African Materials in Special Collections

ART & ARTIFACTS

Search TriArte (Online Database) for African Art & Artifacts

Collections History Timeline (African Materials in Art & Artifacts at BMC)

• Chronicles history of donations, exhibitions, research consultants 

RARE BOOKS & MANUSCRIPTS

Introduction and General List of Works

Archival research is research involving primary sources held in an archives, a Special Collections library, or other repository. Archival sources can be manuscripts, documents, records (including electronic records), objects, sound and audiovisual materials, or other materials.

Archival sources supporting African Material Culture in Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College are most typically organized as part of the donor's papers.

• Margaret Feurer Plass (Class of 1917) Papers
• Jane Martin (A.B. 1953, M.A. 1958) Papers

Material research includes analysis of the physical matter from which an object is made and the manner in which it is constructed.

Materiality, as an aesthetic concept, emerges from Formalism and its method of formal analysis for describing the visible aspects of the work of art. It is interconnected with concepts of style and the practice of connoisseurship.

• Formal analysis
  • mode of analysis focusing primarily on the identification and description of the formal features of an artwork and on their relations—rather than on its explicit content, or without reference to its specific cultural or historical context (see also decontextualization) (Oxford Reference)
  • the process of describing the physical properties of a work of art as objectively as possible and with as much detail as possible (Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology)
• Style
  • term used to describe coherence of qualities in periods or people across comparanda
  • concept which makes possible the grouping of artworks into related and affiliated groups on basis of shared and/or contrastive distinctive features (comparanda) and in order to situate objects’ makers, societies, cultures, or nations as close to or distant from each other in varying ways (Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (New York: Oxford History of Art, 2009).
  • central concept of art history that both presupposes and promotes the hypothesis of a shared stylistic or family resemblance amongst the artifacts of a group, studio, region, nation, ethnicity, or race
    • Caution and circumspection: Theories of style that codify it according to formal typicality have been consistently and broadly criticized, but they are difficult to fully overturn: there are undoubtedly moments in history when it is impossible not to perceive that different cultural artifacts express a single or unified idea. (Elkins on "Style," Grove Art Online).
• Connoisseurship
  • diagnostic evaluation of evidence that an object might provide for authentic origins or provenance
  • European art historical practice (Vasari, Winckelmann, Morelli, and Berenson) (Grove Art Online).

Material research also considers relevant information related to the object's physical existence.

• Production date and provenance
• History and condition
• Maker's biography, personal history, community

Comparanda are materials used for comparison, which may come from the same period or the same place, use the same materials, or display the same iconography.

• Gathering comparanda is a major part of art historical research. Discovery of similar objects and their formal styles can help in their identification because one is looking for conventions or tendencies among a culture as a whole. But caution should be used in assuming a typicality or tribality from a single object. There are always contingencies and exceptions to consider: individual styles and borrowing from the styles of other culture groups are some possibilities. 

Resources

List of Museum and University Collections of African Art (Online) 

• Search other collections for similar objects

Museums in the United States with Collections of African Art (Smithsonian) 

Ross Archive of African Images (Yale University, CT)

• Database of published images of African art 

Ibeji Archive (Ibeji Encyclopedia)   

Imo Dara (African Art Blog, contains search feature pulling from multiple collections)   

The African Heritage Document and Research Center (Log-in required) 

Museum Databases – Bruno Claessens 

See related link for comparanda research advice

Provenance is the history of ownership, or the sources of origin, for movable works of art. 

• Provenance research aims at a recovery of information about an object's history of ownership. A complete provenance provides an accurate account of the locations and changes in the chain of ownership of a work of art from the time and place of its manufacture to the present. The more extensive this record is, the more secure the attribution of the work is likely to be. An accurate and verifiable provenance may also be critical in establishing the rightful ownership of a work of art. It is important to document an object’s provenance for legal, ethical, and scholarly reasons. (See more: Grove Art Online)

Resources (not specific to African Materials)

Guide to Provenance Research (Yale University)

Getting started with Provenance Research (Artwork Archive) 

IFAR (International Foundation for Art Research) Provenance Guide

• Database of every artist catalogue raisonné ever published and currently in production

Getty Research Center Provenance Guide

• Getty Provenance Index

Metropolitan Museum's Provenance Research Project

Art Institute of Chicago: Provenance Research Case Study

Provenance is the tracing of the history of an object (usually a work of art of a book) through its various owners and locations.

Monica Blackmun Visona, et al., A History of Art in Africa (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008).

Arts Council of the African Studies Asssociation (ACASA)

General History of Africa (UNESCO)

Red Lists of African Cultural Objects at risk to illicit traffic (ICOM)

Africa: Dictionaries of Civilizations (University of California) 

Ethnolinguistic Map of Africa (Harvard University) 

African Art Teaching Resources (CUNY/Kress)

Art and Life in Africa: Essays by Topic (University of Iowa Museum of Art)

Art of Africa (Khan Academy)