'African Arts' Review: "Heroes: Principles of African Greatness"

Review by Ian Bourland

My exhibition Heroes: Principles of African Greatness received a full review in the Spring 2021 edition of the journal African Arts.

Dumouchelle...has installed works from the museum’s collection in a dazzling, provocative way. Pairing the classical with the contemporary, he ...engages audiences with an interactive digital app, a lively playlist piped in to the museum’s atrium (available on Spotify), and splashy fonts and bold graphics for the wall text. Taken together, such strategies yield an immersive and playful experience that draws audiences of all ages into a dense survey of aesthetic and political history.

Heroes is, above all accessible. There are literally and conceptually multiple points of entry into the show, and elementary school groups and scholars alike find different vantages from which to connect with the objects, all concisely situated both in history and, anew, in their connection to the show’s titular “principles of African greatness.”

Heroes begins the work of creating a new pantheon during a time of political turbulence, and takes seriously a host of ongoing debates about the arts of Africa in national collections.

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