Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art addresses issues of museum practice—what shapes our experience of art: the work itself or its setting and display? How do museums provide—or deny—access to artworks through their presentation? It reflects on the nature of museums as institutions of learning, and exhibitions as a format for shaping how the public encounters and understands works of art through the examination of looking at African art in museums. We discover that most conventional museum practices contradict the ways art is looked at, experienced, and defined in traditional African societies. Museums are places for intense looking, but African experiences of art are almost always multi-sensual. Museums claim to provide everyone with access to art, but in African societies, most artworks are meant to be seen only on specific occasions and by certain people. Museums appear to present the truth authoritatively, but in Africa many artworks are believed to be alive, so that their meanings are recognized as flexible and subject to interpretation. Museums appear to stop time and halt decay, so artworks look the same year after year. In traditional African societies, artworks are continually changed, renewed, repainted, and re-adorned. This study, then, is about exhibition-making, a cultural artifact of our time, and the challenges posed by the profoundly different ways art is displayed in African societies.

Exhibition catalogue by Mary Nooter Roberts, and Susan Vogel, in collaboration with Chris Müller with essays: Exhibition-ism: The Design Approach by Chris Müller; Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art, Does an Object Have a Life? Outside/Inside: The Space of Performance by Mary Nooter Roberts; History of a Museum with Theory, Portrait of a Museum in Practice by Susan Vogel. Published and distributed by The Museum for African Art, September 1994. 136 pp. ISBN 0-945802-16-1. LCCN: 94-78064.