The exhibition project, Ghana 1957: African Art After Independence—a product of the Humanities Collaboratory project, “Making African Art: From African Independence and the Peace Corps to Civil Rights and the Cold War” (September 1, 2018 – August 31, 2020) — has been awarded a Public Humanities Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support two years of collaborative exhibition development. Ghana 1957 is an exhibition planned for 2027, which will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and diverse public programming in the United States and Ghana.
As the first comprehensive treatment of Ghana’s independence era through the arts, Ghana 1957 will explore, for audiences in the US and Africa, how the dramatic social and cultural changes of the independence era affected the landscape of Ghanaian, African, and Black creativity and how it led artists to reflect on this new era in a host of extraordinary ways. Ghana 1957 will bring together artworks from multiple locations in the US, Ghana, and Europe, to present the first comprehensive exploration of Ghana’s independence era through the arts. “The NEH planning grant will support our bi-national curatorial team, in conversation with an international group of humanities consultants comprised of leading specialists in core areas of the project, to pursue the important research required to create what we hope will be an important intervention into the (re)telling of Ghana’s histories of creative expression and transnational exchange in the post-independence era,” says Ashley Miller, Assistant Curator of African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Beginning in 2018, the “Making African Art” project brought together an interdisciplinary group of faculty, curators, and advanced students based across U-M to develop plans for an ambitious exhibition project that would explore stories of art making after independence in seven different African countries. “A critical element of the Ghana 1957 project is its collaborative format,” she says, “a quality that we were able to first develop in the context of the Humanities Collaboratory. The themes that we developed through our collaborative work remain the basis for Ghana 1957. We have further distilled the scope of the exhibition project to focus on Ghana. Importantly, this shift allows us to pursue more effectively the collaborative model we aim to develop.”
Representing an equal partnership among professionals based at three institutions – UMMA, the National Museum of Art in Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) – the project deploys a new paradigm for pursuing a more equitable and ethically-informed approach to research and public scholarship in and about Africa. “Many scholars and their institutions in the Global North are seeking new strategies for collaborating with colleagues in Africa as they pursue research in Africa and disseminate the new knowledge that it yields. Likewise, professionals across the African continent are engaged in new practices of collaborative art-making, research, and exhibition development that position African institutions, artists, and curators at the vanguard of equitable and inclusive practices of audience and community engagement,” Ashley points out. “Ghana 1957 presents an opportunity for its Ghana- and US-based contributors to learn from each other and develop an innovative approach to sustainable collaborative work.”