Professor Benneta Jules-Rosette is a distinguished professor of sociology and the African and African American Studies Research Center director at the University of California, San Diego. She also served as the President of the Society for Africanist Anthropology of the American Anthropology Association. Professor Jules-Rosette is also in charge of the Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Students Essay Award named after her honor by the Association for Africanist Anthropology (AfAA) of the American Anthropological Association. In addition, she is the author of eight monographs, including The New Religions of Africa (Ablex, 1979); Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (University of Illinois Press, 1998); and African Art Reframed: Reflections and Dialogues on Museum Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2020) co-authored with Dr. J.R. Osborn.
The second speaker at this week’s baraza, Dr. J.R. Osborn, is a scholar and experimentalist of communication and associate professor of communication and technology at Georgetown University. His work explores media history, design, semiotics, communication technologies, and aesthetics with a regional focus on the Middle East and Africa. Dr. Osborn also co-directs Georgetown’s Technology Design Studies. His publications include Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Harvard University Press, 2017) and African Art Reframed: Reflections and Dialogues on Museum Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2020) co-authored.
This week’s baraza talk titled: Reframing African Art & Museum Culture was drawn from the speakers’ book “African Art Reframed: reflections and Dialogues on Museum Culture.” The talk had two parts: the nodal theory of Museums— presented by professor Jules-Rosette and the method and theory for Museum display and exhibition—covered by Dr. J.R Osborn. Finally, the two speakers concluded the talk by providing nine takeaways.
In her part, professor Jules-Rosette identified five “transformational museum nodes” to categorize museums: Curiosity Cabinet (node 1), Gallery Space (node 2), Large Edifice (node 3), Postmodern Museums (node 4), and Virtual Assemblages (node 5). She illuminated that the nodes were developed based on the notion of semiotic and semiology. Her detailed explanation of her classification of the nodes based on functional uses of arts, idea-sentiments, and aesthetic appeal, was aided by videos, images of museums in each node, documents, and examples that she shared with the audience. For example, individual collections, University museums, and national museums were identified as examples of the first, second, and third nodes.
According to professor Jules-Rosette, the transformational museum nodes are ideal types of museums that exist in certain kinds of status or stability for a certain period. Due to seismic changes or pandemics, for instance, some museums may change nodes or disappear. She also underlined that this node-based categorization of the museums might overlap; some museums may fall between two nodes. For instance, the Harn Museum at the University of Florida was categorized as a 2.75 node falling between node two and node three.
Dr. J.R’ Osborn began his part of the talk by suggesting new ways to imagine us interacting with objects in Museums in addition to classifying museums across nodes. Some museum objects might be born of complex histories of constant migration, territorial expansion, intermarriage, and assimilation of captives and cultural exchange. In short, they might have a multicultural story, which could make it difficult to know their place of origins and trace the trajectories that they went through. Dr. J.R. first developed the idea of unpacking and unmixing elements of museum objects using digital technology in response to the African remix exhibit curated by Simon Njami. Then, professor Jules-Rosette and Dr. J.R. identified it as the “unmixing method” and further expanded and elaborated to resolve the above problems. Unmixing method “entails the location and separation of semiotic to enable in-depth analysis, curatorial contextualization, and artistic reconfiguration.” (African Art Reframed, 2020) Dr. J.R. showed how the digitized unmixing method enables “curatorial presentation, artistic interpretation, audience perception, and community dialogue” by sharing images and videos.
Professor Bennett Jules-Rosette and Dr. J.R Osborn concluded their talk with nine important takeaways. They highlighted the relevance of their works on the nodal classification of the museums and the digitized unmixing method for everyone to develop new strategies to learn about museums, especially to create transparency in curatorial networks, enhancing and opening new avenues of connectivity and exchange between multicultural institutions, public and private collections, and and reconfiguring archives and database.
Recap written by Yekatit G. Tsehayu