Nearly 40 African objects from the George Washington University art collection are on view this semester in the “Unfossilizing African Art” exhibition in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery. Students in various classes taught by Clement Akpang, assistant professor of art history and theory, researched the objects and wrote the catalog for the exhibit, which was developed over four semesters.
The Brady Art Gallery is on the first floor of the Flagg Building in the Corcoran School of Art and Design, part of GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. It is overseen by Olivia Kohler-Maga, who worked closely on the exhibit with Akpang and his students.
The African objects are displayed in the gallery’s first two rooms; in the third, another exhibit, “Cracks & Reforms,” features artworks from the 1920s. That exhibition was created by students in the art history class The 1920s: Curating the Collection, taught last spring by Bibiana Obler, associate professor.
Together, the exhibits have created rich opportunities for interdisciplinary learning. Participating students came from various majors, including art history, museum studies, studio art, anthropology, interior architecture and history. The catalogue for the exhibition was created in collaboration by Akpang, Kohler-Maga, the students and Michelle Mazzuchi, a professional designer.
“Unfossilizing African Art” is unusual in that one of the central goals of the project was to recontextualize each object on view while respecting the cultures and intentions of their makers.
“We wanted to avoid the mistakes that we’ve seen in a lot of museums, where you see an object, but you don’t understand what that object is,” Akpang said. “The context is not there. I came up with four seminars across two years, and each student picked one object at the beginning of the semester and researched that object all through the semester. In most cases, we were able to find out a lot of information about the objects.”
The project received support from GW at all levels, Akpang said, with time, resources and space in the Flagg Building for use as a research laboratory for the objects unstintingly given by Professor Lauren Onkey, then the Corcoran School’s director. The students’ first task was to identify the origins of each object.
“That was tricky,” Akpang said, “because many of the objects in the collection had a lot of cultural misattribution. For example, you might see an object that was documented as supposedly coming from Ghana. By the time the student finished the research, we learned it actually came from Cameroon.”
The likely origin of the confusion, Akpang added, stems from when the objects were sold to their original donor—but there were plenty of other questions to answer. After sorting out an object’s origins, it was important to determine what it was used for.
“If you’re exhibiting the object, you want to provide some level of contextual information,” Akpang said, “to understand what the object was, why it was created, what it was made for, who used it.”
This can lead to further complications if it is discovered that an object was not meant to be seen by outsiders. For example, an object may have been intended only for use in ritual contexts, or for people of only one sex to view or handle. It would not be ethical to display such objects to the public.
In keeping with the key concern of the exhibition to retrieve and provide context for each item on display, visitors will see not only the objects themselves, but text and images, either in photographs or a video that situate them in their original Indigenous milieu.
“When African material culture is displayed without context, it is frozen in time—framed as if it’s in the past. It's as if the cultures that created them are extinct or no longer exist. That is the concept called fossilizing cultural heritage,” Akpang said.
“By bringing objects out of the basement and trying to return some of their context, we are doing unfossilizing. A lot of these objects are not aesthetic objects; they’re tangible heritage or material culture. If you exhibit them without showing the context of their creation and use, turning them into aesthetic objects, that’s a wrong perception to perpetuate among viewers. But it’s a common problem among museums.”
It’s easy to understand how this happens, Akpang said, since many museums have thousands of objects in their possession, with few or no qualified people to study them.
“I'm a huge advocate of directing students to conduct this kind of research, because it helps museums,” Akpang said. “It helps uncover certain information about tangible heritage that curators wouldn’t have the time or resources to find.”
Two of his students have published their research from the exhibit in peer-reviewed journals. One of them, Ana Echemendia, M.A. ’25, published an article, “Divergent Connections,” based on the research she did in class with Akpang, in Arts, an international, peer-reviewed journal. She studied two unique wooden posts that, although carved from a single piece of wood each, combined elements from different cultures. The top part is a house post, used to support architecture or just to lean against a house for its symbolic value. The bottom part is an object used in connection with burial. She traced them back to woodcarvers in what is now Côte d’Ivoire, in the middle of an area that was occupied by people from various cultures.
