African Art in the UWM Art History Teaching Gallery

On December 3 and December 8, 2014, Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Francis Rarey went from professor to student in ARTHIST 371: African Art. In the Art History Teaching Gallery, students gave gallery talks summarizing their semester’s worth of research on select African objects from the UWM Art Collection. At the beginning of the semester, students were assigned an object without any identifying information, and in some cases, lacking any known peer examples. These gallery talks, the fruits of three months of research, were some of the first in-depth projects conducted on the UWM African Art Collection.​ Students presented work covering royal and personal arts, objects from across western and central Africa, and most importantly, illuminated the complex life histories of African objects in the 20th and 21st centuries.