Art History Professor Lisa Homann is Scholarly Expert Behind New African Galleries at The Mint Museum
Reinstallation of the Mint’s African art collection focuses on ethics and transparency.
For Associate Professor of Art History Lisa Homann, two years of curatorial scholarship have come to fruition in the newly opened African Art Galleries at The Mint Museum Randolph. Three rooms in the museum have been installed with objects both from the Mint’s collection and on loan, presented in a way that is intentionally transparent about each object’s provenance – the history of its ownership – or lack thereof.
“When it comes to African art, provenance often poses unique challenges,” Homann writes in an essay in The Mint Museum magazine, Inspire. “Detailed African provenance is the exception rather than the rule. Many records are incomplete or based on speculation, creating ambiguity rather than understanding.”
Homann was invited to serve as the curator for the reinstalled African art by Jen Sudul Edwards, the chief curator at The Mint Museum. Homann specializes in West African masquerade practices and serves on the editorial board for the journal African Arts. She first traveled to West Africa in 2006 and in the years since has developed deep and longstanding relationships with artists, dancers, blacksmiths, griots (musicians), patrons, chiefs, and boosters of masquerade in Burkina Faso.
In an article in the museum’s magazine, Edwards writes that after graduate school, she knew her education was deficient in African art studies, so she attended Homann’s classes at UNC Charlotte to deepen her knowledge.
“When I joined the Mint, I knew that she was the Africanist I would want to evaluate the work in the Mint’s existing African collection and guide the collection forward.”
– Jen Sudul Edwards, chief curator at The Mint Museum
With a detective’s focus, Homann combed through every physical file that the museum had on its African objects and worked directly with collectors Michael Gallis (a former UNC Charlotte professor) and Asif Shaikh to verify as much information about each work as possible. She was particularly discerning when considering potentially ancient artworks. Such objects require provenance research to determine if they were scientifically excavated (informal excavation is often illegal) or even excavated at all (and therefore “fake”).
“If I couldn’t determine that it wasn’t looted or fake, I didn’t put it on display,” she said in an interview.
And if she could not determine who actually made the art object, she identified its creator as “Unrecorded Artist.”
“I applaud the Mint for allowing me to do this work,” Homann said. “This kind of transparency is uncommon.”
Homann wrote the exhibition panels and labels for every object on display. She organized the works into three broad thematic categories. One room focuses on ceremonial objects; another highlights personal and domestic objects; and a third presents “global connections,” including a new masquerade ensemble from Burkina Faso that Homann commissioned, working with the artist David Sanou.
Homann began a relationship with the Sanou family in 2008, working first with David Sanou’s father, André. Last spring, she went to Burkina Faso to document every step of the creation of the “Kimi Masquerade Ensemble,” that is now in The Mint Museum.
Her ongoing study and curation of Sanou’s work is featured in a new traveling exhibition, New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, which opens in April at the New Orleans Museum of Art and for which she is a co-curator.
Homann has also co-authored the exhibition catalogue.
The Mint’s stunning new acquisition is prominently displayed next to a video of a masquerade festival that Homann took in Burkina Faso. The galleries’ lime green, burnt orange, and turquoise walls honor the vitality of the many objects on display, from colorful textiles to massive pots and exquisitely carved figures.
“My hope is that visitors will not only admire the imagination and virtuosity embodied by these works,” Homann writes in her Inspire essay, “but also appreciate the honest approach to sharing what we know and what we don’t know about them as individual objects.”
Photos courtesy of The Mint Museum and Lisa Homann