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Collecting and Curating in Liberia and the United States: William Siegmann and Liberian Material Culture at the Fair and in the Museum
Author(s) -
Beck Cohen Stephanie
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
museum anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.197
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1379
pISSN - 0892-8339
DOI - 10.1111/muan.12171
Subject(s) - exhibition , indigenous , politics , vision , sierra leone , national museum , history , national museum of natural history , institution , anthropology , media studies , art history , sociology , natural history , archaeology , ethnology , political science , social science , law , medicine , ecology , biology
Museums mediate diverse and sometimes contentious cultural and political histories. For Liberian collections, museum work negotiates Indigenous and trans‐Atlantic material cultures. Inspired by the Liberian collections at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and the 2014 exhibit Visions from the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone , this article considers the curatorial work of the Brooklyn Museum's William Siegmann, who shaped the exhibition of Liberian art in the second half of the twentieth century. Siegmann's work reflected an interdisciplinary spirit; his exhibitions between 1974 and 1987 adapted to different contexts and audiences, yielding distinctions in how Liberian art was presented in museums during a period of political and cultural turmoil. Examining Siegmann's curatorial projects through collections in Liberia and Washington, D.C., together with archival documents from the Siegmann collections at Indiana University, illustrates how one scholar‐collector influenced knowledge development about Liberian material culture. [national museums, West Africa, Liberia, material culture]