me

to go around the corner past the shoe store, where she would meet me and bring

me upstairs for our 10:00AM interview. Turning the corner, I looked around

confused: the only “shoe store” in site was Dior.

A large metal door suddenly opened, from which Vogel emerged. We

introduced ourselves, shook hands, and then I followed her into her building and

out of the humid weather that is New York in August. After her private elevator

carried us several floors up, the doors quietly swung open, and I found myself in

an airy rectangular shaped room. Bamana sculptures, Senegalese reverse glass

paintings, and other African art works were conspicuously on display throughout

the space. Mounted to the brick living room wall behind me was an El Anatsui

bottle-top assemblage: delicate and refracting the morning sunlight. Seeing my

look of wonder, Vogel simply remarked, “I’m very lucky.”

Our interview took place at her large ovoid dining table placed

perpendicularly to the open kitchen. Her loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows flooded

 21

our interview space with light, and there was a clear view of SoHo’s neighboring

skyscrapers. Prominently placed on another table behind the dining table was a

ciwara headdress, in the shape of a male antelope, and almost identical to the one

on view in the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gesturing to

her SoHo loft, Vogel told me “Abidjan is like this, cosmopolitan. You would love

it.” After I briefly told her more about my goals and the scope of this thesis

project, we both pressed start on our portable digital recorders and the interview

began.

The Formative Years: Living Abroad

Susan Mullin was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1942, to James M. Mullin

and Jeanne McIntyre Mullin.26 Her father was an executive for General Motors

Foreign Distributors, a company he worked for starting in 1937, until his

premature death in 1972. In 1947, Mullin was transferred to the General Motors

branch in Beirut, Lebanon, and this is where the Mullin family lived until Vogel

was twelve.

Beirut in the 1940s was a diverse, multilingual, and metropolitan city,

undergoing a period of transition when the political structure of the country

shifted from the French Mandate to the Lebanon Republic.27 According to Vogel,

not only were there a number of “GM kids” and their families living in Beirut,

there were several American Protestant missionaries as well (Lebanon is both a

Christian and Muslim nation). The Mullin family, however, were one of the few

26
“James M. Mullin Obituary,” New York Times, December 8, 1972,
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/08/archives/james-m-mullin.html.
27
“Population” accessed January 24, 2018, http://countrystudies.us/lebanon/34.htm
 22

Catholic families. It was also at this time that Vogel started to learn the French

language, a skill that would eventually have a major impact on her choice of

studies. Throughout the seven years that the Mullins lived in Beirut, they only

returned to the States twice.

In 1954, the Mullin family temporarily returned to the United States,

settling in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Vogel finished her middle school and

first two years of high school education alternating between public and Catholic

schools.28 For her last two years of high school, the Mullin family was once again

transferred overseas, this time to Puerto Rico, “where they lived on the beach,

practically,” demonstrating yet another privilege Vogel experienced at such a

young age (for a further discussion on Vogel’s cultural capital, see Chapter

Three).29 Not long after Vogel’s high school graduation, her parents were again

transferred abroad, now to Lima, Peru. For the first time, Vogel did not

accompany her parents to South America, instead moving to Washington, D.C.

with her brother to attend Georgetown University.

On this experience of living abroad, Vogel articulated how it shaped her

educational pursuits and eventual research. She learned from an early age how to

navigate spaces in which she was an outsider; in the case of living in Beirut, being

one of the few American Catholics in a predominately Christian and Muslim

country. As she has stated,

SV: I got used to being an outsider, it seemed

normal, it seemed the way it should be and I think

28
Rita Reif, “Arts/Artifacts; For African Art Treasures, a Place to Spread Out,” New York
Times, February 7, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/07/arts/arts-artifacts-for-
african-art-treasures-a-place-to-spread-out.html; Personal communication with SV.
29
Susan Vogel, interview by author, digital recording, New York City, August 8, 2018.
 23

that’s one of the things that made it possible for me

to live in Baule villages and not see anyone that
looks like me for a very long time. From an early age
you realize how many different ways there are of
looking at the world.30

This mindset of being different is one that Vogel often references today.31

Since Vogel started learning French at age five, a language that she

continued to practice even after moving back to the States, the decision to join the

Language Institute at Georgetown came naturally. A year abroad of study at

Sorbonne Université in Paris allowed Vogel to further practice her French, a

language that she has stated was pivotal to her success in Côte d’Ivoire and

beyond.32 (While French certainly would have been useful navigating the

metropolis of Abidjan, in conducting fieldwork among the Baule people in Kami

in the 1960s-1970s, Vogel relied on her interpreter, Yoboué Kouamé Edouard, to

translate the Baule language.)33

In addition to French, she decided to double major in English, a choice

that led her to meeting her future husband, Jerome ‘Jerry’ Vogel (1933-2014),

who was a professor of English and American literature at Georgetown at the

time. In 1964, Vogel was teaching a class on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry

James, which Susan Vogel enrolled in.34 By the end of the year, they had fallen in

love and were married. Shortly after their wedding, Jerry Vogel was offered a

30
Vogel, interview by author.
31
The experience of being “an outsider” was a recurring theme throughout the length of
our interview; I further discuss this autobiographical trope in Chapter Three.
32
In 1986, the Côte d’Ivoire government stated that all formal references to their country
should use the Francophone spelling, Côte d’Ivoire, rather than Ivory Coast. For that
reason, I use Côte d’Ivoire in all future references to the country throughout this thesis.
33
Vogel, “Baule Art as the Expression of a World View,” (PhD dissertation, New York
University, 1977): xv.
34
Susan Vogel, “Jerome Vogel: In Memoriam,” African Arts 48, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 5.
 24

teaching award with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to teach English at the

Université d’Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, and the newlyweds moved across the

Atlantic to settle in West Africa.35 This is where Susan Vogel’s story with Africa

begins – in Abidjan.

Côte d’Ivoire circa 1960s

En route to Côte d’Ivoire, the Vogels took a brief stop in Paris, where they

familiarized themselves with the African art on view in the city. At this time, the

Musée de l’Homme was the only place to see African art in Paris, the same

museum that Constantin Brâncusi, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Pablo

Picasso had spent time in only a few decades earlier – in its original Trocadéro

Palace location – as they began to appropriate the visual forms they observed.

Similarly, the Musée de l’Homme was also the Vogel’s first direct interaction

with the arts of Africa and Oceania.36

What the Vogels could, they learned from books, most notably William B.

Fagg’s and Eliot Elisofon’s The Sculpture of Africa, first published in 1958 before

its second reprint in 1978.37 This Fagg and Elisofon text was “a classic” for its

35
In 2012, the university was renamed to Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
36
Although the U.S. diplomat Warren M. Robbins made his private collection of African
art available to the public on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., later becoming the
Museum of African Art in 1964, the Vogel’s did not visit it prior to their move abroad.
The Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Primitive Art were two other institutions in
the States that had an African art collection on view at this time; however, the Vogel’s
did not visit them until after moving back to the Northeast. During our interview, Susan
Vogel stated she did not engage with any African art collections in the United States prior
to her move abroad with Jerry Vogel; perhaps they were unaware of the Robbins
collection.
37
Herbert Cole, “The Sculpture of Africa by Eliot Elisofon and W.B. Fagg,” African Arts
12, no. 3 (May 1979): 20
 25

time, and the Vogels ensured to bring it with them in their new home in West

Africa, quickly becoming a reference tool for the art they encountered at Abidjan

and Korhogo markets.38 The first edition of The Sculpture of Africa was an almost

three hundred page text written by Fagg (1914-1992), a former Keeper of

Ethnography at the British Museum in the late 1930s and early 1940s who is

known for his study of Afro-Portuguese ivory works using connoisseurship

methods, attempting to identify a specific artist’s style.39

In The Sculpture of Africa, Fagg discussed “the plastic art of Negro Africa

under fifty-seven tribes and cultures, there being seven in the Sudan, twenty-two

in the Guinea, and twenty-eight in the Congo sections.”40 Four hundred and five

photograph plates taken by the National Geographic and Time global

photographer Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973) accompanied Fagg’s text, showcasing

well-lit representations of sculptures taken from multiple vantage points.41 For the

Vogels, two individuals who were just beginning to learn about art from the

continent, the text served as a helpful introduction to the arts of Côte d’Ivoire,

even if Fagg’s artistic classifications by “tribe and style” were problematic for the

way he used them seemingly interchangeably.42

38
Ibid.; Vogel, interview by author.
39
John Picton, “A Tribute to William Fagg, April 28, 1914-July 10, 1992,” African Arts
27, no. 3 (July 1994: 26; The categories of Afro-Portuguese ivories that Fagg established
in his 1959 seminal text, Afro-Portuguese Ivories, continue to be used today, such as
saltcellars, oliphants, pyxes (chalices for the Eucharist), forks, and weapon handles (Fagg
and Vogel collaborated for her exhibition, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory;
Susan Vogel, “Introduction: Africa and the Renaissance,” in Africa and the Renaissance:
Art in Ivory, ed. Susan Vogel (New York City: Center for African Art, 1988), 13.
40
Author Unknown, “The Sculpture of Africa Book Review,” 358.
41
“Eliot Elisofon 1911-1973,” accessed December 30, 2018,
https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/africa-reviewed/index.html.
42
G.I. Jones “The Sculpture of Africa Book Review,” Africa: Journal of the
International African Institute 29, no. 2 (April 1959): 199.
 26

The Vogels arrived on the continent in 1964, only four years after Côte

d’Ivoire gained independence from France.43 Vogel’s arrival to Africa also

coincided with three years of Peace Corps volunteers’ presence in Côte d’Ivoire,

the two-year service program launched in 1961 during the Cold War by President

John F. Kennedy.44 These events are key to the Vogel’s story, as Vogel has

stressed that timing was everything:

SV: I was lucky. It was just, I think it was the minute, it

was the minute, to [move to Abidjan]. The Peace Corps
was just starting. Wasn’t there yet I think in 1964, I think
it was the next year; it was just starting, I mean it was just
the beginning of a whole lot of things, the country had
only been independent for four years.45

KP: So if you had arrived a year later it would’ve created

a completely different story.

43
On August 7th, 1960, Côte d’Ivoire President Félix Houphouët-Boigny (1905-1993)
declared freedom from France. Houphouët-Boigny was an elite Ivorian planter and
founder of the Syndicat agricole africain (SAA), a plantation union that Houphouët-
Boigny helped assemble to abolish forced labor among French colonies in West Africa.
Although Houphouët-Boigny is credited with the country’s freedom, young Ivorian
intellectuals and students did not celebrate the occasion in the way other newly liberated
African nations did. Instead, the younger generation criticized Houphouët-Boigny for the
way he handled achieving liberation. They looked to neighboring leaders such as Kwame
Nkrumah in Ghana and Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, individuals who chose “poverty
in freedom against opulence in servitude.” They considered Houphouët-Boigny
treacherous for the way he “sold out” for freedom, “imposing an independence he hadn’t
wanted (Konstanze N’Guessan,“‘Independence is not given, it is taken’: the Ivorian
cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence,” Nations and Nationalism 19,
no. 2 (2013): 279-281).
44
The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps program should be noted. As a
result of Peace Corps volunteers’ placements throughout Africa, there was a sudden
increased interest in the arts of the continent. In fact, many Africanists today entered the
field as a result of volunteering with the Peace Corps, including Henry Drewal (Nigeria,
1964-1966), Donald J. Cosentino (Nigeria, 1964-1966), Phil Peek (Nigeria, 1964-1966),
Allen F. Roberts (Chad, 1968-1970), and Suzanne Preston Blier (Dahomey, present-day
Benin, 1969-1971). Peace Corps volunteer sources: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-
history/kennedy-establishes-peace-corps; and
http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/depts/resources/country.html.
45
Emphasis was communicated verbally by Vogel during our interview.
 27

SV: It was changing very fast. That year in ‘64, there was
still… all the tellers in the bank were French. There were
still French people selling shoes, repairing shoes in the
market and selling fish. In a year or two they were gone.
They had taken over the businesses more. There were still
tellers in the bank and then that quickly that changed. But
Jerry was the first non-French teacher at the University.
So there were no African teachers, that’s for sure. So it
was really, (pause, laughs) very lucky. And I had just
graduated from college, I was your age I guess. It was
really lucky.46

As a result of Peace Corps volunteers’ placement throughout Africa and

their expressed interest in Ivorian wooden sculptures, replicas and fakes quickly

became available and sold.47 The Vogels arrived just before this increased

consumption occurred, and they often traveled to the market where “authentic”

works were sold to learn more about them.48

As Vogel has stated, “I fell in love with the place and with the art…so

we’d go to the market, go home, look at the books [referring to Fagg and

Elisofon’s The Sculpture of Africa], go back to the market, go home and read the

books…”49 The Vogels were also able to begin their own collection of African

sculptures. Within a year of collecting, they had acquired over one hundred

46
Vogel, interview by author.
47
In our interview, Vogel stated that Peace Corps volunteers were not yet present when
she arrived in 1964; however, the first volunteer to Côte d’Ivoire was in 1961. It seems
Vogel did not have communication with Peace Corps volunteers until later, during her
fieldwork.
48
A discussion on the “authenticity” of African art works is beyond the scope of this
thesis. For more on this, see Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, “African Art and Authenticity: A
Text with a Shadow,” and all subsequent African Arts responses to her essay; Prita Meier,
“Authenticity and its Modernist Discontents: The Colonial Encounter and African and
Middle Eastern Art History;” Salah M. Hassan and Olu Oguibe, “‘Authentic/Ex-Centric’
at the Venice Biennale: African Conceptualism in Global Contexts,” and writings by Ulli
Beier and Odiboh Freeborn.
49
Reif, “Arts/Artifacts; For African Art Treasures, a Place to Spread Out”; Vogel,
interview by author.
 28

objects, mostly heddle pulleys, but also larger works, including three Senufo

“firespitter” masks.

The Museum of Primitive Art

According to Vogel, her entryway into the study of African art was

distinct in that she started by way of collecting, from the continent itself, in

comparison to many scholars of her generation, or a generation ahead, such as the

art historian and African arts scholar Robert Goldwater (who was also Vogel’s

future graduate school advisor) who came to African art through engaging with

modern art. She has stressed that she came “to African art from Africa,” and,

SV: I came to African art because I was already

enthralled with the place, the people; it was very
personal and the context was as important as the
objects for me, and that never stopped, that never
changed…not that year but soon after we made really,
really good friends, lifelong friends, so that the people
were as important as the art.50

While her husband taught English classes at Université d’Abidjan, Vogel

started working as a library assistant at the university library, in addition to

spending time collecting and learning more about Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso

objects. Her position at Université d’Abidjan eventually led her to being offered a

similar library job at the Museum of Primitive Art and to meeting Goldwater,

when the Vogels moved back to the States in 1966 at the end of Jerry’s Fulbright

grant.

