Art with a Capital A: Competing Systems of Value for Dr. Barnes's African Sculpture Collection
Channel: Barnes Foundation
Date: 2024-03-25

Alison Boyd | “Art with a Capital A: Competing Systems of Value for Dr. Barnes’s African Sculpture Collection in the 1920s and 1930s”
Thursday, March 14

About the Talk
As Dr. Barnes assembled his collection, he framed its ensemble displays around two key pillars: Euro-American modern paintings and African sculpture. Artists and thinkers as diverse as Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Ernest Mancoba, and Léopold Sédar. 
Senghor positioned their “discovery” of African sculpture around visits to the Barnes galleries or encounters with its related publications, which based the value of the objects on their influence on the development of European modernism.

In this lecture, Barnes director of research and interpretation Alison Boyd will trace how these important figures, nevertheless, used Dr. Barnes’s ideas for their own purposes and to create different meanings. The walls of the Barnes collection may appear static, but the artwork and its display sparked a dynamic conversation about the status of African art that reverberated across the African diaspora through Europe, the US, and Africa and still resonates today.

About the Speaker
Alison Boyd is director of research and interpretation at the Barnes. She studies the intersection of multiple modernisms in American and European art in the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on the arts of the African diaspora and the politics of museum display. Boyd contributed to the 2023 publication The Barnes Then and Now: Dialogues on Education, Installation, and Social Justice.


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About the Barnes Foundation:
The mission of the Barnes is to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.

Our founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, believed that art had the power to improve minds and transform lives. Our diverse educational programs are based on his teachings and one-of-a-kind collections. 

Philadelphia art collector, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), chartered the Barnes Foundation in 1922 to teach people from all walks of life how to look at art. Over three decades, he collected some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, including works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He displayed them alongside African masks, native American jewelry, Greek antiquities, and decorative metalwork.

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