AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

The exhibition New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations will open at the New Orleans Museum of Art in April 2025. Five masquerade ensembles were mounted in 2024 in preparation for this exhibition, a challenge with no mountmaker on staff. This paper will detail the construction of the posable figural supports, made with aluminum tubing and locking hinges, and the decision-making across roles and continents that led to this design strategy.The exhibition aims to model more ethical ways to collect and display African art through direct commissioning rather than secondary market acquisitions, and collaborative presentation, emphasizing the ability of Africans to tell their own stories. To accomplish this, a team of eight people was assembledthree masquerade artists from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Burkina Faso, three American scholars, each with a longstanding research relationship with one of the masquerade artists, another artist/researcher from Cameroon, a research director of a museum in Senegal, and a curatorial assistant from Ethiopia.This team agreed that it was important for the display to reflect the liveliness of masquerade practice, and the physicality of the bodies inside the ensembles. Countering the history of Western museums displaying just the headpieces as abstract sculptures rather than full body suits worn by humans, the appearance of the bodies in New African Masquerades would impact viewer interpretation, and therefore their fabrication presented a variety of potential pitfalls.Specific poses were requested that standard retail mannequins could not provide. The ensembles weight and the five-venue schedule called for strength and durability. Shelly Uhlirs mounts for the NMAIs exhibition Circle of Danceprovided both conceptual inspiration and a specific product that became critical to the project: a click-adjustable aluminum hinge. These allowed the construction of strong supports without welding for asymmetrical, naturalistic poses, with the added benefit of being partially adjustable even during installationinvaluable with a curatorial team of nine.Because of the artists preference for realism, the exposed hands and feet were cast in epoxy and painted brown. The weighty history of museum displays of Black bodies has been previously discussed, notably by Stephenson and Gunsch, and the appropriate degree of realism as well as the color was carefully considered by the team.Also presented will be lessons learned while installing with the full curatorial team, all nine of whom are planned to be present at NOMA, and the practicalities and ethics of the removal of original material required by the artists to meet their standards of beauty in display.