Meanwhile, upon their return to America, Jerry Vogel was hired to work

at Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA), a cultural exchange organization that was

50
Vogel, interview by author.
 29

founded by the humanitarian and Reverend Dr. James Herman Robinson of the

Church of the Master in Harlem. Vogel’s position at OCA took the Vogels back

to Côte d’Ivoire for two months every summer, ultimately enabling Vogel to carry

out her fieldwork during this period, from 1968-1975, as will be discussed

shortly.51

With her library experience acquired from the university in Abidjan,

Vogel started looking for work when people told her “Oh, you’re a librarian,”

eventually leading her to being hired as a library assistant at the Museum of

Primitive Art, a position she had from 1966-1967 until she was promoted to

assistant registrar. 52 Originally called the Museum of Indigenous Art, the

Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) was founded in 1954 by the American

billionaire and politician Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979; grandson of

Standard Oil Company founder, John D. Rockefeller) to house his personal

collection of African, Oceanic, pre-Columbian, and Native American arts.53

Rockefeller’s travels abroad from a young age inspired his collecting preferences,

and in 1930, he became a board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in

the hopes of seeing such objects placed on view for the public to enjoy. However,

Rockefeller quickly found himself in disagreement with the acquisition decisions

of Met director Herbert Winlock, which Rockefeller felt did not adequately

51
Ibid.; Vogel, “Baule Art as the Expression of a World View, xv.
52
Vogel, interview by author.
53
Susan Vogel, “History of a Museum, with Theory,” Exhibition-ism (New York: The
Museum for African Art, 1994): 89; Rockefeller was also the former governor of New
York, from 1959-1973.
 30

represent non-Western artistic traditions.54 As a result of Winlock’s refusal to

collect non-Western objects, on the basis that they were better off in natural

history collections, Rockefeller founded the MPA to showcase art “absent from

the Met’s collections.”55

In further expanding his own collection and in the search for works for his

new museum, Rockefeller worked closely with two prominent American

collectors, Rene d’Harnoncourt and Robert Goldwater, individuals who defined

“quality” in African art collecting in mid-twentieth century America.56 Goldwater

and d’Harnoncourt helped Rockefeller launch his collecting efforts concerning

pre-Columbian, Oceanic, and Native American acquisitions, advising him on

which works to collect based on their knowledge of other non-Western art

collecting efforts. Ultimately, they chose works that were considered

“masterpieces,” or those that “defined the kinds of non-Western objects that were

desirable as art,” including Fang reliquary ensembles, Yombe commemorative

figures, and Benin ivory sculptures.57

On the recommendation of d’Harnoncourt, Nelson Rockefeller hired

Goldwater as director of the Museum of Primitive Art in 1956, a position he kept

for almost twenty years until his unexpected death.58 In this role, Goldwater

developed the museum’s collection guidelines, theorizing “non-Western art

54
Alisa LaGamma, “The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in the Arts
of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 72, no.
1 (Summer 2014): 4.
55
LaGamma, 4; Ibid.,18.
56
Jonathan Fine, “Exhibition Review: The Rockefeller Vision.” African Arts 48, no. 2
(Summer 2015): 80.
57
Ibid., 78-79.
58
LaGamma, 6.
 31

primarily as a ‘primitive’ influence on European and American modern art. His

methodology focused on assessing the aesthetic character of the works and his

own understanding of their context.”59 Goldwater also implemented an impressive

exhibiting and programming schedule: in less than fifteen years, the museum

“mounted approximately seventy exhibitions, put out almost fifty publications,

and made loans to exhibitions in Africa.”

Despite the quantifiable work that the MPA undertook, there was still an

underlying tension between Goldwater and Michael C. Rockefeller, Nelson

Rockefeller’s son, who contributed his own anthropological research to the MPA,

until his death in 1961. While Rockefeller preferred extended field visits and

research abroad, Goldwater took the “armchair art historian” approach, learning

about African art objects through the lens of collecting and hands-on cultural

materials.60

In 1958, the Museum of Primitive Art opened to the public – in a

renovated pair of townhouses on 54th street in Midtown – so that visitors too

could enjoy Rockefeller’s “primitive art” collection that was comprised of over

3,300 objects (Figure 2).61 Its mission was to be “a Museum organized around

permanent exhibition galleries where outstanding masterpieces of each area [of

Africa, Oceania, and the Americas] will be continuously accessible to the public,

59
Fine, 8-79.
60
This relationship was explored in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The
Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and
the Americas (October 8, 2013-October 5, 2014).
61
“Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” published September 1999,
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/general-information/2005/arts-of-africa-oceania-and-
the-americas
 32

and other galleries with changing exhibitions.”62 The museum’s opening marked

only nine years after the end of World War II, and the postwar economy was

experiencing a period of unprecedented expansion, overall promoting more

spending, building, and collecting.

The museum also boasted a sizable library filled with periodicals and

journals focused on the visual arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native and pre-

Columbian America, the same library in which Vogel found herself as a library

assistant in 1966. Reflected on being offered this position, Vogel has been careful

to emphasize how she came about the job opportunity completely on her own,

without help from a mentor who did it before her (although Goldwater would

soon become a trusted source of guidance).

The MPA library served as a crucial resource for scholars and students

studying non-western art.63 Its diverse holdings rivaled even those of nearby

Columbia University, with Africanists and graduate students frequenting the MPA

library for access to its impressive volumes, including Douglas Fraser and Herbert

“Skip” Cole, among others. Fraser graduated from Columbia in 1959, and

although his dissertation focused on Oceanic sculpture (“Torres Straits Sculpture:

A Study in Oceanic Primitive Art”), he later expanded his area of focus to

Africa.64

62
LaGamma, 7.
63
In honor of Goldwater’s legacy, the research library continues to serve students and
scholars today. In 1978, the library’s holdings were moved to the Metropolitan Museum’s
Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. In 1982, the library’s
accessible collection was renamed to the Robert Goldwater Library and The Visual
Resource Archive.
64
Herbert Cole, “A Mighty Tree: Douglas F. Fraser 1930-1982,” African Arts 50, no. 3
(Autumn 2017): 30.
 33

Fraser and Goldwater both played a pivotal role in the development of

African art history in the States; however, there seemed to be an ongoing tension

between them. No published source or interviews have directly discussed the

conflict between the two; however, Vogel hinted at their contention in our

conversation when she described her interaction with Fraser at the Museum of

Primitive Art. She took Fraser’s library visits as an opportunity to talk to both

Fraser and Goldwater about the possibility of starting graduate studies at the

Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University, where Goldwater had taught

since 1957. On this conversation, Vogel has said:

SV: When I told Fraser that I decided to go to the Institute

[rather than Columbia] he said, ‘I couldn’t care less.’ I
thought, ‘Hmm, this is very personal.’ And he was a very
emotional person. He had his own demons and he later had a
nervous breakdown actually. So anyway, my choice of
Goldwater was also a choice for a really kind of broad art
history, which is what I got at the Institute.65

Perhaps the conflict between Fraser and Goldwater arose from their

importance in New York scholarship at the time, competing intellectually using

the same conceptual methodologies in understanding African art (and, possibly,

from their generational age difference; Goldwater being twenty-nine years

Fraser’s senior).66 For instance, both scholars never conducted fieldwork to

support their ideas. It was not until 1966 that Fraser visited the continent for the

first time, while meeting his student Herbert Cole for an Igbo research visit in

southeastern Nigeria.67 Similarly, Goldwater visited Africa for the first (and only)

65
Vogel, interview by author.
66
Peter Probst, Chapter Four, From Einstein to Enwezor: Why and How to Write a
History of African Art (forthcoming), 5.
67
Cole, “A Mighty Tree,” 36.
 34

time when he attended the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal in

1966.68 Instead, Fraser and Goldwater conducted object-based research from New

York in their pursuit of non-Western art knowledge. Goldwater, especially, relied

upon collections to inform his expertise.

New Transitions: From the IFA to the Met

Upon the Vogel’s return to New York in 1966, Vogel knew she wanted to

attend graduate school to begin a formal, rather than self-taught, educational

program in the arts of Africa. Before applying for programs, however, Vogel first

had to complete several art history courses, since she had not taken any during her

undergraduate coursework at Georgetown University. To make up for this,

SV: I took summer courses. I took Impressionist

painting. I took Baroque and Renaissance
Architecture. And I took Italian Painting, early Italian
Painting, Giotto. So that’s really the background. That
and going to museums here [in New York] all the time
and seeing everything.69

She continued to work for the Museum of Primitive Art during the length of her

preparatory coursework. After a year of employment as library assistant, she was

promoted to assistant registrar, giving her hands on learning access to the

museum’s collections. It was now her role to process all object and collection-

related projects, such as condition reporting, processing new acquisitions and

receipts, and inventorying objects. At this time, the museum was lending over a

68
The first five American scholars to conduct fieldwork in African art history were
Robert Farris Thompson, Roy Sieber, William Rubin, René A. Bravmann, and Herbert
M. Cole (Source: Cole, “A Mighty Tree,” 37).
69
Vogel, interview by author.
 35

third of its collections to other institutions for exhibitions, which Vogel was

responsible for overseeing. She handled each piece, giving her the opportunity to

learn “African art through [her] fingertips.”70 Her role also gave her a glimpse

into the types of collecting decisions Goldwater was making; choices that

mirrored his aesthetic interests as discussed in his 1937 “Primitivism in Modern

Art” dissertation.

SV: The kinds of choices that were being made for

acquisitions were completely aesthetic choices. And
Goldwater, whose whole experience and approach to
African art was the opposite of mine because he come
to it from modern art and I’d come to it from Africa. I
think he found what I knew interesting to him, and I
certainly was influenced by what he did. He was much
less anthropological than Fraser. He’d never been to
Africa. He went to Africa once, and that was for the
Festival, the World Festival of Black Arts. It was a
brief visit to Dakar [Senegal, in April of 1966].71

As noted above, unlike Vogel, who lived on the continent for several months out

of each year, Goldwater only visited the continent once. With these different

backgrounds, experiences, and entryways into the field, Vogel and Goldwater

could learn from one another.

By the spring of 1969, over a lunch with Rockefeller, Goldwater, and the

rest of the Museum of Primitive Art staff, Vogel learned that the museum’s entire

collection and library would be transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in

the planned new Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing.72 The Museum of

70
Vogel, interview by author.
71
Ibid.
72
Susan Vogel, “Bringing African Art to the Metropolitan Museum,” African Arts 15, no.
2 (February 1982): 38; The new wing was dedicated to the memory of Nelson
Rockefeller’s son, Michael, an art collector himself, who disappeared in New Guinea on
a collecting mission in 1961.
 36

Primitive Art’s three curators, Vogel, for African art, Douglas Newton for

Oceanic, and Julie Jones for Native American art, were each chosen to oversee

the Met’s new permanent Wing installation.73 Although Vogel, Newton, and

Jones looked forward to the opportunity to curate their respective specialty in the

planned brand new and spacious galleries, countless challenges soon made

themselves known. For instance, the specialized audience who frequented the

Museum of Primitive Art was comparatively different than that of the

Metropolitan’s, which welcomed visitors from the public at large, including

school groups, tourists, graduate students, scholars of African art, or those who

have never interacted with “non-Western” art before. How could Vogel curate

exhibitions about African art that spoke to this more general audience, while

striving to “interest, attract, and inform them to the greatest measure possible?”74

With the wing’s inaugural opening still almost two decades away, she had time to

critically consider new exhibiting choices. (In fact it was not until the 1970s that

the Metropolitan Board of Directors and Rockefeller formally agreed on the

official transfer between the Museum of Primitive Art and the Met.75)

After completing her required introductory art history courses, Vogel

matriculated at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in the fall of 1969

and continued to work at the Museum of Primitive Art. Now Goldwater was both

her advisor at university, and her boss at the MPA, even if she did not interact

with him that often at the museum since she “was way down the hierarchy.”76 On

73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 40.
75
Fine, 78.
76
Vogel, interview by author.
 37

choosing the IFA rather than Columbia for graduate school, Vogel has expressed

that her

SV:…choice of Goldwater was also a choice for a

really kind of broad art history, which is what I got at
the Institute. So I took courses in Islamic architecture
and eighteenth century painting and the whole gamut. I
did a paper on Goya, all different kinds of things. And
Egyptian art. I minored in Egyptian and Islamic.

Vogel earned her Master of Arts in Art History in 1971 after completing two

qualifying papers, “Art of Predynastic Egypt” and “Baule Aesthetics,” allowing

her to continue with PhD coursework. She was also promoted to Assistant Curator

at the Museum of Primitive Art at this time, providing her with the opportunity to

dictate how the museum’s collection could be showcased.

Ironically, as her studies continued, her graduate school experience

became an independent endeavor, much like her initial study of African art while

living in Côte d’Ivoire. As a collector, Goldwater did not feel adept at providing

Vogel with a holistic African art discourse, so it was up to her to “design her own

program” and find professors with a specialization in the cultures of Africa and

petition to enroll in their courses from outside the IFA.77 Using funding from the

Institute, Vogel studied with Robert Farris Thompson at Yale University, the first

American to earn his PhD in African art history and widely known for his

fieldwork among the Yoruba; Michael Coe, the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican

specialist in Yale’s archaeology department; Leon Siroto, Associate Professor of

Anthropology at the University of Delaware who’s research focused on west and

77
Vogel, interview by author.
 38

central African masks; and the Africanist anthropologists John Middleton and

Thomas O. Beidelman at NYU’s Washington Square campus.78

KP: So it was really up to you to go out and forge your

own course.

SV: Right. And by doing that you end up making up your

own theories in a sense. [Robert Farris] Thompson of
course had a very strong approach, which I think I’ve
absorbed parts of and I think I’ve absorbed parts of all of
these people. But I wouldn’t say there was any single one.
They were all less art historical than I was.79

Although she studied with anthropologists rather than art historians (aside from

Farris Thompson), each scholar provided her with a solid foundation in better

understanding the historical contexts and formal qualities of varying non-western

art forms, ultimately shaping her own field research in the years to come.

Interlude: Baule Fieldwork

Fieldwork was conducted over five stays among the Baule people of

central Côte d’Ivoire, between the summers of 1968-1975 in the months that took

the Vogel’s to West Africa for Operation Crossroads Africa related-endeavors,

with more extensive research following the completion of her Master’s degree. At

the beginning of her research, almost all fieldwork occurred in “Akwe area with

Kami village near Yamoussoukro as center,” while subsequent field research

visits “were made to other Baule areas” including Agba, Warebo, Kode, and

78
In our interview Vogel mentioned she studied with Siroto “at the Field Museum,” but it
is unclear if she meant she traveled to Chicago for a course with him or if she studied
with him at University of Delaware. Siroto was assistant curator of African ethnology at
the Field Museum from 1965-1970, and was a professor at the University of Delaware
from 1971-1974. Considering that Vogel started her advanced coursework following the
completion of her MA in 1971, I can assume she meant she went to Delaware when she
studied with Siroto.
79
Vogel, interview by author.
 39

southern Nanafwe (Figure 3).80 When I inquired about her decision to study the

Baule, she replied it seemed “like the obvious thing to do. It was right there.