“The carvers who served all of these communities were creating objects for ceremonial purposes and also for the commercial market,” Echemendia said. “They would experiment.”
Another of Akpang’s students, Deirdre Lafferty, M.A. ’25, published her paper, “Smoke Shrouded,” in the journal Arts in 2025. A third student, Sandra Claire Koretz, has a forthcoming paper in Art Antiquity and Law.
Akpang is planning to host established scholars at a symposium on December 3 to discuss how to rethink the canon of African art. Last summer, he took four students to present papers at the University of Iowa during the annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG).
Students researched objects in the exhibition using a methodology developed by Akpang called Heritage Context Retrieval Analysis, or HeCRA. It breaks working with artifacts into stages beginning with formal analysis, or looking at objects carefully and taking note of their features, followed by questions prompted by the markers and features identified on the object.
Next comes comparative analysis, comparing the item at hand with other, similar objects. Students sent photographs of their objects to the Brussels-based African Heritage Documentation and Research Centre (AHDRC), a nonprofit that maintains a database describing hundreds of thousands of objects. The database finds objects similar to those submitted by researchers and identifies where they come from. Students then reached out to curators and scholars of African art in the U.S., Europe and Africa to cross-check the information received from the database. They also did reverse image searches on Google.
In the next stage, contextual analysis, researchers ask what the object was used for. Questions about its provenance followed, among them: Who donated the object? Where was the object collected? The next phase, ethical intervention, involves deciding if it is ethical to exhibit the object. If so, how?
Elizabeth Bailey, a second-year grad student in the art history program, said her work on the exhibition helped heighten her awareness of her intentions and biases.
“Not every object can fit neatly into a Western conception of art or into a framework that you’re familiar with,” Bailey said. “I came from an institution that didn’t have African arts, so in this class I was basically learning everything from scratch and building up from there.”
Emma Saunders, M.A. ’26, echoed Bailey’s remarks. Beyond researching objects and writing about them, students worked in one of three teams: programming, curation or cataloging. Saunders signed up to work on the cataloging team, which seemed like a natural fit given her concentration in collections management.
“This was my first foray into African art and exploring the different ways that it can be displayed to unfossilize or recontextualize it with information from its original culture,” Saunders said, “and the ways that we as museum professionals can change the ways that we think about and display these objects.”
Julia Welp, a third-year Ph.D. student in history, said working on the exhibit taught her the importance of using due diligence in research.
“Museums love to present themselves as authorities and keepers of all knowledge,” Welp said, “but if you’re working on a museum collection, especially African or Indigenous objects, you should do as much research as you possibly can and be honest about what you do and don’t know.”
Temiloluwa Osunjimi, currently in her second year of work on her M.A. degree in art history, brought traditional Yoruba knowledge to her work on the exhibit. She worked primarily on the Ose Shango, or Shango wand, a traditional medical tool still used today. Shango is the deity of lightning, fertility and storms. A woman uses the wand, a handheld object made of African satinwood, in an effort to guarantee her fertility.
“In Shango’s story, it says that he hanged himself from an African satinwood tree. So people of his religious cult make their items out of that wood,” Osunjimi said. “We’re showing that these aren’t just items from a deceased culture. People still actively use them.”
Osunjimi, a former middle school art teacher, enjoyed seeing how her classmates learned about African cultural objects.
“As somebody who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area going to the African museum and seeing her own culture almost like in a laboratory, it was really good to see a change of perspective in my peers,” Osunjimi said. “This felt more progressive. In a lot of Western museums, you’ll see each object in a case. It’s not like you can actually come up close and see it.”
The Brady Art Gallery is open to the public from 1–5 p.m. Wednesday–Saturday. Students will provide public tours every Friday and Saturday at 1 p.m. and will make brief presentations about their research in a public symposium on Nov. 19. For more information, click here.
