Art and Artifact: Museum Presentation of African Objects and African Cultures

African objects possess an unusual dual citizenship in both fine arts museums and museums of anthropology and natural history. Housed alongside both Monets and mastodons, touted as both art and artifact, African objects provide a bold illustration of the distorting effects of display. This research examines the influence of museum display by addressing the question of how museum visitor interpretations of African objects and cultures change in response to the aesthetic and ethnographic display strategies of fine art museums and museums of anthropology and natural history respectively. To answer this question, fieldwork on the display of Kongo power figures, or minkisi, was conducted in six prominent American museums. A combination of content analysis, participant observation, and visitor interviews was used to determine the distinguishing characteristics of aesthetic and ethnographic displays and connect these display features with the visitor responses they evoked. The research ultimately determines that design and text form the primary distinctions between aesthetic and ethnographic displays and powerfully influence whether visitors recognize the cultural, artistic, or historical aspects of the minkisi. The research also uncovers a widespread tension between preconceptions of African society as primitive and postmodern subjectivity