Collecting Visions

African Gallery 4 September - 21 August 2011
In 1984, the Art Centre received the spectacular gift of almost 600 hundred works of African art, from a wide and diverse range of cultures in West and Central Africa, including Nigeria, Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Gabon and Democratic Republic of Congo.

These objects were collected in the mid-20th century by Montrealers Justin and Elisabeth Lang, and represent one of the strongest concentrations of African art in Canadian public collections. Over the years, thematic selections from the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection have been much admired among the Art Centre’s exhibitions, through which our visitors have gained enhanced understandings of the social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of African art.

With Collecting Visions, we draw once again from this outstanding resource, this time to consider some of the cultural motivations underlying the Langs’ collecting practices within the context of mid- 20th century western understandings of the art and artists of the African continent. In so doing, we inaugurate a new ongoing curatorial approach to the Lang Collection, in which we hope to enlist scholars in a variety of disciplines to engage critically with, and to bring new meanings to, this exceptionally rich collection.

Janet M. Brooke

This exhibition is developed by Janet M. Brooke and Patricia Sullivan, with the collaboration of doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Catherine Hale, and is supported by the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Foundation Fund.

Associated Categories: arts-theatre  community-events  family-events  festivals  free-events  kids-events