Spend a Sunday afternoon learning the wonders of African Art! 

Jean Borgatti, Consulting Curator of Global Africa, First Peoples - North America and Oceania at the Fitchburg Art Museum, will delve in to a different aspect of African Art each month! This series of talks is meant as an introduction to African Art, its variety of forms, the depth of its history, and how it became an important player first in Western culture and continues to be important in a global world. A reading list will be available for anyone who wants to delve more deeply into any one topic. Jean Borgatti, our speaker, will invite participants to an online workspace where she will post additional images, articles, and links to videoclips for anyone interested.

For those interested in additional resources from the get-go, Jean suggests Christopher Spring’s African Art in Detail (2010), full of wonderful illustrations from the collections of the British Museum and a very accessible, readable text. Chris Spring served as a curator at the BM from 1987 until his retirement in 2018. Jean also suggests Suzanne Blier’s book The History of African Art (2023). Suzanne Blier is a distinguished scholar and professor of art history at Harvard University. This is a new textbook based on many years of research, writing and teaching. Both are available on Amazon and at FPL.

February 9 - Masquerade. A multi-media artform including a ‘head’ or mask, of many possible materials and a body costume presented in the context of movement and sound--not just that mask on the wall! Image: Ancestral masquerades, Iddo-Okpella, Etsako area, Edo State, Nigeria, 1973. Photograph by Jean Borgatti.

Upcoming talks:

March 9 - Anonymous Doesn't Live Here Anymore--African Artists Traditional and Modern

April 13 - Likeness and Beyond: Portraiture in Iconic African Art

May 3 (May 11 is Mother’s Day) - Shango to Shonibare: African Art in the Black Atlantic World--with a focus on the form, meaning and movement of the Thunder Deity Shango from Africa through the Diaspora (Cuba, Brazil, Haiti), and into the art of the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights movement in the United States

RECORDING NOTE: This program will be recorded. All registrants will receive the recording via email within 48 hours of the program.

Made possible by the Groton Public Library Endowment Trust and a gathering of public libraries throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including the Fitchburg Public Library.

Please register here!