Nobody had done anything with it. It was a huge, rich, well-established, admired

tradition.” While it is true that no (American) scholar had yet extensively

examined Baule artistic traditions through time, numerous European

anthropologists and ethnographers, including Philippe de Salverte-Marmier,

Timothy C. Weiskel, and Maurice Delafosse, had already spent time completing

fieldwork among Baule people, translating origin stories and other myths.81

Though helpful, Vogel stated “these studies leave many lacunae,

especially relating to art, and some discrepancies.”82 Vogel argued her research

was different than the scholars who had come before her because she prioritized

seeking knowledge about art making and aesthetic choices among the Baule, in

contrast to the research done before that “almost totally ignored the existence of

art among the Baule.”83 Vogel used an anthropological approach to fieldwork in

her analysis of Baule wood sculpture, conducting interviews with “elders,

diviners, dancers, and artists, who are the makers, owners, users and connoisseurs

of works of art.”84 Many of Vogel’s assertions about Baule art making practices

and their interpretation are further explored in her exhibition catalogue, Baule:

African Art, Western Art (1997), representing the culmination of over twenty-five

80
Vogel, “Baule Art as the Expression of a World View,” viii- xii.
81
According to Vogel’s dissertation literature review, other scholars who conducted
fieldwork in Baule areas and subgroups include Hans Himmelheber, Pierre Etienne,
Vincent Guerry, Donald Thurow, Bohumil Holas, Fernand Lafargue, Jean-Pierre
Chauveau, Yves Monnier, and Georges Effimbra.
82
Vogel, “Baule Art as the Expression of a World View,” xiii.
83
Ibid., 9-10.
84
Ibid., viii.
 40

years of research. The accompanying show of the same name was Vogel’s last

curating project at Yale University Art Gallery, prior to her transition to film

school.85

In 1973, midway through her fieldwork, Goldwater unexpectedly passed

away. At Goldwater’s funeral, multiple scholars of African art history who were

in attendance told Vogel “if you need some help finishing your degree, just

call.”86 Roy Sieber, Professor of African art history at Indiana University at the

time, took over as her interim advisor, serving as primary reader for her

dissertation.87 That same year, Vogel was promoted to Assistant Curator at the

MPA, ultimately curating two shows before her transition to the Met, including

The Sculpture of Black Africa: Upper Volta and Gods of Fortune: The Cult of the

Hand in Nigeria (1974). It was in this role of assistant curator that Vogel also met

the American philanthropist and real estate developer Charles B. Benenson, who

visited the Museum of Primitive Art in his search for an African art advisor for

his growing collection of art from the continent.88 As will be revealed in the next

chapter, Vogel relied on this relationship in the founding of her own museum, just

over ten years later.

85
For more on the possible reasons Vogel left Yale, see Chapter Three.
86
Kathryn Gunsch, interviewed by the author, digital recording, September 2018.
87
Roslyn Adele Walker, “Remembering Roy Sieber (1923-2001),” African Arts 50, no. 3
(Autumn 2017): 22-29.
88
Vogel, “Riding the Crest of African Art with Charles Benenson,” Accumulating
Histories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 45.
 41

A New Wing, Exhibiting Challenges

By 1976, seven years after the luncheon with Rockefeller when Vogel and

the other Museum of Primitive Art staff learned of its approaching closure, the

MPA closed its doors for good and its collection entered an offsite warehouse.

Following the end of Vogel’s fieldwork, she was hired as Associate Curator of

African Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although she was now working

in an encyclopedic institution facing new restrictions – namely that she had to

present proposed African art acquisitions to annual trustee committee meetings

with no guarantee that her selection would be chosen for accession – her

collecting decisions remained the same as they were established at the MPA, even

if the acquisition process itself was different. Her criteria derived from

Goldwater’s, Rockefeller’s, and d’Harnoncourt’s aims “to select objects of

outstanding beauty whose rare quality is the equal of works shown in other

museums of art throughout the world, and to exhibit them so that everyone may

enjoy them in the fullest measure.”89 An example of such an acquisition that met

these criteria included a nineteenth century Ijebu Yoruba Janus headdress, with its

facial geometric pattering, curving edges, and two protruding incised horns that

give the impression of the same braids donned by Ijebu queens (Figure 4). Carved

from a single piece of wood, the Janus mask speaks to the artistic exchanges that

occur among Yoruba communities and also references masquerade traditions.

A year later, in 1977, Vogel graduated from the IFA with her PhD in

African art history – the second American woman to do so after Jean Borgatti

89
Vogel, “Bringing African Art to the Metropolitan Museum,” 44.
 42

(who had done so just a year earlier).90 With her dissertation, “Baule Art as the

Expression of a World View,” complete, Vogel could now focus on the new

design of the planned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The Met prioritized the

display of “pure art,” thereby eliminating any anthropological or natural history

representation possibilities in its galleries.91 Curating within these constraints,

while also being mindful of accessibility issues, presented a problem Vogel had

not yet previously encountered.

Despite the limitations, Vogel felt fortunate to have the spatial, financial,

and temporal support from the museum, considering that the opening of the wing

“has been a long time coming”.92 Together with the Met’s curators for Oceanic

and Pre-Columbian art, Douglas Newton and Julie Jones, who were also facing

similar constraint challenges, it was decided that the Wing’s galleries should be

curated in the most inviting way possible. To do this, a neutral grey-beige wall

color, carpet, and case linings were chosen, alongside the use of fluorescent and

incandescent light bulbs to create a warm ambience that also gently highlighted

the collection’s details and nuances (Figure 5). The curators determined that any

didactic panels accompanying exhibition cases should be approximately two

hundred words in length, so as to not overwhelm the reader but also to provide

enough information for understanding context. Vogel chose to install five large

wall panels, “one each for the five main areas of Africa (although Vogel does not

specify which five sections, I assume she is referring to North, East, South, West,

90
In addition to her PhD, Vogel also graduated with a Certificate in Museum Training.
See footnote 10 for a longer list of American women scholars who earned their PhDs in
African art history.
91
Ibid., 40.
92
Vogel, “Bringing African Art to the Met,” 45.
 43

and Central Africa) with an easy-to-read font for individuals with visual

impairments.93 Finally, ramps were provided throughout the galleries to ensure

accessibility.

In January of 1982, the brand new Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing

opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to showcase Rockefeller’s collection

of indigenous arts, transferred from the Museum of Primitive Art. As a result of

Vogel’s, Newton’s, and Jones’ curatorial decisions, the Met’s new $18.3 million,

42,000 square foot wing welcomed more than 190,000 visitors in the first twelve

weeks of its opening.94 A photography archive, art storage complexes, and the

Robert Goldwater Library were constructed in the Wing for visitors to enjoy as

well.95 One Met official even naïvely noted, “Never has so much expensive high

technology been lavished on a display of ‘primitive’ art.”96 Although audience

feedback was overwhelmingly positive, the Met’s “pure art” constraints still

negatively impacted the African art galleries.

For instance, the overwhelming use of glass display cases for conservation

reasons and the lack of in-depth contextual information, appears to have

perpetuated stereotypes about art from the continent, despite Vogel’s carefulness

to avoid this trap (she deliberately avoided the use of dark galleries in fear that

this aesthetic would “reinforce all the stereotypes about Africa that we want to

93
Ibid., 42.
94
Grace Glueck, “A Spectacular New Wing,” New York Times, January 24, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/24/magazine/a-spectacular-new-wing.html; and
Vogel, “Bringing African Art to the Met,” 42.
95
“Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” September 1999, accessed May 10, 2018,
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/general-information/2005/arts-of-africa-oceania-and-
the-americas
96
Glueck, “A Spectacular New Wing.”
 44

dispel).”97 Even though a 1982 New York Times review of the Wing began

positively, “Time and silence have given these [African sculpture] pieces an

exceptional echo,” it ended in a problematic tone: “That echo is not owed either to

freakish materials alone or to the implicitly sinister nature of the works in

question. It can be found equally in work that is free from terror and has long

been in favor with dealers and collectors in the developed world.”98

Vogel was also continuously fighting the Board of Directors for more

funding to host temporary or traveling African art exhibitions even prior to the

new wing’s opening. However, because the Met had recently showcased The Buli

Master: an African Artist of the Nineteenth Century (1980) and For Spirits and

Kings: African Art from the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection (1981), the BoD

felt they had done enough to showcase African art, giving any immediate African

art shows a “check in the box,” so to speak.99 In response, Vogel decided it was

time to take her ideas outside the Met:

SV: So I realized there was money, there were shows,

people like [Herbert] Skip Cole were writing to me
and offering me his Igbo show, which was traveling.
There were other shows that people thought would
come to New York but the Met wasn’t about to take
them. So I realized there’s room, there’s shows, there’s
an audience, there’s donors. I could do this. Let’s take

97
Vogel, “Bringing African Art to the Met,” 42.
98
John Russell, “Art: Primitive Works from Diverse Worlds,” New York Times, February
3, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/03/arts/art-primitive-works-from-diverse-
worlds.html
99
Photographs from the Met’s Rockefeller Wing in the 1980s look almost identical to
photographs of its galleries today. However, in November of 2018, the Met announced a
$70 million renovation project that will “reconfigure and reimagine” the Rockefeller
Wing’s displays, instead placing the collections “in dialogue with the Museum’s
collections as a whole” (“Metropolitan Museum of Art to Renovate its Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas Galleries,” accessed April 16, 2019,
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2018/rockefeller-wing-announcement).
 45

it outside the Met and that’s what happened. And that

was really the model. And the situation… looking
back, I now realize what I thought was normal, wasn’t
normal at all. I couldn’t have done it at any other time.
And I couldn’t have done it in any other place.
Everything was just kind of like perfectly there to
make it possible.100

At this time in the early 1980s, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian’s National

Museum of African Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn

Museum, and the recently closed Museum of Primitive Art were the only modes

of “non-western art” displays of which Vogel was familiar. Though realizing that

such institutions’ techniques were “flawed… no alternative models came to

mind.” Opening a museum of her own provided her with the platform to

experiment with possible display techniques that often highlighted a certain aspect

of an object, or turned the lens from the art to the audience, in complete contrast

to the broad themes the Met prioritized. Shortly after making the decision to leave

the Met and open the Center for African Art, Vogel found potential board

members, funding, and assistant staff, including Mary (Polly) Nooter who was

still a graduate student at Columbia at the time.

Conclusion

Recognizing that “almost nothing displayed in museums was made to be

seen in them,” Vogel set out to challenge traditional display modes by opening the

Center for African Art. While she has repeatedly insisted her work has never been

about theory, as evident by her curatorial choices and accompanying exhibition

catalogues, it is clear that she was very much entrenched in postmodern theories,

100
Vogel, interview by author.
 46

closely following the museum culture and trends of the early 1990s. In the

following chapter, I trace the cultural biography of the Center for African Art.

Several of the Center’s most discussed exhibitions will be reconsidered through

the lens of postmodernism and postcolonialism, ending with a re-examination of

Exhibition-ism before Vogel’s transition to Yale University Art Gallery.

 47

Chapter 2

“The opening of a new museum is a time for recognizing

past accomplishments, assessing the present, and
preparing for the future.”

Sylvia H. Williams, African Art Studies: The State

of the Discipline, 1987

“Museums are not only places for contemplation, passive

learning, and jingoistic celebration, but also settings for conflict
and debates about art, culture, and society.”

Ivan Karp, “First Word,” African Arts 26, no. 3 (July

1993): 12

Introduction

How can museums thoughtfully represent art that speaks to museological

colonial legacies? Do curators have a responsibility to cast meaning onto an

object? How can curators do so, while also letting the art speak for itself? In the

course of her lifetime pursuing the study and advancement of African art

scholarship, Susan Vogel has directly addressed these critical questions that

Africanist curators continue to grapple with today. Recognizing the inherent

problems that arise in the display of marginalized and non-Western art forms –

namely that unchanging exhibitions reinforce incorrect perceptions that certain art

traditions are static, frozen, and unchanging in time – Vogel aimed to approach

the display of African art in a more resonant way, through turning the focus away

from the art itself and instead to the visitor, when she opened the Center for

African Art in a pair of renovated townhouses on East 68th Street in New York

City in the fall of 1984.

 48

As the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt has stated, a resonant

exhibition or museum “pulls the viewer toward a series of implied questions: How

did the objects come to be displayed? How were they originally used? What were

the feelings of those who originally held the objects, cherished them, possessed

them?”101 Similarly, after opening the Center for African Art with a mission of

promoting the “appreciation and understanding of Africa’s cultures,” Vogel

helped activate this mindset of resonance in museum visitors by curating

exhibitions that encouraged both viewing and “reading;” exhibitions that allowed

visitors to “hear” the “voices” and the stories of the objects on view before

them.102

This chapter considers the emergence of the Center for African Art (later

renamed to the Museum for African Art), its place in the New York City art world

milieu, and the circumstances that led Vogel to utilizing such resonant display

approaches as described by Greenblatt. Rather than discussing many of the

museum’s exhibitions that have already received substantial attention in the

scholarship and press – notably Africa Explores, Perspectives, and ART/artifact –

I turn instead to the decisions that led Vogel to conceive of exhibitions such as

Africa Explores, and the factors influencing her curatorial choices. As I will

argue, Africa Explores would not have been conceived without the successes of

Perspectives and ART/artifact, even if the curatorial decisions used in Africa

Explores were inherently flawed, as will be revealed.

101
Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Levine (Washington and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 45.
102
Greenblatt, Ibid 45; and ACASA 1, no. 2, “New Items,” (Winter 1982): 4-5.
 49

One exception, however, is the chapter’s in-depth discussion of the 1994

show Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art, which was only briefly reviewed

by the art critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times shortly after its debut.103

The show’s accompanying exhibition catalogue of the same name has received

more discussion in sources such as African Arts, and is often a staple text for

introductory museological undergraduate courses. As I argue, Exhibition-ism can

be considered an exemplary model of the museum’s exhibiting philosophy for the

ways it challenged viewers’ inherent assumptions about art from the continent,

invited audiences to consider their own aesthetic and informative curatorial

choices, and communicated to visitors the difficulties in translating notions of

ritual, performance, or other rather esoteric visual media into an exhibition

format.

Many of the exhibitions that ultimately came to define the Museum for

African Art were shown during the height of postmodernism and postcolonial

discussions. As the field of African art history was consistently in dialogue with

such theories, this chapter reexamines Vogel’s work through the lens of

scholarship put forth by scholars such as Howard Becker, Homi Bhabha, Kwame

Anthony Appiah, and Olu Oguibe. Although Vogel has stated she never been

interested in theoretical discourse, instead asserting “my work has always been

driven by a deeply felt, personal political agenda to make Africans, African art,

and culture respected and admired in America,” reading Vogel’s exhibition

103
See Roberta Smith, “Art in Review,” The New York Times, October 28, 1994,
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/28/arts/art-in-review-661481.html. As far as I am
aware, this is the only resource to review the actual show, rather than the accompanying
catalogue.
 50

catalogue excerpts or her exhibitions’ wall text itself makes clear that she was

entrenched in the intellectual movements of the era.104 This chapter further

explores these theories that helped shape the display of non-western art

throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Opening of the Center

The first official announcement of Susan Vogel’s intention to open her

own museum was revealed in the Arts Council of the African Studies

Association’s (ACASA) second newsletter:

THE CENTER FOR AFRICAN ART, NEW YORK.

