NEU Conversations: African Art in American Museums

Bios

Organizer / Event Moderator

PANEL 1 PROVENANCE RESEARCH AND RESTITUTION

• Laura De Becker joined the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2014 as the museum’s first-ever Helmut and Candis Stern Associate Curator of African Art. Many of the works De Becker overseas were donated from the Late Helmut Stern’s own collection of Central African art, widely viewed as one of the finest private collections in the world.
  
  
• Dr. Erica P. Jones is the Senior Curator of African Arts and Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Since joining the Fowler, she has curated many exhibitions including Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa (2019), and The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Nigeria and Beyond (2023) as co-curator. Jones is on the board of African Arts Journal and is co-chair of the Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects Working Group. Her publishing centers on colonial-era provenance and the arts of the Cameroon Grassfields.
  
  

PANEL 2 Engaging Communities

• Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba is currently the Curator of African Art at the VMFA. Raised in Benin City, Nigeria, where he initially trained as an artist, Ezeluomba received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of Florida, Gainesville. In 2017, he earned the University of Florida Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, Olokun Shrines: Their Functions in the Culture of the Benin Speaking People of Southern Nigeria. Ezeluomba graduated from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, completing his master’s thesis focused on the contemporary Nigerian sculptor Obi Ekwenchi. He received his bachelor’s degree in fine and applied arts from the University of Benin.
  
  Internationally recognized as one of the leading curators and scholars in his field, Ezeluomba has contributed to numerous publications including Black Art Quarterly; African Arts journal; Hyperallergic; Routledge Encyclopedia of African Studies; African Artists: From 1882 to Now (Phaidon) and Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism among others.
  
  
• Kristen Windmuller-Luna is the Curator of African Arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art. A first-generation college graduate from Yale University, she received her PhD in African Art and Architecture from Princeton University. She has previously held curatorial positions at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in addition to working as a museum educator and a university lecturer. Her first experience with African arts in American museums was as an intern at the Neuberger Museum of Art.
  
  Expansive and inclusive new ways of collaborating, collecting, and curating are central to her museum practice, as well as mentoring upcoming professionals. She serves on the boards of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and the journal African Arts. Her research on historical and contemporary African arts has been published and presented in African, American, and European outlets including Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics; African Arts; Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; and the Metropolitan Museum Journal. Recent exhibitions include “Threads Across Time: African Textiles, 500-1993” in Stories from Storage (2021) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and African Arts––Global Conversations (2020) and One: Egúngún (2019) at the Brooklyn Museum. Her next exhibition Africa & Byzantium considers links between northern and eastern Africa and the Byzantine Empire.
  
  
• Annissa Malvoisin received her Ph.D from the University of Toronto in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 2024, and earned a Master of Museum Studies from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto in 2016. She specializes in archaeological ceramic studies and researches the inter-regional relationships between Nile Valley sites and West African sites via Meroitic pottery and wider ancient trade industries. Her dissertation Through the Sahara, Across the Red Sea: Trade Networks of Meroitic Fineware and their Impact on Modern Museum Collections is a tripartite and interdisciplinary analysis that incorporates Egyptian archaeology and Nubian archaeology, West African archaeology (specifically of Nigeria, Mali, and Ghana) and Museum Studies in order to investigate object biographies through the archaeological record and how these biographies influence the understanding of objects in museum collections.
  
  Malvoisin is a curator and scholar of ancient African history with research interests in a globalized ancient world through the study of material culture and trade and from the perspective of African regions. Additionally, her scholarship contributes to understanding practical methods of rethinking outdated display paradigms that have settled into curatorial practice. In addition to the Brooklyn Museum, she has worked on the collections of Global Africa and Egypt and Nubia at the Royal Ontario Museum and as a ceramicist for the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition at Arizona State University. Her scholarship has been supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Curators, the American Society of Overseas Research, among others, in addition to publishing her research on archaeology and curatorial practice in forthcoming books, conference proceedings, exhibition catalogues, and journals (supported by Routledge, Archivaria, Sudan Studies, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others).

PANEL 3 Reframing African Art

• Perrin Lathrop, PhD, is the Assistant Curator of African Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. She was previously the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow at Fisk University Galleries and the University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art History. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in the Department of Art & Archaeology with a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies in 2021. Her research and teaching explore the interlocking intellectual histories and networks of nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and modernism that informed art produced under the strictures of colonialism in Africa. Perrin is co-curator of the traveling exhibition African Modernism in America with Fisk University Galleries and the American Federation of Arts. The exhibition publication, which Perrin edited, was awarded an Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award by the College Art Association in 2024.
  
