In hopes of bolstering the Krannert Art Museum’s educational relationship with the University, the museum acquired new art pieces this year that offer a spectrum of interdisciplinary perspectives for professors and departments to take advantage of.
A team of four curators considers how every acquisition will complement KAM’s collection and aspirations. With the help of other University departments like the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, curators selected the museum’s most recent additions, which could be used as research and educational tools.
“One of the things (the curators and I) talked about was how we can develop more curriculum, introduce more interdisciplinary curriculum that really draws on the arts in a very robust and real way,” said Allyson Purpura, senior curator at KAM. “It’s about selecting works that, in an art-historical sense, in a sociopolitical sense, can be used in a very prismatic way.”
According to Purpura, “Personnage” by Wilfredo Lam, a Cuban surrealist artist who aimed to portray the Afro-Cuban community and spirituality through his works, is one such exhibit that emphasizes these motivations.
“(Wilfredo Lam) became introduced to Pablo Picasso and became very much involved in the surrealist and avant-garde movement,” said Purpura. “When he finally went back to Cuba, he found that a lot of the paintings of the Afro-Cuban community by white artists were very lyrical and fanciful when, in reality, these were folks who were being profoundly ravaged by colonialism and by racism.”
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Enraged by this contradiction, Lam created pieces that he believed represented the Afro-Cuban people’s authentic experiences. “Personnage” is the culmination of these portrayals, a series of surrealist illustrations that honor the Orisha and Santeria religious practices of the Afro-Cuban people.
On Feb. 20 next year, the first of many educational initiatives spurred on by the new exhibits will be held, centered around “Personnage.” Regarded as the number-one Lam scholar, Lowery Stokes Sims, independent curator and art historian, will be visiting KAM to give a public lecture on the piece and Lam’s work as a whole.
Another sculpture, “Untitled” by Nick Cave, took the teamwork of KAM staff, University faculty members and graduate students to settle on the decision of acquisition. The sculpture houses a racist caricature of a black man as a part of its centerpiece, a feature that curators like Purpura scrutinized heavily on whether it was the right fit for KAM.
“Is this going to be something that’s going to be hurtful? Is it going to cause harm, is it going to, you know, cause some kind of trauma to people?” said Purpura. “It took an entire semester just to meet with people and talk. And, of course, we just knew it was the right thing to do.”
Last year, two University faculty, professor M. Cynthia Oliver in the Department of Dance and KAM curator Amy L. Powell, formulated the new Chancellor for Arts Integration at Illinois to encourage the synthesis of campus life, education and fine arts. With their help, KAM and its resources could be better integrated into University syllabi from the ground up, according to Purpura.
“With Lam, you can talk about Pan-Africanism. You could talk about Afro-Cuban religions. You can talk about global emancipatory politics. Same (prismaticism) for Nick Cave,” said Purpura. “We would love to see them in syllabi, but that’s that’s the dream; (to be) in conversation with our collection, in conversation with our community”