Executive Director: Susan Vogel. Public, non-profit gallery;
‘Purpose: To increase appreciation and understanding of
Africa’s ancient cultures through a program of art exhibitions
and related activities…’ Envisioned: three exhibition/year/3
months, 100 + objects each) ‘of a caliber equivalent to those
presented at the Metropolitan Museum;’ ‘educational in
subject, and of the highest aesthetic quality. Most will travel
to other museums in America and Europe.’ Location of
gallery being negotiated. First exhibition (‘Art Treasures of
Gabon’) scheduled to open late 1983.105

Although the Center’s announcement debut was revealed in 1982, Vogel had been

gathering sources of funding, assembling a Board of Directors, and seeking

potential museum spaces since before the Met’s Rockefeller Wing even opened:

SV: As soon as I had this idea [of opening my own

museum] I went to Charlie Benenson, Marc Ginzberg. All
the people who were going to be the backbone of this in any
way and within a few months we had a meeting in Marc
Ginzberg’s office where the people in the room agreed to

104
Email communication with Susan Vogel; Vogel’s most recent work El Anatsui: Art
and Life (2012) also reiterates her refusal to engage with theory. The first sentence of the
monograph states, “This is not a work of research of theory. It is both more analytical and
more personal than that, having grown out of my contact with El Anatsui as I directed
Fold Crumple Crush and Anatsui at Work (6).”
105
“New Items,” ACASA 1, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 4-5.
 51

constitute themselves as a Board. And we incorporated and

did all the legal work. And fundraising.106

Thanks in part to her long-standing relationship with Charles B. Benenson, a

collector of African and modern art with whom Vogel had frequently consulted in

his pursuit of “authentic” objects from the continent, Vogel worked with

Benenson to raise the necessary funds relatively quickly, within the span of five

months.107 As it turned out, however, finding the right space for this new

forthcoming institution was even more challenging than fundraising efforts, a

process Vogel has likened to “stepping on a treadmill that was being

accelerated.”108

Vogel wanted to avoid the rather impersonal and commercial “white cube

effect” of standard art museum galleries and instead sought a space that could

provide visitors with a more intimate viewing experience on a smaller scale. She

found these requirements in a pair of classic “brownstone” townhouses near Park

Avenue that, until their conversion into the two-story, five-gallery Center, had

served as private residences (Figure 6). To enter the Center, visitors walked

through a narrow, cast iron door framed by a carved doorway of floral motifs.

Once through the door, a small vestibule comprised of wood-panels and marble

106
Vogel, interview by author; Board Members included Roger Azar, Bernice Clyman,
Gordon Douglas, Ann Hutchinson, Deborah Last, Jay Last, Jack Naiman, and Kenneth
Prewitt.
107
For more on the relationship between Susan Vogel and Charlie Benenson, see
Accumulating Histories: African Art from the Charles B. Benenson Collection at the Yale
University Art Gallery. The catalogue’s introductory essays describe Benenson’s reliance
on Vogel in shaping his African art collection; he did not purchase a single object without
her approval and expertise. According to Benenson’s son, Lawrence B. Benenson, Vogel
became his “second-most-trusted advisor,” after Michael Kan, and together they both
started the Museum for African Art (“Foreword,” in Accumulating Histories (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 9.)
108
Vogel, interview by author.
 52

floors served as the entryway to the galleries. Upstairs, the rooms retained their

residential aesthetic; each gallery was painted a different warm color and

domestic design features such as paneling, ceiling plasterwork, latticed windows,

and even marble fireplaces could be found throughout each space (Figure 7). The

designer Maureen Healy oversaw the building’s conversion from residence to

museum, and she prioritized the use of vitrines in contrast to the Met’s abundant

use of wall cases so as to create a more welcoming and personable museum

environment.109

After finally securing the townhouse lease in April of 1984, the Center for

African Art opened five months later with its inaugural exhibition, African

Masterpieces from the Musée de L’Homme (contrary to the initial announcement

about a planned Gabon show in the ACASA newsletter). African Masterpieces,

which opened on September 17, 1984 and ran through January 6, 1985,

showcased one hundred objects from the Paris museum, the first time the Musée

de l’Homme had agreed to place a portion of its collection on temporary traveling

loan. Vogel attributed this rare loan agreement to the contacts she had established

over the years during her time as assistant registrar and curator at the Museum of

Primitive Art:

SV: And partly because you know I had been at the Met
by then, and the Museum of Primitive Art, and that was
the place. Every European curator that came through town
came and saw me, every academic on their way to do
fieldwork saw me, all the academics that were teaching
wanted to see the objects, they came to see me. I knew
everybody, or met everybody, and that made it hugely
easy. So that I could, the Musée de l’Homme would lend
to a non-existent institution, a hundred of their best pieces,
109
Exhibition-ism, 104.
 53

because they knew me and because the curator knew me

and that was really the only way it could’ve happened.110

The show intended “to elevate African art from the realm of ethnography to that

of aesthetics,” however, Vogel and Francine N’Diaye (curator of Musée de

l’Homme who worked on the show with Vogel) were criticized for the way they

clearly placed precedence in objects from former French colonies, including Mali,

Cameroon, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.111

As the Africanists Janet L. Stanley and Jean Borgatti observed, Vogel and

N’Diaye “did not seek geographical balance…[the show was] not surprisingly

biased in favor of the former French territories.”112 In response, Vogel argued that

since African Masterpieces was the Center’s inaugural exhibition, her goal was

“to attract a broad museum-going public” with artworks of the highest aesthetic

quality.”113 As will be seen from other critiques of Vogel’s exhibitions over the

course of her curating career, she has often employed an outsider/insider narrative

trope in her showing of objects considered “the heritage of conquest,” despite

trying to reframe modes of museological display.114

It should also be noted that African Masterpieces opened ten days before

the Museum of Modern Art’s notorious “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art:

110
Vogel, interview by author.
111
Janet L. Stanley, “Book Reviews: African Masterpieces from the Musée de
l’Homme,” Library Journal 110 (June 1985): 120.
112
Jean Borgatti, “African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme by Susan Vogel
and Francine N’Diaye,” African Arts 18, no. 3 (May 1985): 22-23; Ibid.
113
Flora Katz, “African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme,” African Arts 18, no.
1 (November 1984): 79-80.
114
James C. Faris, “ART/artifact: On the Museum and Anthropology,” Current
Anthropology 29, no. 5 (December 1988): 777.
 54

Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern exhibition.115 Organized by William Rubin,

the show was advertised as “the first exhibition to juxtapose tribal and modern

objects in the light of informed art history. Primitivist works by modernists…are

juxtaposed with tribal works in order to clarify the nature of the Western response

to them.”116 For instance, works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Alberto

Giacometti were placed alongside a Pende mask, a Zuni sculpture, and a

Nyamwezi figure, respectively, with the question “Which is primitive?” meant to

guide visitors through their understanding of primitivism (Figure 8).117 Although

the 690-page accompanying exhibition catalogue discusses the complex

relationship between modern and “non-western” artists, many visitors walked

away from the exhibition with the incorrect assumption that “primitive” art gave

rise to modernism, due in part to the way Rubin highlighted non-western objects’

forms rather than their original context.118 According to Vogel, the overlapping

runtime of both exhibitions was “not by coincidence.”119 While “Primitivism” did

not properly contextualize the non-western objects on view, for each object in

African Masterpieces, didactic labeling was placed adjacent to the work in

115
There were no women artists or artists of color represented at MoMA until the late 20th
century. Rubin’s “Primitivism” exhibition was the museum’s attempt to engage in
postmodern discourse, while trying to be less canonical and respond to criticisms. This
approach backfired.
116
“‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” The
Museum of Modern Art Press Release, August 1984.
117
Arthur C. Danto, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,” The Nation 239 (December
1984): 590.
118
For more on the inherent curatorial problems associated with “Primitivism,” see
Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” ArtForum 23, no. 3 (November 1984): 54-61.
119
Exhibition-ism, 105.
 55

question, with the object’s cultural biography provided too.120 Even Holland

Cotter of the New York Times noted that the “Center’s show was perceived by

many as a corrective example and established the museum as an institution to

watch.”121

Furthermore, Vogel hoped that the “constellation of Western artists’

names in that exhibition, and the beautiful galleries [at the Center] would help the

visitor relax and take in what were genuinely some of the most riveting and

beautiful African sculptures anywhere.”122 The abundant use of signifiers aside, it

is clear that with African Masterpieces, Vogel intended to attract both visitors

who were new to the appreciation of art from the continent, and those, like the

specialized audience who frequented the Museum of Primitive Art, who already

had familiarity with African art.

As was exemplified in the production of the African Masterpieces

exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Vogel was closely following the

Museum for Primitive Art model, especially the MPA’s “highly active exhibiting

program and publishing.”123 For every show the center produced, a colored

120
James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in Race-ing Art History:
Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2002), 226.
121
Holland Cotter, New York Times, September 18, 2018,
“https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/obituaries/mary-nooter-roberts-dead.html
122
Ibid.; There were no less than six “primitive” art exhibitions on view in New York and
Washington D.C. in the Fall of 1984, including Te Maori, Maori Art from New Zealand
at the Met; Asante: Kingdom of Gold at the American Museum of Natural History;
Beauty by Design: the Aesthetics of African Adornment at the African-American Institute;
and The Katherine White Collection of African Art at the National Museum of African
Art.
123
Vogel, interview by author.
 56

catalogue was written in conjunction with it.124 Her decision to lease a pair of

uptown residential brownstones also parallels the Museum of Primitive Art’s

location in a midtown townhouse (that was even attached to Nelson Rockefeller’s

childhood home).125 Unlike the MPA, however, the Center for African Art did not

have an African art collection, nor did Vogel aspire to actively acquire any works,

contemporary or not. Instead, Vogel wanted to spend the center’s resources on

producing and hosting rapidly changing exhibitions that would travel

internationally, choosing to rely on temporary object loans for display rather than

depending on a permanent collection (that would have required more space, staff,

and funding to oversee).

Although the Center for African Art initially started following the

Museum for Primitive Art model, it soon became clear that this practice was not

sustainable for a non-collecting art institution. By 1987, the museum started to

experiment with other display mechanisms, through exploring the “nuances and

byways…the overarching concepts and the untested hypotheses, of African art

and theory.”126 These “untested hypotheses” included the use of interdisciplinary

approaches to increase African art appreciation and accessibility, and it was in

this era that the Center produced Perspectives, ART/artifact, and Africa Explores.

Each can be categorized by what the Africanist art historian Polly Roberts called

reflective exhibitions, the type of shows that ultimately came to define the

124
Every single catalogue the Center produced is digitally archived and accessible on The
Africa Center website, https://www.theafricacenter.org/archive/.
125
“Exhibition Overview,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed April 1, 2019,
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/nelson-rockefeller.
126
Exhibition-ism, 98.
 57

museum.127 In contrast, African Masterpieces and the exhibitions that followed

soon after, including Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (1985) and African

Aesthetics, The Carlo Monzino Collection (1986) were what Roberts called

“culturally-based” exhibitions, shows that provided audiences with a general

introduction to the continent’s historic art forms. Before further exploring the

museum’s reflective shows and the efforts that ultimately led to the production of

Africa Explores, it will prove useful to establish the Center for African Art

theoretically, historically, and temporally within New York City, and to consider

the advantages of the New York City art world milieu in the late twentieth

century.

New York City Art World

The successes that the Center of African Art experienced within its first

few years of operations stem from its careful placement in the New York City art

world.128 In this context, “art world” refers to “an actual world, a community of

people who foster the production, exhibition, appreciation, and ideally, sales of

art. It means a network of galleries, dealers, collectors, curators, museum officials

127
Roberts was the former curator for the Museum for African Art; Phone interview, May
2018.
128
Vogel herself has stated, “If the Museum for African Art has ancestors, if it fits into a
genealogy of exhibition approaches to African, Oceanic, and other arts deemed related,
its closest relatives are all in New York” (Vogel, “History of a Museum, With Theory,”
Exhibition-ism, 81).; The Center’s success also stemmed from its sources of funding.
Vogel relied on the ongoing donations from wealthy collectors of African art, including
Charles Benenson, Marc Ginzberg, Carlo Monzino, Robert Rubin, and Paul Tishman. In
addition, the Center received financial support from Sotheby’s, the National Endowment
for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and various New York City art
galleries.
 58

and trustees, and critics.”129 For the sociologist and urban ethnographer Howard

S. Becker, art worlds “denote the network of people whose cooperative activity,

organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,

produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for.”130 It can be helpful to

apply his philosophies to my study of the Center for African Art, an institution

that thrived in the context of New York City because of the abundance of galleries

and larger institutions that also displayed African art. That is, an art world of

African art was already in place when the Center for African Art opened in 1984.

There had been an appreciation for African art in New York City since the

early twentieth century. The Brooklyn Museum (or the Brooklyn Institute of Arts

and Sciences, as it was called in the early twentieth century) started collecting

African art in 1900, becoming the first museum in the United States to display

African objects as fine art, and not anthropological or ethnographic artifacts as

was the case at the nearby American Museum of Natural History.131 Similarly,

Alfred Stieglitz’s 1914 show, Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of

Modern Art at his 291 Gallery in midtown, also displayed African objects as art

(despite the primivitizing title of the exhibition). As a result of Stieglitz’s show,

the demand for African art in the New York art market rapidly increased, with

numerous American dealers encouraging their clients to invest in non-Western

art.

129
Louis Menand, “Thirteen Crucial Years for Art in Downtown New York,” The New
Yorker, March 28, 2017.
130
Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982): x.
131
Author Unknown, “Anatsui in Brooklyn,” New York Times, August 3, 2012.
 59

While New York City itself has long been considered an artist’s and art

critic’s haven with its hundreds of galleries, museums, and other cultural art

centers, three art districts in Manhattan specifically have been known for their

promotion of fine arts.132 These include the Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue in

uptown, home to institutions such as the Met, Guggenheim, and Cooper Hewitt

Smithsonian Design Museum; SoHo (“South of Houston”) in downtown; and 57th

Street in midtown.133 It is no coincidence that the Center occupied two of these

central Manhattan locations.134 The original Center’s location was right off of

Park Avenue in midtown, the “world’s wealthiest address,” and later relocated to

SoHo.135

From 1982 onwards, each art district saw a significant increase in the

number of galleries selling “high tribal art,” due in large part to the success of the

newly opened Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met, as well as the popularity

of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Primitivism” two years later.136 Within a span

of eleven years, there were multiple venues promoting African art; by 1996,

Museum Mile alone had nine galleries dedicated to exhibiting art from the

132
For more on the history of New York City as an artistic center, see Ann Fensterstock,
Art on the Block: Tracking the New York Art World from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick
and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013) and Jed Perl, New Art City (New York:
Knopf, 2005).
133
C.M. Rawlings “‘Making names’: The cutting edge renewal of African art in New
York City, 1985-1996,” Poetics 29 (2001): 28.
134
The original Center for African Art was located at 54 68th St. and Madison in
midtown; in 1992, the newly renamed Museum for African Art opened in SoHo. The
Africa Center, built upon the legacy of the Museum for African Art, is currently being
constructed on Museum Mile.
135
“Park Avenue: Money, Power, and the American Dream,” PBS, 2012, accessed
February 12, 2019.
136
Rawlings, “‘Making names,’ 33.
 60

continent.137 As Becker has stated, “The sociology of art has looked at innovation

and artistic change as resulting from the collective activity of an art world.”138

Considering this thriving “collective activity” of the display of African art in three

central Manhattan neighborhoods, the Center for African Art’s placement in

midtown was ideal for legitimizing a quickly emerging African art consumer

demand.

