Smithsonian’s New & Now Opens the Conversation About Collecting African Art
A new Smithsonian exhibition brings the choices behind collecting African art into public view.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is preparing to put its own collecting decisions on display. Announced October 22, “New & Now: A Decade Building the National Collection of African Art” opens November 6, inviting visitors to consider how a national collection grows and whose stories that growth makes visible.
According to the museum’s announcement, the exhibition draws on acquisitions made during the past decade. Featured artists include Adebunmi Gbadebo, Wangechi Mutu, Thania Petersen, Beya Gille Gacha, Damien Ajavon and Pamina Sebastião. Phoebe Boswell’s drawing “Notes on Lockdown: I Just Want To Be Touched Again” brings the experience of the pandemic into the selection.
The oldest work included is a wooden bowl made by King Lewanika, a nineteenth-century Lozi leader in what is now Zambia. Its inclusion offers a useful counterweight to any assumption that a show of recent acquisitions must consist only of recently made objects. An object can be new to a museum while carrying a much longer history.
That distinction gives the exhibition its strongest cultural question: what happens when the story of an artwork includes the decisions that brought it into a public institution? The acquisition date alone cannot answer that. A thoughtful display can place the artist’s purpose, the work’s original setting and its later movements alongside the museum’s interpretation.
The museum’s practice and policy page describes provenance research as an essential part of its mission. Provenance means tracing an object’s ownership history from its creation onward. For visitors, that research can change the experience of reading a label. Names, dates and gaps become part of understanding how an object reached the gallery, rather than administrative detail left out of sight.
There is an institutional backdrop to that approach. The Smithsonian adopted an ethical returns policy in 2022, allowing museums to consider shared stewardship and returns on ethical grounds. Its implementation is tailored to individual collections. A policy of this kind creates room to ask questions beyond whether an institution can legally retain an object.
The National Museum of African Art subsequently transferred ownership of 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments in October 2022. That action is historical context for the collecting conversation, not a claim that those works are part of “New & Now.”
For Cyclolore, the promise of this exhibition lies in making institutional choices easier to examine. Celebrating African creativity and asking careful questions about stewardship can reinforce each other. Visitors deserve to encounter named artists and specific histories, with enough information to distinguish a documented account from a general statement of good intentions.
A useful question for visitors is whether a label explains both what is known and what remains uncertain. Clear acknowledgment of missing information can be more informative than a seamless narrative that hides the limits of the record.
The official exhibition listing identifies the presentation as ongoing from November 6, with admission free and no passes required. This is a preview based on museum materials. The quality and completeness of the installation’s provenance interpretation will need to be assessed once it opens.
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