Paper short abstract:

This paper utilizes a Fowler Museum exhibition to discuss how community engagement can reshape the way collections are displayed and understood. It will also address a more expansive definition of collections care that promotes museum object use by local practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

From October 29th, 2023 to June 2024, the Fowler Museum presents The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond. Bringing together historical and contemporary objects from West Africa and the Americas, the exhibition illustrates the historical legacy as well as the changing and expanding global relevance of Yoruba religion. Utilizing the Fowler’s well-known collection of Yoruba arts, the curatorial team wanted to find a new, dynamic way to engage with it. For this reason, Fowler staff established an advisory team including practitioners, academics, and artists devoted to Yoruba and Yoruba-inspired faiths. Drawing on their religious training, scholarly research, and lived experience, the collective aided curators to select objects, determine exhibition layout, design display furniture, and provided gallery text descriptions for selected artworks. Attempting to create a new model for inclusive collections care and as part of our engagement with practitioners, the Fowler Museum invited three babalawos to utilize museum collection objects for divination and demonstration. These pieces are the center of one section of the exhibition. This approach to collection object use powerfully recognizes how engaging with African, Diaspora, and local communities reveals a plethora of potential futures for museum objects. As concepts of ethical care have begun to shift in light of recent debates about the restitution of arts to Africa, this paper will serve to provide a case study of a single exhibition that is seeking to find a new way to display a museum’s objects with a focus on physical and spiritual care.