In 1992, the Center for African Art moved to 593 Broadway in downtown

SoHo and was renamed to the Museum for African Art (Figure 9). Since the

1970s, SoHo has been associated as a “scene of living artists, students, and

intellectuals, many of whom pride themselves on remaining at the cutting edge of

culture.”139 Considering SoHo’s avant-garde associations, it is clear why Vogel

would choose this district for the museum’s new space, designed by Maya Lin.

Not only was SoHo a district that proliferated art students, movements, and

commercial art galleries, it epitomized “art for art’s sake,” ultimately sustaining

the experimental work of emerging artists. In the context of SoHo, the newly

renamed and renovated Museum for African Art could produce innovative,

reflective exhibitions that catered to audiences who could appreciate its different

display mechanisms.

I would also argue, however, that Vogel herself attributed to creating a

distinct African-art-art world in New York City for the way she “coordinated the

137
Rawlings, 33.
138
Ibid., 26.
139
Ibid., 29.
 61

work of the many actors needed to produce and display any kind of art.”140 She

did this via the use of her connections she established over the years from her

work at the Museum of Primitive Art and the Met, as well as encouraging the

work of other scholars to showcase his or her research. As Kathryn Gunsch, Teel

Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

observed:

KG: She allowed other people’s research and ideas

to come forward in a way that shaped the field. So
the Center shaped the field through Susan and also
through Susan’s support of other people’s work.141

Considering her work in light of this context, the Center for African Art was

functioning in three art “worlds coexisting at one time,” as Becker deemed

possible.142 In this case, the Center flourished among a distinct African art world,

set within the context of the greater Manhattan art world, and of course, the art

world of New York City at large.

Perspectives and ART/artifact

According to the African art historian Polly Roberts, the Center for

African Art experienced three pivotal stages of exhibitions since opening in 1984

and throughout the early 1990s.143 First, upon the center’s inaugural opening, it

produced culturally focused exhibitions, such as African Masterpieces, shows that

were based upon the Museum of Primitive Art’s and the Met’s encyclopedic

140
Paul J. DiMaggio, “The Sociology of Art Comes of Age,” Contemporary Sociology
12, no. 3 (May 1983): 273.
141
Kathryn Gunsch, interview by the author, Boston, September 2018.
142
Becker, “Art Worlds and Social Types,” American Behavioral Scientist 19, no. 6
(July/August 1976): 704.
143
Polly Roberts, phone interview with the author, May 6, 2018.
 62

approach to exhibiting African art. Relatively quickly however, Vogel realized

she could move beyond this fairly standard exhibition display and instead create

an exhibition that stemmed from a single idea or theme, drawing upon “styles that

crossed genres, trespassing into the realms of anthropology museums, outdated

museums, and even theater.”144 As a non-collecting art museum, the center was

the ideal space in which to experiment with various modes of display, avoiding a

single narrative. The center transitioned to creating more thematically focused

exhibitions, such as Sets, Series, and Ensembles in African Art (1985), which

looked at the ways African objects “intended to be used together” by “resembling

the objects, emphasizing the importance of their function and meaning as part of a

group.”145

On such thematic exhibitions, Vogel has stated:

SV: Cause I realized what we could do there which we

could never do at the Met was take some small detail of
African art like portraiture, like just images having to
do with the bush, just things that are made, looking at
art objects in the context of other art objects which is
Sets/Ensembles.146

The third and revolutionary stage in which the museum hosted exhibitions was

through a reflective approach, taking place with the decade of postmodernism

discourse. It is within this context that Vogel produced the center’s first reflexive

exhibition, Perspectives: Angles on African Art (1987), and later, ART/artifact:

African Art in Anthropology Collections (1988), arguably Vogel’s most critiqued

144
Vogel, “Portrait of a Museum in Practice,” Exhibition-ism, 98; For more on the
influence of theater on the Museum for African Art, see the Exhibition-ism section of this
chapter that discusses the work of Chris Müller and Richard Schechner.
145
Inside jacket cover, Sets, Series, and Ensembles in African Art (New York: The Center
for African Art, 1985).
146
Vogel, interview by author.
 63

and discussed reflective show. Each show’s reliance upon multiple voices of

interpretation for communicating meaning helped give rise to Africa Explores,

which similarly used round kiosks to “post” information about the art on view;

that is, there was no single voice of authority.147 As the Africanist art historian

Christa Clarke noted, the curatorial work the museum produced during this stage

informed visitors of the power of installation practices:

CC: [Vogel] was the only one doing (and Roy Sieber,
to a certain extent) an exhibition for looking at those
ideas like how African art is framed, like ART/artifact.
I think an exhibition like ART/artifact, Exhibition-ism-
the exhibitions where she was looking at how African
art is framed and how it affects how we understand it
or receive it – is one of the first times that people were
highlighting different perspectives, including so-called
cultural stakeholder perspectives.148

Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art (1994), co-curated with Roberts, was

the last of the Museum’s reflexive shows, and it will be discussed at length

shortly.

Ten curators of varying backgrounds and specialties were chosen to

organize Perspectives: Angles on African Art, including Ekpo Eyo, former

director at the National Museums of Nigeria; David Rockefeller, an art collector

and former CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank (and the younger brother of Nelson

Rockefeller, who founded the Museum of Primitive Art), Iba N’Diaye, the

French-Senegalese artist who founded the Section des Arts Plastiques at the École

Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar; and Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of

African Art History at Yale University, among other artists, writers, connoisseurs,

147
That is not to say that the exhibition was without its critiques; a brief review of the
show’s many problems will be discussed below.
148
Clarke, interview by author.
 64

and African art scholars.149 As the name of the exhibition implies, each co-curator

offered visitors his or her own “perspective” in approaching African art, revealing

to audiences the differentiating roles of African art consumption in the west.

William Rubin, for instance, highlighted objects’ forms rather than historical

context, while the Baule artist Kouakou Kouame took the opposite approach,

predominately concentrating his analysis of Ivorian objects on their function and

context, limiting the discussion pertaining to a work’s formal qualities. For Vogel,

such a transparent approach to curating encouraged visitors to think about the

influence curators have in shaping one’s thoughts about African art:

SV: My shows at the museum are really part of a

kind of very deliberate desire to justify…not justify
exactly, but to legitimate and establish African art.
So something like Perspectives is the most obvious.
It’s like the seal of approval of ten famous people.150

Altogether, visitors were left with multiple voices with which to understand the

objects on view, rather than a singular focus on form or context from one

authoritative opinion. The success of Perspectives and its use of differentiating

viewpoints helped lead to ART/artifact one year later, and soon, Africa Explores.

In his discussion on postcolonial globalism, the art critic Thomas

McEvilley reminds us that “during the Modernist period, Western

anthropologists, despite admirable attempts at objectivity, tended to represent the

rest of the world through Western conventions, as if the latter were normative,

natural, or given. Western culture, taking its paradigm from its sciences, was to be

149
Romare Bearden, Kouakou Kouame, Nancy Graves, James Baldwin, William Rubin,
and Ivan Karp were the six other curators who collaborated in Perspectives.
150
Vogel, interview by author.
 65

the universal Self: non-Western culture was to be entirely Other.”151 With

ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, Vogel wanted to

interrogate this notion by similarly questioning various modes of display most

commonly used for African art, ultimately encouraging audiences to consider

African art through the lens of “the Other,” among other conventions.

The exhibition was organized throughout four juxtaposing gallery spaces,

each with a different approach to the notion of “art”. These included the

“Contemporary Art Gallery,” “Curiosity Room,” “Natural History Museum

Diorama,” and the “Art Museum.” In each gallery, audiences could clearly

identify “the rhetoric of museum strategies.”152 For instance, in the

“contemporary” space, several vigango memorial posts from the Mijikenda in

Kenya were displayed as if they were for sale in an art gallery, evenly spread out

under flood and spotlighting, raised above eye-level on white cubes (Figure 10).

No additional context was provided, and the display implied that a visitor was

meant to appreciate the vigango’s forms rather than socio-historic significance. In

contrast, the “diorama” space featured three full-scale human figures represented

in the process of creating a kigango (the singular form of vigango), seemingly

frozen in time (Figure 11). Although the art object itself was the same, visitors’

interpretation of it changed depending on the physical environment in which it

was presented. By simply stepping from one gallery room to the next, an object

from Africa could be perceived as fine art (“ART”), or it could be an

151
Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York:
McPherson & Company, 1992): 10-11.
152
James C. Faris, “‘ART/artifact': On the Museum and Anthropology,” Current
Anthropology 29, no. 5 (December 1988): 775.
 66

ethnographic specimen (“artifact”). For many curators even today, ART/artifact

continues to be the most thought provoking of Vogel’s exhibitions. On this

exhibition, the Africanist art historian Christa Clarke has stated:

CC: The most influential is ART/artifact. I mean it's

hard to get past that. And when I use that example with
students or in talks it’s still an eye opener for people to
look at those different setups and to kind of… you
could just see people who are not art historians to just
to be like, wow, they finally understand that museums
are not neutral.153

From the use of multiple curators’ voices in Perspectives to the varying and

contradictory display formats in ART/artifact, Africa Explores took these ideas

one-step further by presenting audiences with original documents from scholars,

critics, newspaper clippings, and notes from the show’s artists, displayed on a

kiosk in each gallery. In doing so, Vogel hoped that showcasing the contemporary

arts of Africa (which was still an emerging field at this time) from the “African

perspective” would allow for a greater understanding and appreciation for art

from the continent. Yet these intentions swiftly backfired. However, before a

further examination of Africa Explores, it is necessary to first consider the

theoretical postcolonial context of the era.

Postcolonialism and Africa Explores

In April of 1990, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, organized a

contemporary African art symposium with two panels intended to “explore and

153
Christa Clarke, interview by the author, digital recording, November 2018.
 67

compare traditional and contemporary art and artistic production in Africa.”154

The first panel, “The Role of Art and Artists in Traditional and Contemporary

Africa – a Comparison,” addressed recent issues of art historical categorization

terminology. Susan Vogel and the Africanist art historian Patrick McNaughton

were two of the panels’ participants, and each expressed their concerns with the

problematic phrasing of “traditional” and “contemporary” African arts. Both

agreed that these labels are “oversimplified in ways that could never be accepted

in the study of Western art.”155 Vogel called for an adoption of the word

“international” instead of “contemporary,” because so many contemporary artists

lead global lives, often traveling back and forth between countries for work and

residence.156 Moreover, contemporary African art history was yet to be accepted

and considered a field of study. At this time, contemporary African art history

“was routinely collapsed into the discourse of anthropology rather than art

history/criticism, while not a few scholars simply regarded the very idea of

contemporary African art with suspicion.” 157

The Harlem panel came at a fitting time, considering that shortly after the

Center for African Art opened Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art

(1991), an exhibition that brought such categorizations as “traditional” or

“contemporary” African art to the forefront of curatorial conversations.

154
Stanley Tarver, “Contemporary African Art Symposium at the Studio Museum in
Harlem,” African Arts 24, no. 2 (April 1991): 12.
155
Tarver, Ibid.
156
El Anatsui, for instance, is a Ghanaian sculptor who spends much of his time working
in Nigeria.
157
Okwui Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, in their founding of Nka:
Journal of Contemporary African Art, helped establish the field as an international
mainstream discipline. (“From the Editors: Nka at 20,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art 35 (Fall 2014): 4.
 68

(However, in her wariness of the word ‘contemporary,’ Vogel instead used

‘international’ in the show’s categorizations.) Even today, twenty-eight years

later, Africa Explores continues to be discussed, cited, and debated. The show was

spread out across two institutions, the Center for African Art itself and the New

Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, and, as the subtitle implies, displayed

twentieth century art from across the continent, including cement sculptures by

the Nigerian-based artist Sunday Jack Akpan, portraits by the Malian

photographer Seydou Keïta, and paintings by Iba N’Diaye (who was also one of

the co-curators of Perspectives four years earlier).

Africa Explores is contested for numerous reasons, but one of the major

critiques stems from Vogel’s decision to separate the artworks on view using

nonstandard categories, or “strands” as she referred to them.158 She implemented

broad themes to categorize the one hundred and thirty three sub-Saharan included

artworks, using the designations ‘traditional,’ ‘new functional,’ ‘urban,’

‘international,’ and ‘extinct.’ Five different wall colors further separated the

works and near the center of each gallery was a large kiosk post covered in

contradicting statements, or perspectives, of African authors, scholars, and artists

(Figure 12). For instance, in the “Urban Art” gallery, or “Art of the Here and

Now” (identified by its light green-colored walls), Senegalese reverse glass

158
Vogel, “Foreword,” in Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art (New York:
The Center for African Art, 1991), 10-11; John Picton, an Africanist art historian and
critical theorist, summarized the show’s critiques when he simply stated, “Susan Vogel
seemed to annoy everyone with her Africa Explores exhibition” (John Picton, “In Vogue,
or The Flavour of the Month,” Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to
the Marketplace, edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1999); Another common criticism pointed to the lack of representation; there were no
Northern African artists included in Africa Explores, for instance.
 69

paintings, portrait photographs, and painted shop signs by Chéri Samba

dominated the space (Figure 13). Together, the urban art category was the show’s

“only strain of African art to portray the artists who make it, and the world they

share with their clients.”

The art historian Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie summarized the critiques

of Africa Explores best when he stated it “masks a larger issue, namely

contemporary African arts’ struggle for a right to self-definition in the critical

spaces of art history.”159 This argument is an example of what the artist and art

historian Olu Oguibe critiques scholars for becoming the “‘intimate Outsider,’

speaking for the native.”160 Oguibe has asserted, “Otherization is unavoidable,”

even if “contemplation of the Other is a continuous process evident in all cultures

and societies. But in contemplating the Other, it is necessary to exhibit modesty

and admit relative handicap since the peripheral location of the contemplator

precludes complete understanding.”161 Oguibe argues that in any study involving

Africa, especially one that may “exoticize” the continent, scholars should avoid

speaking for the culture they are writing about, and remind themselves that their

work is just one approach in what should always be “an ongoing discourse.”162

While art historians should also try to avoid a deliberate “othering,” it is crucial to

unpack its use in the field.