  
• Dr. Andrea Myers Achi is trained as a Byzantinist, and her curatorial practice focuses on Byzantine art of the Mediterranean Basin and Northeast Africa. She graduated from Barnard College in 2007 with a BA in Ancient Studies. She thought she would become a Classics Professor but fell in love with Byzantine art and archaeology her senior year during a study abroad program on an excavation in Egypt. Dr. Achi went on to receive two Masters of Arts degrees from New York University, the first in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies with a concentration in archaeology and the second in Byzantine Art. In 2018, she earned a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
  
  Currently, Dr. Achi is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her role, she specializes in the art and archaeology of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, with a particular interest in illuminated manuscripts and ceramics. She has brought this expertise to bear on exhibitions like Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (2017), Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020), The Good Life (2021), Africa & Byzantium (2023), and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (2024) at The Met and in numerous presentations and publications.
  
  Her latest project, Afterlives, opened at The Met in January 2024.
  
  
• Ernestine White-Mifetu is the Sills Foundation Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Specializing in the Arts of the African continent, she has twenty years of experience working in the African arts and culture sector, with twelve years working exclusively in national African art museums in curatorial and directorial positions. Throughout her career, her exhibitions have focused on making visible the silenced and forgotten narratives of women of color, explored issues of dislocation and hybridity, perceptions of identity, and the interrogation of colonial narratives imposed on the black and brown body in the work of classical, modern and contemporary artists of and from the African continent. Her current project is reinstalling the African Art Galleries to open in 2026 at the Brooklyn Museum, where she will showcase diverse modes of creative expression from the African continent in conversation with its diasporas. A key focus will be to expand the regionality and temporality of narratives, lived realities, and works of art.
  
  

PANEL 4 Contemporary Artists in Dialogue with Collections

• Natasha Becker was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where she studied African history. She came to the United States in 2003 and participated in the art history graduate program at Binghamton University (New York) before heading to the Clark Art Institute (Massachusetts) where she specialized in contemporary African art and advanced academic programs in global art history. She trained as an independent curator, working closely with artists to develop exhibitions, advance a critical understanding of their work, and build relationships with collectors, galleries, and institutions. In 2018 she co-founded Assembly Room, a community space for curators, a platform for emerging artists, and a forum for educational collaborations in New York City. She has curated exhibitions for the International Video Art Festival (Massachusetts), Goodman Gallery (South Africa), International Print Center (New York), Osage Foundation (Hong Kong), Ford Foundation for Social Justice Art Gallery, among many more. She is the curator for the Arts of Africa at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco since December 2020 where she is focused on curating meaningful connections with the arts of Africa through the reinterpretation of the permanent collection, establishing a new program of contemporary African art, and collaborating on public programs that enriches visitor experiences. In 2022 she curated “Lhola Amira: Facing the Future,” a contemporary exhibition with artist Lhola Amira that explores ideas of cultural trauma, ancestor support, and gestures toward healing. She has taught courses on contemporary South African art, contributes to publications about contemporary African art, and regularly speaks on topics related to the arts of Africa.
  
  
• Paul R. Davis, Ph.D., is Curator of Collections at the Menil Collection and oversees the museum’s holdings of art from Africa, Pacific Islands, the Americas, the ancient world, medieval and early modern Europe. His academic research focuses on the visual cultures of West Africa between the 18th and 21st centuries. His research on Malian visual art has been published in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (2013) and the journal Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. He was a co-director for the Collections Analysis Collaborative (2015–2020) and coeditor the publication Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2021), which examined alternative models for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. His past exhibition projects include ReCollecting Dogon (February 3–July 9, 2017), Mapa Wiya: Your Map’s Not Needed (September 13, 2019–February 2, 2020), Art of the Cameroon Grassfields, A Living Heritage in Houston (February 17–July 9, 2023), as well as installations of permanent collection galleries for the reopening of the Menil in September 2018.
  
  
• Henone Girma is passionate about celebrating the dynamism and power of arts and cultures from Africa and its Diaspora. The Ethiopian-born curator and arts administrator is currently Associate Curator of Arts of Global Africa at The Newark Museum of Art, where she curated a year-long exhibition titled Adama Delphine Fawundu: In the Spirit of Àṣẹ since joining the Museum in 2022. Before joining NMOA, Girma oversaw programs at various New York City and surrounding area institutions, including The Africa Center, where she worked as Manager of Programs and co-organized the exhibition Ezra Wube: Project Junction.

This virtual convening is organized by Christa Clarke, an independent curator and consultant, for the Neuberger Museum of Art as part of the Museum’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Generous financial support for this event is provided by the Mellon Foundation and Dr. Susan R. Harris in honor of her late husband, Thomas Molnar, a collector of African art and a long-time docent at the Neuberger Museum of Art.