Curator of the Arts of Global Africa - Purchase Collage

Post Date
2/22/2025

Expiration Date
4/1/2025

Details:
The Neuberger Museum of Art is seeking a Harris Molnar (Rank TBD) Curator of the Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora to work with traditional objects in the Museum’s collection, and to create contemporary projects that explore the broad ways in which Africa is being thought about today.

The history of this collection at the Neuberger extends back to the opening of the Museum in 1974 at Purchase College, SUNY. The collection totals approximately 350 objects. The capstone of our current work in the arts of Africa was NEU Conversations: African Art in American Museums, a fall 2024 two-day virtual convening in which speakers shared their work in moderated panels, offering models for how museums can address issues of what constitutes a traditional object, provenance and restitution, engage and collaborate with communities both locally and in Africa, reframe the institutional representation of African art, and bridge the historic past and the creative present.

The Neuberger seeks scholar who is engaged in these conversations and is familiar with the creation of the best practices guidance being generated by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. The successful candidate will be able to review the categorization and provenance of objects of the extant collection so that the Neuberger’s display and conceptualization of the arts of Africa is in keeping with the highest and most contemporary standards and methodologies.

The successful candidate will collaborate with source and descendant communities in their stewardship of the collection, with respect to the traditional arts as well as the contemporary program, to think historically in the present and to diversify and bring forth new narratives, particularly from Black communities. As an academic museum, the Neuberger is a space that supports consideration of the understanding, activation, and explication of the complex histories that can arise from work with arts of Africa and the legacy of Eurocentric colonialism and coloniality in museums.


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