159
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Exhibiting Africa: Curatorial Attitudes and the
Politics of Representation in ‘Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa,’” African Arts
30, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 10.
160
Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004),
8.
161
Ibid., 8-9.
162
Ibid., 8.
 70

In African art history, as in other marginalized areas of study in the canon,

namely non-Western cultures, there is often a recurring problem of the use of

binaries in describing artworks from colonized places. Examples of such binaries

include art/craft, local/global, subject/object, technology/magic,

subjugation/liberation, erasure/visibility, colonizer/colonized, modern/traditional,

or nation-state/individual.163 Postcolonialism can help scholars enter the terrain

within these binaries, the “third space,” as the critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha

has defined it. According to Bhabha, the “third space” includes those “‘in-

between’ spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood –

singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of

collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”164

It is here that:

any calls for a return to pure and uncontaminated

cultural origins merely obfuscate the reality of the deep-
rooted and largely irrevocable cultural effects of the
process of transculturation, which has taken place and
defines the protracted experience of colonization, it is
not always practical to associate culture with place. In
other words, the colonizer and colonized are so very
deeply implicated in one another that any discourse
about origins smacks of paradoxes.165

It is through this postcolonial lens of understanding that makes clear the inherent

issues of race, class, and privilege at stake in Africa Explores. Despite an intention

to prioritize African artists’ voices and to “present African artists as active

163
For more on the discussion of binaries concerning postcolonial African art, see Okwui
Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent
Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 58.
164
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 1994), 2.
165
Fetson Kalua, “Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African Identity,” Journal of African
Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (June 2009): 25.
 71

explorers and exploiters rather than passive specimens being explored and

exploited,” by categorizing the works on view using arbitrary Western

perceptions, Vogel is guilty of being that ‘intimate outsider’ that Oguibe

critiqued.166 In attempting to ensure that “Western perceptions of Africa and

Western uses of African art are entirely secondary” (unlike ART/artifact),Vogel

became the authoritarian voice.167

Considering the festering critiques of Africa Explores, I was hesitant to

ask Vogel about it during our interview. In asking if she expected such fierce

commentary, she responded that she “wasn’t a bit surprised.” Moreover, her

response to the critiques surprised me:

SV: I think that it’s been mischaracterized as a show

about contemporary African art, which it was not. It’s
title is African Art in the 20th Century so it’s really
looking at the changes of the twentieth century and
that’s what’s interested me cause that’s what I realized
I’ve been watching. I’ve been watching from the 60s to
the 90s, or 80s; I’ve been watching these changes and
ignoring them and lamenting them for a long time until I
realized they were actually very interesting…it’s also a
period where change and modernity were sort of seen –
described – as ‘lost’ in Africa; it wasn’t something that
Africans were acquiring or inventing. It was something
they were losing. Cause it was seen as kind of an
imitation of Western modernism.168

While problematic, the show still placed twentieth century African art on a

greater platform to be seen and appreciated, elevating the work of artists such as

Samba and Seydou Keïta. Moreover, it helped shape the work of future curators

166
Michael Brenson, “Review: Africans Explore Their Own Evolving Cultures,” New
York Times, May 17, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/17/arts/review-art-
africans-explore-their-own-evolving-cultures.html.
167
Susan Vogel, “Foreword,” Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: The
Center for African Art, 1991), 9.
168
Vogel, interview by author.
 72

and African art scholars and also inspired the production of more globally focused

African art exhibitions, with the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in

Africa (1995) at the Whitechapel Gallery in London being an outstanding

example for the way it similarly focused on plurality. Africa Explores also

inspired emerging scholars to become more involved with the contemporary

African art scene. Marla C. Berns, for instance, Director of the Fowler Museum at

UCLA, stated, “Africa Explores woke me up, introducing many artists who were

new to me and provoking the kind of debate that made me rethink traditional

categories, boundaries, and definitions.”169 Africa Explores was also Christa

Clarke’s introduction to contemporary African art, and one of the reasons she

went into the field.170

In several of the interviews I conducted during my field research, I noticed

that many interviewees were quick to point out the issues associated with Africa

Explores, even if acknowledging that it opened a platform for discussion and

response.171 While its problems are important to address so as to avoid another

‘intimate outsider’ approach, I think curators sometimes overlook the significance

of Africa Explores’ backbone: it would not have been conceived without the

intellectual buildup of Perspectives and ART/artifact, the first shows that Vogel

and Center for African Art created that exposed the implications of an art museum

setting and our Western expectations.

169
Marla C. Berns et. al, “Nka Roundtable III: Contemporary African Art and the
Museum,” Nka 31 (Fall 2012): 51.
170
Christa Clarke, interview by the author, November 2018.
171
Karen Milbourne, interview by the author, February 2019.
 73

Postmodernism Discourse and Exhibition-ism

Following Africa Explores, the museum continued to produce thematic

exhibitions, albeit with less contentious modes of categorizations. The next show,

Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (1993), was the inaugural

exhibition for the Museum for African Art’s new opening in its SoHo location.

Curated by Polly Roberts, Secrecy featured one hundred objects from thirty

different sub-Saharan cultures, ranging in objects associated with secret society

initiations, royalty, and divination.172 Organized into five sections, the art was

separated according to its historical context, including visual language or the

physical and social boundaries associated with secrets. Audiences were guided

through the exhibition by a series of questions printed on the walls, such as, “How

does art identify owners of secret knowledge?” or “Can we ever really understand

another culture’s secrets?,” inviting viewers to think critically about the artwork

displayed around him or her. Questions similar to these, and more, were also

utilized in Exhibition-ism, and according to Roberts, Exhibition-ism would not

have been realized if Secrecy did not occur first. Secrecy aligned with the

postmodern goals of the era: in response to decreasing visitor numbers and a fear

of the “death of the museum,” many institutions started to question approaches to

exhibiting, even directly calling the public’s attention upon their problems.

Several institutions were embracing the use of reflexive exhibitions during

this height of postmodernism, the critical theory that challenged the notion of

“art,” at a time when many museums began questioning the inherent bias of the

172
John Dorsey, “New Space for Museum of African Art Intrigues With the Promise of
Revelations,” Baltimore Sun, April 4, 1993.
 74

art history canon. Museums were debating the question of who has the authority

to tell a master narrative of art history, if anyone at all. Fred Wilson’s Mining the

Museum (1992) is often referred to as the quintessential postmodern exhibition of

the 1990s for the way he interrogated the Maryland Historical Society’s

permanent collection. Through “mining” the Society’s long-buried collection of

antebellum slavery objects and juxtaposing them alongside colonial American

decorative arts, Wilson offered a museological critique for the ways that so many

museums bury their problematic histories. Other examples of postmodern works

at this time include the 1994 exhibition A Museum Looks at Itself: Mapping Past

and Present at the Parrish Art Museum, 1887-1992 (curated by Donna De Salvo

at the Parrish Art Museum in New York); performance works by artists such as

Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Andrea Fraser, or Adrienne Piper; and of

course, Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art, which used irony to critique

museums, a difficult tactic to employ in a museum setting.173

The Museum for African Art directly engaged with and encouraged this

postmodern dialogue of the decade. In 1992, the museum hosted a symposium

called “Africa by Design: Designing a Museum for the 21st century?” Some of the

leading artists and postmodern scholars of the century participated, including

Arthur Danto, Fred Wilson, James Clifford, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Maya

Lin, and Robert Farris Thompson. Together, they shared an open discussion about

what a twenty-first century museum might look like, and how it should manage

173
The companion book for A Museum Looks at Itself exhibition is Past Imperfect: A
Museum Looks at Itself (New York: The New Press, 1994); For more on the work of
Fusco and Gómez-Peña, see Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural
Performance,” TDR 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 143-167.
 75

itself in terms of sustaining its longevity. Exhibition-ism was directly a result of

the symposium’s brainstorming session, in addition to the work of Richard

Schechner, Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, and Chris Müller, an

exhibition designer, who worked together to incorporate a sense of theatricality

into the exhibition’s production, distinguishing it from the museum’s previous

shows.

While the Museum for African Art’s reflective exhibitions, Perspectives

and ART/artifact were arguably equally strong in academic and contemplative

caliber for their time, they were not as effective as Exhibition-ism: Museums and

African Art (1994) in communicating the potential for museums to serve as a

platform for responding to curatorial authority and provoking conversation,

especially concerning non-western art display. Although Vogel stated that her

museum has “been characterized by no single exhibition,” I argue that the 1994

show Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art is the ultimate example of an

exhibition that effectively used irony, humor, and institutional critique to

communicate its ideas.174 Co-curated by Vogel and Roberts, Exhibition-ism

served as a catalyst for a shifting dialogue in the representation of African art in

the approaching 21st century.

Exhibition-ism did not receive much media coverage during the course of

its runtime, nor has it been discussed in the scholarship since its debut, aside from

a short review by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith.175 While the catalogue

174
Vogel, “Portrait of a Museum in Practice,” in Exhibition-ism (New York: Museum for
African Art, 1994), 99; Greenblatt, 42.
175
The only review that I have found in the archives is by Roberta Smith, who stated,
“The Museum for African Art may have been bitten by the Conceptual Art bug when it
 76

of the same name that was published prior to the show has been extensively

quoted and is used as a learning tool for classrooms and discussions, the

exhibition itself has not been examined as thoroughly as Vogel’s other exhibitions

of the same decade. African Arts published only one review of the catalogue while

glossing over the exhibition itself.176 Even the quarterly Arts Council of the

African Studies Association’s newsletters from 1994 did not mention the

exhibition despite it referencing other contemporary African art-related events

occurring globally. This disregard may be because ACASA chose instead to

emphasize Vogel’s departure from the Museum to her new position as the Henry

J. Heinz II Director of Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.177 Exhibition-

ism ended in 1994, and Vogel began work at Yale in January of 1995.

Exhibition-ism was organized across four galleries, each guided by a key

theme. On each gallery wall of the exhibition were statements about museum

display practices – all of them myths – that guided visitors through each space.

Upon entering the first gallery, the audience was greeted by the large statement

“Museums are silent places for looking;” however, everything included in this

gallery space directly contradicted that statement. Multisensory stimuli filled the

room: loud and jovial music could be heard overhead, and multiple video

moved to SoHo. Its 10th anniversary show, “Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art,”
is in many ways consistent with an institution widely respected for having its cake and
eating it, too- that is, for mounting exhibitions that combine a strong ideological agenda
with rigorous connoisseurship” (“Art in Review,” New York Times, October 28, 1994,
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/28/arts/art-in-review-661481.html).
176
For this, see Christine Mullen Kreamer’s review of Exhibition-ism: Museums and
African Art in African Arts 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 15.
177
“Susan Mullin Vogel has resigned as director of the Museum for African Art, New
York, to become the Henry J. Heinz II Director of Yale University Art Gallery, New
Haven. She assumes duties in January 1995,” ACASA Newsletter no. 41 (December
1994): 13.
 77

monitors screening dance and masquerade traditions were shown on repeat.

Visitors could get a sense of the motion and sounds involved with the arts of the

continent through listening to the swish swash of raffia fiber costumes and

watching dancers jump around in rhythm to the pounding of accompanying

instruments. This gallery also critiqued the notion that museum visitors should use

hushed voices while engaging with art in a museum.

In the second gallery of the exhibition, visitors encountered the phrase

“Museums provide access to art.” Beneath this sign was a Central African votive

sculpture that was heavily guarded with red velvet stanchions and ropes, raised

high on two plinths, and with a surveillance camera installed nearby (Figure 14),

an approach that Smith called “simplistic.” This was responding to the notion that

museums are a space in which visitors can engage with art to learn more, even

though there are often intense barriers. In that same gallery, visitors could enter a

private viewing cubicle to interact with similar sculptures such as an ivory Dogon

figure in a more intimate and personal space, away from the constant surveillance

that one normally experiences when he or she enters a museum.

With these individual viewing cubicles, Vogel finally realized a curatorial

tactic that she had been hoping to try since the early 1980s, when she transitioned

from the Museum of Primitive Art to the Met. She had “hoped that the galleries

for [the new Met] display would be small and intimate, a situation that would

bring the viewer into close and personal contact with the objects.”178 Due to

conservation and safety concerns, as well as the high volume of visitors, almost

every African object at the Met had to be displayed under glass. With the private
178
“Bringing African Art to the Met,” 42.
 78

viewing chambers in the second gallery of Exhibition-ism, visitors at last had the

opportunity to experience close and direct contact with the objects on view.179 It

was in this gallery that visitors responded to most; with Smith noting “the degree

to which different light levels change and animate these objects is astounding and

underscores the notion that many African objects, seen only when worn or held by

others, could possess something akin to multiple personalities.”180

The statement “Museums present the truth” guided visitors through the

third gallery (Figure 15). At the center of the space was an open circle of vitrines,

each featuring a different object. The front side of the vitrines appeared like any

typical museum display, with relevant tombstone information and a didactic label

adhered to the case. After observing the objects from the front side of the circle,

visitors then had the chance to enter the circular setup. Here they were allowed

access to the backside of the objects – sides that only curators or conservators

normally get to see. However, within the circle of vitrines was a different set of

didactic labels, with notes from the curators calling attention to the object’s

repairs or support structures. The curators took these labels one-step further by

even asking the audience to consider how the sculptures on view arrived in the

museum in the first place.

Finally, the last gallery, “Art in museums never change,” featured several

funerary objects that visitors themselves had the opportunity to curate to their

liking, directly contradicting the notion that museum displays always remain the

same. Several groups over the course of the exhibition’s duration changed the

179
It should be noted that careful security measures were still in place to prevent theft or
damage to the objects.
180
Smith, “Art in Review.”
 79

gallery’s display, including schoolchildren, the SoHo-based jewelry designer

Robert Lee Morris, and the dancer Geoffrey Holder, who covered the walls and

vitrine bases in crumpled white paper similar in aesthetic to his dance costumes

(Figure 16).181 Each display spoke to the visitor’s background in some way,

allowing the public to understand why they must interpret museum exhibitions so

carefully, because they almost always reflect their maker.

While Roberta Smith’s assertion that the exhibition used “a number of

unorthodox curatorial approaches,” I counter-argue that Exhibition-ism’s

“unorthodox” methods are in fact what made it most effective in communicating

the power of displays. Through disrupting the standard expected viewing

experience one anticipates when he or she enters a museum, the curator can

expose museological legacies of selective looking, reminding audiences that

museums are never neutral.

Conclusion

Exhibition-ism was the last of the reflective exhibitions held at the

Museum for African Art. Following Vogel’s departure, the museum returned to

its culturally-based and thematic exhibition organization, conceiving exhibitions

such as Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention (1996) as an example

of the former, and To Cure and Protect: Sickness and Health in African Art

(1999) as an example of the latter. Moreover, Exhibition-ism and its

accompanying catalogue was Vogel’s final project at the museum she had opened

181
Roberts, phone interview.
 80

a decade before.182 In the final month of the show’s run, Vogel transitioned to her

new role as the Henry J. Heinz II Director at Yale University Art Gallery, a

position she held from 1994 until 1997. On this move, Vogel stated:

SV: See I was leaving at that point. When I wrote that

catalogue, when I wrote that essay, I knew I was leaving.
Other people didn’t know but I knew. So it has that kind
of valedictory summary quality to it although it had been
planned before I decided to leave.183

In the next and final chapter, I consider Vogel’s work after her departure from the

Museum for African Art, including her new role at Yale and the curation of her

dissertation, Baule: African Art/ Western Eyes (showcasing the culmination of

twenty-five years of research), and her transition into film work just prior to the

turn of the new century. The crux of the chapter examines Vogel’s overall impact

in the canon of African art history, and how the scope of her work continues to be

felt in African art exhibitions today.

182
Elsie McCabe Thompson took over as the Museum of African Art’s next president, a
position she held from 1997-2012. Uzodinma Iweala is the current CEO of the Africa
Center.
183
Vogel, interview by author.
 81

Chapter 3

“How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you

think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it…like
they took everything else?”

Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, Black Panther, 2018

Introduction

As the art history canon has entered this new turn towards the “global

contemporary,” Susan Vogel’s work has also entered a new terrain in which to be

critically considered. How can we understand Vogel’s cumulative curatorial

career and her varying modes of display in this new era of art history, and where

does it fit within the current field of African art history? Are her exhibitions still

relevant today, and where do we find some of the techniques she initiated in other

exhibitions, non-western or not? This chapter explores possible answers to these

questions.

