HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, has long benefited from the insight and dedication of its curators of African art, including current curator Smooth Nzewi, and the winter exhibition Inventory: New Works and Conversations around African Art highlights the work they have done. In particular, it demonstrates a renewed and purpose-driven focus on collecting modern and contemporary art in the African collection—works from African artists both in and beyond the continent, as well as non-African artists who address Africa in their practice. The exhibition, on view from January 16 through March 13, 2016, includes an array of paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and mixed media, all acquired in the last two years, by artists such as Ibrahim El Salahi, Lamidi Fakeye, Akin Fakeye, OwusuAnkomah, Victor Ekpuk, Chike Obeagu, Halida Boughriet, and Eric Van Hove. Programming for the exhibition includes several winter-term gallery talks and guided tours.

“Concomitant with Dartmouth College’s emphasis on experiential learning, Inventory provides Hood audiences with a transformative encounter with works of art historical importance. They highlight historical legacies and contemporary conditions in and about Africa. At the same time, they are globally oriented and draw our attention very sensitively to pressing issues and challenges that we face in the world today,” says Curator of African Art Smooth Nzewi.

Shown together for the first time, the works in Inventory offer varied yet compelling insights into modern and contemporary African art from the 1960s to the present. In addition to providing an important art historical anchor, they explore wide-ranging issues and engender critical conversations about Africa and the world we live in. They are organized around four broad themes: “Tradition and Modern/Modernist Traditions,” “Contemporary Visions of a Continent,” “Historical Returns,” and “Diasporic Imagination.” Regarding the latter theme, for example, French-Algerian Halida Boughriet’s photographs Diner des anonymes (pictured here) and Les enfants de la République (2014, both from the acclaimed Pandora photographic series) present remarkable insights into the plight of African and Islamic immigrants and their firstgeneration French children when faced with the challenges of belonging in contemporary Europe in the wake of Islamophobia and escalating far-right nationalism. These works and others in the exhibition are some of the attempts at filling crucial gaps in the African collection.

African art curators have long sought to develop a holistic representation of the arts of Africa and have placed their emphasis on things like masks and other kinds of ritual objects and works of material culture. The Hood’s present approach signals the museum’s intention to robustly engage with emerging discourses and narratives of the “global modern” and “global contemporary” in academia. While the Hood continues to collect tradition-based art forms today, it has also begun to conceive its methods of collecting more broadly, ultimately pursuing a richer understanding of Africa and its arts—historical, modern, and contemporary—across campus and in the wider community.