Susan Vogel, well-known curator of African Art, provides a thoughtful discussion of the ways in which museums contextualize objects. She describes several of her exhibitions which grappled with issues of representation and authority. The conversational article provides a useful resource for information on some of her exhibitions including Art/Artifact, which received a lot of critical attention. One of the exhibitions discussed reflected American interpretations of African works, while another one questioned the museum’s own practices–looking at the notion of perception, showing similar objects in very different types of environments. She suggests that museum professionals must be conscious about what they do and why, and they should inform the public that what it sees is not material that speaks for itself but material filtered through the tastes, interests, politics, and state of knowledge of particular presenters at a particular moment in time.