Chapter Three examines Vogel’s career from 1995 through today, starting

with her transition to Yale University Art Gallery and the curation of Baule:

African Art/Western Eyes. Rather than offering another interpretation of Baule,

which has been extensively discussed in the scholarship, I will instead provide a

brief overview of the exhibition that won her the African Studies Association’s

Herskovits Prize for best scholarly work before focusing on her decision to pursue

film studies.184 In addition to revealing the current trajectory of Vogel’s work in

184
For more on Baule: African Art/Western Eyes see the reviews by Denis Dutton,
“Susan Vogel on Baule Art,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 264-269; Robert T.
Soppelsa, “Baule: African Art, Western Eyes Review,” H-Net Reviews in the Humanities
and Social Sciences (May 1999): 1-4; William Zimmer, “At Yale, an Adventure in
Learning to Look,” New York Times, September 21, 1997,
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/21/nyregion/art-at-yale-an-adventure-in-learning-to-
 82

the later twenty-first century, I reevaluate her work through the lens of Pierre

Bourdieu’s “cultural capital,” because at the root of her story are greater

considerations of class and privilege taking place in the specific constraints of the

New York City art world. This chapter will also demonstrate how Vogel uses

what I call a “self-curating” approach to the telling of her story, as observed by

the careful statements she made throughout our interview that did not always

align with arguments she has made in past exhibition catalogues. Finally, this

chapter examines Vogel’s impact on other African art exhibitions and curators,

and looks at current turns in the field, such as the recent Brooklyn Museum

controversy and the famed museum scene from the 2018 film Black Panther,

which sparked conversations across museum communities for the way it

highlighted ongoing issues of repatriation, stereotyping, and racial disparities

among museum staff.

Yale University Art Gallery and the Baule Show

On January 1st, 1995, Susan Vogel started her new position as the Henry J.

Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, with an immediate goal of

overseeing a major renovation of the gallery’s central building.185 However, due

look.html; Holland Cotter, “Beyond Beauty, Art that Takes Action,” New York Times,
September 28, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/28/arts/art-view-beyond-beauty-
art-that-takes-action.html; and Roberta Smith, “Objects of Wonder that are Too Potent
for Mere Display,” NYT, September 11, 1998,
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/11/arts/art-review-objects-of-wonder-that-are-too-
potent-for-mere-display.html.
185
Sheila Rule, “The Yale Art Gallery Names a New Director,” New York Times, August
17, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/17/arts/the-yale-art-gallery-names-a-new-
director.html; “Transitions,” ARTnews 93 (October 1994): 54; Although one of Vogel’s
primary goals was to renovate the museum’s main building designed by Louis Kahn, the
project was not completed until 2012 (a total of fourteen years of expansions).
 83

to her dismissal from the institution less than two years later, the renovations did

not occur under her tenure. 186 Until coming to Yale, Vogel had only worked in

museum institutions, and she grappled with the new terrain of academia. During

our interview, Vogel revealed the institutional tensions that took place during her

short stay with the university:

KP: I’m just trying to imagine this transition from a

purely museum world to all of a sudden academia, and
the levels of politics that come into play there.

SV: Well it’s politics, but it’s really value systems.

And universities, and museums also, within
museums you have different constituencies with
their different priorities and I’ve always thought of
it as engaging in a kind of ritual combat, where
there are no deaths but there’s a victor. So the
conservation department has one set of priorities,
the curators have a different set of priorities, the
educators have a third set of priorities and you end
up battling it out and getting labels that are not
bigger than the objects…and lighting that’s brighter

186
A few coy remarks from interviewees during my field research led me to infer that
Vogel was fired from her Yale position rather abruptly in 1997, for reasons that will
likely always remain unclear except for the persons directly involved in New Haven in
1997. During our interview, Vogel hinted at the strained relationship she had with the
Yale Museum’s Board of Governors and administration. On this complicated working
environment, Vogel stated: “I think there was a clash of value systems because I believed
the most important thing we did was protect the artworks and you protected them even if
they weren’t the most beautiful or even if they were broken or something, you protected
them. And Yale, university art museums, all of them, but especially Yale, the priority of
the students took... if the students benefited from touching the objects, they touched them.
If they wanted to move the objects around, you let them. And that was hard. And I didn’t
agree…so there was a moment when the university wanted to lend our most famous
Hopper painting, two Hopper paintings, to a three day exhibition at a club, a private club
in New York, and I said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ And they said, ‘Why not?’ They said it
was just going to be private. And that’s one reason. And they said it’s only for three days.
And they said it will only be Yale people who see it. And that’s another reason. And that
was a crystallizing moment. Because I really saw the degree of which my values were not
in sync with the administrations values. The museum people are two different groups.
And museum people were more, at the time, most of the people, the curators, almost all
of the curators, had been there a very long time, and were Yale people, and so they were
much more ingrained in the culture than I was, certainly, and much more likely to see eye
to eye with that kind of request than I was” (Vogel, interview by author).
 84

than conservation wanted but dimmer than curators

wanted and that kind of thing.

While it is clear there were ongoing clashes of value systems between the

museum’s administration and Vogel, her legacy at Yale remains in the curation of

Baule: African Art/Western Eyes, which showcased the results of her dissertation

field research from twenty years earlier (Figure 17). As the first museum

exhibition to present a “comprehensive look at the arts of Baule people,” over 130

objects were included in the show, mostly stemming from the village of Kami

where Vogel completed much of her research in the 1960s-70s.187 Central to the

exhibition was the idea that the word “art” as we are familiar with it in the West

does not apply in the same context for the Baule. Rather, an object’s value resides

in its spiritual or religious agency and personal or communal significance, not its

aesthetic features.

Similar to ART/artifact, Vogel curated the show’s Baule sculptures,

masks, and jewelry in a way that addressed Western expectations, perceptions,

and misconceptions of African art. Through using “a variety of installation

approaches that allows [the art] to be seen both in the distinctive ways intended by

their creators and in the traditional Western museum manner,” Vogel intended for

her audiences to “unlearn” any preconceived notions about Baule work.188 Just as

ART/artifact asked audiences to consider how the presentation of an art object

shaped their understanding of it, Baule took this one step further by questioning

the audience if they even have the right to view the art objects. For instance, one

187
Vogel, “Exhibition Preview: Baule: African Art, Western Eyes,” African Arts 30, no.
4 (Autumn 1997): 64.
188
Vogel, “Exhibition Preview,” 64; Dutton, “Susan Vogel on Baule Art,” 269.
 85

section of the exhibition featured a room installation that had many visitors pause

before entering, it at all. Didactic labeling informed visitors that the room

contained masks only Baule men are allowed to access to; similarly, another room

showed a film clip of a dance only women are allowed to see. With this

information, visitors were challenged to make a choice: either enter, or not; that

is, conform to Baule protocol, or follow Western art viewing practices. Like

ART/artifact, Baule influenced the curating techniques of future curators, inviting

them to consider different modes of viewing and access.

CC: In terms of capturing everything that Susan was

about, the Baule show, of course, coming in as
something that speaks to that scholarly strength of
hers and a love of hers, but also captured her
innovation in terms of exhibition practice…And I
think in her Baule show, of course, something
represented her decades of serious research in a
particular area, but again, they are experimental
approaches with the exhibition, with this idea of
asking visitors to make a decision that these objects
are sacred and that they only met facing by certain
people; you choose whether you're going to go in
and see them. That's very radical. So I think her
impact is huge in those ways and that certainly
impacted me in the way I tried to be transparent as a
curator.

Despite a runtime through January 4, 1998, Vogel left the university

before the show’s end (following its debut at New Haven, Baule also traveled to

the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum for African Art for greater

visibility), most likely as a result of the frequent “ritual combats” among

administration members that she alluded to in our conversation. This abrupt

departure from Yale left the gallery without a director for over a year. Yale

University Art Gallery’s curator of American painting, Helen Cooper, replaced

 86

Vogel as interim director until Jock Reynolds took over in 1999.189 Leaving Yale

University for NYU would be the start of Vogel’s career in a new intellectual

terrain, one that gave her a highly visual and sensory-driven platform to translate

her ideas from a physical format into that of a time-based medium.

Transition to Film, circa 2000s

Following her dismissal from Yale, Vogel applied for graduate admission

to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to earn her Master’s of Fine

Arts in Filmmaking. She chose NYU for its proximity to her home and the fact

that it was simply, “the best.”190 Although she had already attended NYU’s

Institute of Fine Arts for her Master’s and PhD, she still faced a challenge in

being admitted. In 1997, over one thousand applicants applied for graduate

admission at Tisch, with only twenty-seven spots available for incoming students.

Prior to her acceptance notice, the department head of Tisch actually reached out

to Vogel to express the university’s concerns (“they think this person is going to

be a pain in the neck!”), reminding Vogel that even though she would be an older

student – fifty-five years old at the time – she was still expected to collaborate

with her cohort as a team.191 In response, Vogel reminded Tisch that collaboration

has always been central to her museum practice, and it was this collaboration that

she enjoyed most during her graduate studies in film.

189
Mark Alden Branch, “An Artist Guarding the Art,” Yale Alumni Magazine, May 1999,
http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_05/reynolds.html.
190
Vogel, interview by author.
191
Ibid.
 87

In 1998, the same year she entered graduate school, Vogel founded Prince

Street Pictures, Inc., an independent film company that has specialized in

documentary productions. One exception to the company’s documentary focus is

the narrative film FANG: An Epic Journey (2001), originally produced for

Vogel’s MFA thesis (Figure 18). In just over eight minutes, FANG is an ironic

short that traces the cultural biography of a Fang reliquary figure from southern

Cameroon, following its travels around the world entering various collectors’

hands, from colonial officials to European dealers and ultimately a private

collection in the States. (In fact the actual Fang figure used in the film belonged to

Vogel’s longtime friend and donor, the art collector Charlie Benenson, prior to it

being donated to Yale University Art Gallery in 2012.) Fold Crumble Crush: The

Art of El Anatsui, released in 2011, marked the company’s seventh produced

film.192

When I inquired about Vogel’s decision to study and produce time-based

media, she responded that the medium of film would allow her to achieve certain

aspects of curating that was too challenging to replicate in a museum setting:

SV: I had kind of done everything that I wanted to do

in museums. I mean by the time you curate your own
dissertation, twenty five years of research in a museum
where nobody can say no to you – which is the best –
there’s no place else to go after that and I had been
shooting film and photographs in Africa seriously for a
long time…But film really does give you the
immediacy and contact with the person or the place or

192
The films she has produced thus far include: Everybody Benefits (2000); FANG: an
Epic Journey (2001); Living Memory: Six Sketches of Mali Today (2003); Salif Keita Live
in New York (2004); Malick Sidibe: Portrait of the Artist as a Portraitist (2006); The
Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne (2007); and Fold Crumble Crush:
The Art of El Anatsui (2011). While a discussion of each of Vogel’s films is beyond the
scope of this project, more research and critique is very much still needed.
 88

a moment. The only thing in front a camera is a

moment, highly specific. And so the kinds of films I
started to make were much more oriented toward
contemporary. And Living Memory, which was done at
the museum in Mali, showed you basically all the
things the museum couldn’t show so it showed
architecture, performance, contemporary artists, that
kind of stuff. Music, the kinds of things that weren’t in
the galleries, couldn’t be.193

With film, Vogel intended to visually and aurally transport audiences to the

continent, providing them with the opportunity to experience Africa in “the here

and now.”194 For this reason, her film work has continuously focused on

contemporary events, places, and people, such as the recent monograph of El

Anatsui.

Vogel’s Cultural Capital and Self-Curating Tropes

Before exploring Vogel’s overall impact in the field of African art history

and providing an overview of the challenges the field faces today, I would like to

offer two varying theoretical reconsiderations in understanding Vogel’s biography

and curatorial work. To do this, I rely on two frames of interpretation: Pierre

Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital” and what I call a “self-curating” approach.

As several individuals have already observed about Vogel, “In the field of African

art, scholars and collectors tend to think of Vogel as a ‘classicist’ and perhaps an

‘elitist’.195 I first would like to better understand this observation through

engaging with Bourdieu’s notion of what he called “cultural capital,” a helpful

193
Vogel, interview by author.
194
Ibid.
195
Frederick John Lamp, Amanda M. Maples, and Laura M. Smalligan, “The Characters
and their Tastes,” in Accumulating History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012),
41.
 89

tool in considering the inherent elitism of Vogel’s story. Applying Bourdieu’s

“cultural capital” to Vogel’s biography provides another way of understanding her

life, revealing the levels of privilege and social status she was awarded from a

young age.

In his seminal text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

(1984), the French sociologist Bourdieu argues there is a correlation between

one’s class and participation in arts and culture. As he states in the introduction to

his study, one’s engagement with the arts are the direct result “of upbringing and

education, all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading, etc.), and

preferences in literature, painting, or music,” and that these activities are “closely

linked to educational level and secondarily to social origin.”196 To Bourdieu,

one’s capital correlates to social, economic, and cultural resources; each

ultimately determines one’s place in society. We can use this cultural capital

model to understand Vogel’s story, re-evaluating her childhood, travels, and

socioeconomic advantages. For instance, growing up, Vogel had an early

introduction to art: “I was always interested in art, my mother was always

interested in art. My mother painted and made ceramics and things.” Moreover,

living abroad in Beirut and Puerto Rico provided her with access to experiences

that few are granted. Through these experiences, Vogel continued to gain her own

cultural capital, ultimately influencing her place in the art world. As Bourdieu

196
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 1.
 90

argues, the more capital one has, the more likely that individual is to have a

position of power in society.197

However, as the cultural theorist Kathy Littles has observed, Bourdieu’s

model is also one of exclusion; his work, perhaps because of its inherent French

middleclass context, “is an example of hegemony and identity politics that

privileges whiteness.”198 To complement this reading, I turn to the way Vogel

herself has framed and narrated her own life experiences, in an approach I have

coined “self-curating.” What elements of her life has Vogel chosen to curate?

Just as Vogel has argued that museums are “a tightly focused lens that

shows the visitor a particular point of view,” so too has she carefully presented

herself and her curatorial practice in her writings and interviews.199 For instance,

upon hearing my initial interest in learning more about her work and its alignment

with African art historical theory, Vogel was quick to assert that she in fact has

“never been focused on theory.”200 Rather, her “work has always been driven by a

deeply felt, personal political agenda to make Africans, African art and culture

respected and admired in America.”201 This statement was directly contradictory

to the vast amount of scholarship that I had been immersing myself in prior to our

interview; numerous sources situate Vogel’s work in the canon of art history

using postcolonial, postmodern, and other poststructuralist theories.

197
“Cultural Capital,” accessed April 14, 2019, http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-
tags/cultural-capital
198
Kathy Littles, “Locating the Hidden Voices in African Museum Exhibitions: How
‘African Voices’ at the Smithsonian Institution Politicizes Race, Class, and Cultural
Capital” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2006), 18.
199
Vogel, “Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion,” 201.
200
Email communication with SV.
201
Ibid.
 91

Over the course of this intense temporal and theoretical examination of

Vogel’s past, I noticed several repeating ways in which she carefully constructed

her own narrative and curating practices, aligning with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s

observation that:

Every human identity is constructed, historical; every

one has its share of false presuppositions, of the errors
and inaccuracies that courtesy calls ‘myth’…Invented
histories, invented cultural affinities come with every
identity; each is a kind of role that has to be scripted,
structured by conventions of narrative.202

Similarly, throughout our two-hour interview, I observed several tropes of self-

representation, or self-curating, that Vogel repeatedly relied upon to tell her story.

For instance, one major recurring theme was Vogel’s insistence that she has

always been an “outsider.” Vogel shared that she was raised in Beirut, a city with

languages, religions, customs, and cultures far unlike than her hometown of

Detroit. From a young age, she became accustomed to being different, a feeling

that became second nature to her and would eventually bring her comfort as she

completed her fieldwork in Baule villages, or when she returned to graduate

school as the oldest individual in her cohort. From this role of being the outsider,

Vogel also frequently stated how it taught her to be “fearless,” an adjective that

she (and other African art curators in discussions about her work) used numerous

times in describing her life experiences and curatorial choices. Another trope she

relied on in telling her story was attributing her successes to luck, or being in the

right place at the right time (such as moving to Abidjan shortly after the country’s

independence, or choosing Baule as an area of field research).

202
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
(London: Methuen, 1992): 174.
 92

Prior to our interview, Vogel disagreed with the placement of her work

using any theoretical underpinnings. Yet in the interview, she acknowledged that

coming up with theories of her own was instrumental to her early coursework in

graduate school. I also find it surprising that she stated other scholars of the time

period were “less art historical” than her, even though she had no art history

training when she decided to pursue graduate studies. Perhaps she was referencing

the fact that many of the individuals she studied with from outside the IFA were

anthropologists rather than art historians. There is an ongoing tension between the

ways Vogel does not see herself as a theorist, despite the common reading of her

work using a theorized lens, and the way she asserts her practice as pragmatic and

personal; that is, she claims she has always been more concerned with the

heartfelt connections she established while living and conducting fieldwork in

Côte d’Ivoire.

In aligning with this “self-curating” theory, on the homepage of Vogel’s

personal website is a New York Times article quote from a review about Vogel’s

work: “In the 1980s and ‘90s, [her exhibitions] revolutionized the way art, any art,

could be exhibited. No one else has fully picked up that challenge since.”203 In the

selection of this quote it is clear that Vogel agrees no one has yet “picked up that

challenge,” but I disagree with this assertion. As observed by the Africanists

Christa Clarke and Amanda Gilvin, most curators today are exhibiting art in ways

never done before, using innovative methodologies that invite viewers to question

what’s on view before them and to be curious. While a career as broad as Vogel’s

may not be possible today – or at least certainly more challenging to achieve

203
“Susan Vogel,” http://www.susan-vogel.com/Susan-Vogel/Vogel.html.
 93

considering its breadth from art history to museology to film – many curators are

making shifts in their field by putting forth material in ways not previously seen.

On this, Clarke has stated, “I feel like the new generation of curators are making

interesting choices and I think everybody's looking to do new things and looking

to move away from the past.” While Vogel may be “self-curating” the events of

her life in interviews and her writing, this thesis is my way of counter-curating her

story through the use of a theoretical and temporal lens.

The Field Today

In 1991, only twelve art history departments in the United States offered

African art history courses.204 Today, that number is well over thirty. Despite this

increased visibility and engagement, several scholars have expressed concern in

the sustainability of the field and its current trajectory. Some, like Christa Clarke,

are worried about the current broad scope of the field. In this turn towards the

global contemporary, the field of African art history is significantly more

inclusive of various regions across the continent, in comparison to the field in the

later twentieth century. More scholars are looking towards the visual trends

arising from North Africa, for example, and it is less likely to be categorized as

the “arts of Islam,” or even “arts of the Middle East.” While this more holistic

encompassing of the continent is inherently good, Clarke expressed concern in the

lack of museum jobs to support the number of emerging scholars covering such a

broad array of topics, and also questioned how Africanists are meant to teach

African art history considering the field’s wider scholarly breadth.

204
Mary Jo Arnoldi, “African Studies Review,” African Arts 24, no. 2 (April 1991): 26.
 94

Others, like Kathryn Gunsch, have critiqued the recent turn towards a self-

reflection of the field. As she argues, as more African art scholars and students

research the field itself, such as the art market, notions of authenticity, and the

canon, the focus moves away from Africa and African artists, and turns instead to

Western perspectives. Although Gunsch acknowledged that researching such

trends are important, it is more critical to adjust our focus back to the continent

itself. Furthermore, Gunsch expressed concern about the way some museums’

present colonial histories, which can overshadow the art and leave audiences with

feelings of guilt. When this happens, “the guilt becomes about you, Europe, and

the West…this once again eclipses African art and African artists and patrons and

makes [the museological colonial legacy] about Europeans and European

descendants…that’s not really the goal of the field as I understand it.”205 How can

we move beyond discussing the relationship between European modernism and

colonization and African art? One way might be a return to exhibitions that

“celebrate” cultural art forms, rather than a focus on critiquing the past, which,

according to Gunsch, is a “death spiral.”206

KG: I’ve had more than one person say to me, ‘I feel
guilty looking at African art’ – people of your
generation, younger than me. ‘I feel guilty looking at
African art because I know all of it was stolen,’ and I
always want to say, well, one, it wasn't all stolen. A
lot of it was sold, a lot of it was made to be sold.

So it was all on a period where lots of things were

stolen and that's, you know, it's alright to feel sad and
guilty about that. It’s right to look at things and feel
bad that were looted. But if I have students telling me
that they feel bad, even looking at African art in the
205
Kathryn Gunsch, interview by the author, digital recording, September 2018.
206
Ibid.
 95

end result is that they're not looking at African art,

which means that eventually it goes into the storeroom
and no one can see which to me is the ultimate insult.
So I think students working with the market because
it's fun to look at the archives in Paris as opposed to
spending two years in Malawi…is important to
document, but I think it's not going to have the mass
appeal that will keep the field alive.

These concerns also stem from two recent, highly politicized events that

even spurred intense debates among non-art historians: the notorious “Brooklyn

Museum” controversy and the famed museum scene from Marvel’s Black

Panther, both of which occurred last year. In April 2018, Dr. Kristen Windmuller-

Luna, a recent graduate of Princeton University, was hired as the Sills Family

Consulting Curator of African Arts at the Brooklyn Museum, a part-time position

with a terminal contract. Several Brooklyn-based anti-gentrification coalitions

immediately responded to Windmuller-Luna’s hiring, demanding the Brooklyn

Museum launch a “decolonization commission” for the way it decided to hire a

white curator rather than a curator of color for the position.207 Many activists

referenced the museum scene from Black Panther, citing similar tensions of race

and authority.

The scene portrays the film’s antagonist, Erik Killmonger, a young black

youth from Wakanda (a fictional African country in the Marvel universe), in

conversation with the museum’s white curator, an expert in African art. As they

stand in the museum’s African art gallery, Killmonger asks the curator several

questions about the objects on view, including an object that he knows was looted

207
Alex Greenberger, “‘Simply Not a Good Look’: Activist Group Criticizes Brooklyn
Museum’s Hiring of White Curator for African Art Department,” Artnews, April 6, 2018,
http://www.artnews.com/2018/04/06/simply-not-good-look-activist-group-criticizes-
brooklyn-museums-hiring-white-curator-african-art-department-open-letter/.
 96

from Wakanda. As they speak to one another, gallery security, all of who are

white, slowly encircle Killmonger, keeping a close eye on him while completely

ignoring other gallery visitors (whom are also all white). Several Africanists in

my field research referenced both the Brooklyn Museum event and the Black

Panther scene as sounding tensions in the field:

CC: The whole Brooklyn Museum situation will

continue to resonate. Again, in ways that make sense
and in ways that don't make sense but I think it will
impact the field and who goes into the field.

In responding to the Brooklyn Museum situation, Dr. Steven Nelson, Professor of

African and African-American art history at UCLA, tweeted that he was not

surprised by Windmuller-Luna’s hiring considering that “African art scholars in

the US are overwhelmingly white and female.”208 The Africanist art historian

Karen Milbourne, a curator at the National Museum of African Art, has also cited

racial politics as a continuing challenge in the field. As a result of such media-

driven discussion, the greater public is more knowledgeable about the problems

inherent to the display of African art and are more likely to critique non-white

specialists gaining positions of power in the field (even if the Brooklyn Museum

position is relatively low on the hierarchy of museum jobs, considering it is part-

time with a finite end, unless Windmuller-Luna herself can get the grants needed

to continue the role).

One positive aspect of the field’s turn towards this new global era is that

now many museums prioritize their placement of African art in dialogue with

208
It should be pointed out that all individuals interviewed for this project were white
women, myself included.
 97

other collections, a process that Christa Clarke calls “collaborative curation.”209

Institutions that have successfully implemented this interdisciplinary and cross-

cultural curating approach include the Davis Museum at Wellesley College,

Princeton University Art Museum, Newark Museum, and soon, the

Metropolitan.210 By placing African art – or other marginalized specialties for that

matter – alongside Western artistic traditions, museums can “broaden discussions

about Africa’s place in global art history,” thereby “rejecting the Africa-Europe

binary and instead prompt intercultural conversations about the history of art and

its markets.”211

Impact, Reflections, and Conclusion

The study of the visual culture of Africa and its diaspora has experienced

multiple paradigmatic shifts over the past century. Since the mid-1980s, Susan

Vogel has embraced and critically explored contested museum terrains through

using innovative strategies that highlight the politics of exhibiting art from an

entire continent. No other New York museum, or Western museum for that

matter, directly challenged these ideas so intensely as Vogel. She was keenly in-

tune with the decade’s postmodern debates, and responded both accordingly and

creatively. Her exhibitions deconstructed the standard museum narrative through

focusing on audiences, using multiple perspectives, and examining notions of

curatorial authenticity through a multidisciplinary lens. It is impossible to study

209
Clarke, interview with the author.
210
Smaller institutions are also following this trend, such as the Fitchburg Art Museum in
northern Massachusetts.
211
Kristen Windmuller-Luna, “African Arts at the Princeton University Art Museum,”
African Arts 52, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 85.
 98

African art and its use in museum contexts without also studying Vogel’s work.

Her career paved the way for crucial discussions related to the politics of display,

increasing African art visibility along the way. With the Museum for African

Art’s history of polyvocal exhibitions that turn the lens from the art to the visitor

or museum context itself, I would argue that it is in part because of Vogel’s work

that contemporary non-western exhibitions continue to consider notions of “the

Other,” global networks, and the museological colonial legacy. Her shows

continue to be referenced in other African art exhibitions. As Gunsch has noticed,

KG: I've never actually been to any African art

anything where someone hasn't mentioned one of
Susan's shows at least four times. People are
constantly referring to them. So I feel like every
African art exhibition you see owes some debt to
things that Susan was doing, particularly at the
Center for African Art because they were such a
breath of fresh air into the field, such a new model
that everyone has studied them and thought about
them. And so whether you see actual quotes, using
the same strategies they've used or not, I think most
people have been affected by those shows.

Moreover, as a result of Africa Explores, Vogel helped establish contemporary

African art as a discipline.

KP: I remember reading somewhere that no one thought it

would be a field.

CC: No, most definitely not. There was nobody else

doing it. She was the only one.

In critiquing the field of African art history, Vogel has stated, “African art has

been treated as if it was timeless for so long, as if nothing has ever changed in
 99

Africa, which is ridiculous.” 212 Today, however, the field of contemporary

African art is a more common field of focus among graduate students and

scholars; ‘timeless’ is no longer used to describe the arts of the continent.

After a nearly fifty-year career, Susan Vogel has taken a pause from

curating, publishing, and filmmaking, albeit a brief one. She is in the preliminary

research stage for a forthcoming book about the changing field of African art

history in the United States from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, or the

“crest years,” as they are sometimes referred.213 The book will be based on

interviews of key players of the era who experienced the field’s shifts. For the

moment, however, when not conducting research interviews, Vogel spends most

days making ceramics.

SV: For the first time, I’m not working under a

deadline, which is not normal for me. I’m use to
working flat out. And I’ll probably [write this book]
the way I did my dissertation a hundred years ago,
which is malinger for about three years and then I
wrote the whole thing in about four months. I didn’t
do anything else. Not a movie. Not a night out.214

My goal in writing this intellectual biography was to broaden the interpretation of

Susan Vogel as a central and active player in the canon. This study, while hardly a

complete intellectual biography due to the physical and temporal constraints of

this thesis project, has provided one view of Vogel’s life and career in which to be

considered in the field of African art history. As the art critic Arthur Danto so

eloquently stated, the “story of anyone’s life is never the simple unfolding

212
Vogel, “Shifting Meaning: African Art in the World,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUeFdxdNVhE.
213
For more on the “crest years,” see Susan Vogel, “Riding the Crest of African Art,” in
Accumulating Histories, 46.
214
Vogel, interview by the author.
 100

through time of an internally programmed narrative, even if it exhibits what one

might call a standard episodic structure…[also important] are the accidents, the

intersection of crossed casual histories that produce events not strictly predictable

from either chain.215 While this thesis has followed the ‘episodic structure’ of

Vogel’s intellectual choices, I look forward to future excerpts, reviews, and

discussions that might speak to the ‘intersection of crossed histories’ Danto

implies.

215
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41.
 101

FIGURES

Figure 1. Susan Mullin Vogel

Figure 2. Museum of Primitive Art (1958)

 102

Figure 3. Map of Baule region, Côte d’Ivoire

Figure 4. Ijebu Yoruba Janus headdress

 103

Figure 5. Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1982)

 104

Figure 6. The Center for African Art, exterior (1984)

 105

Figure 7. The Center for African Art, interior gallery (1984)

 106

Figure 8. Museum of Modern Art’s “‘Primitivism’” in 20th Century Art” (1984)

 107

Figure 9. Museum for African Art, SoHo (1992)

 108

Figure 10. Vigango in ART/artifact, “Contemporary Art Gallery” (1988)

Figure 11. Kigango in ART/artifact, “Diorama” (1988)

 109

Figure 12. Informational post example, Africa Explores (1991)

Figure 13. “Urban Art” (green gallery) in Africa Explores (1991)

 110

Figure 14. “Museums Provide Access to Art,” Gallery 2, Exhibition-ism (1994)

Figure 15. “Museums Present the Truth,” Gallery 3, Exhibition-ism

 111

Figure 16. “Art Museums Never Change,” Gallery 4, Exhibition-ism

 112

Figure 17. Baule: African Art/Western Eyes (1997)

Figure 18. Film still from FANG: An Epic Journey (2001)

 113

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abiodun, Rowland, Henry John Drewal, Adrian A. Gerbrands, et. al, African Art
Studies: The State of the Discipline. Washington, D.C.: National
Museum of African Art, 1990.

Arnoldi, Mary Jo. “African Studies Review,” African Arts 24, no. 2 (April 1991):
24, 26, 28, 31.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of

Culture. London: Methuen, 1992.

________. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism?” Critical

Inquiry 17, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 336-357.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association 1, No. 2, “New Items.” (Winter
1982): 4-5.

Becker, Howard S. “Art Worlds and Social Types.” American Behavioral

Scientist 19, no. 6 (July/August 1976): 703-718.

________. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge Classics, 1994.

Borgatti, Jean. “African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme by Susan

Vogel and Francine N’Diaye,” African Arts 18, no. 3 (May 1985): 22-23.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

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