Fowler at Fifty

The Fowler Museum at UCLA will honor its 50^th anniversary with a suite of special exhibitions and programs from fall 2013–fall 2014. The exhibitions in the fall of 2013 will fill the Fowler's Getty Trust and Lucas Family galleries with nearly 1,000 objects from the Fowler’s vast, acclaimed, and diverse permanent collections. The installations will honor traditional cultures from South Africa, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Find out more at the Fowler website.

Snuff container  -  Zulu, South Africa  -  Late 19th century

Textile with crowned figures bearing staffs  -  Chancay or Rimac, Peru  -  12th century CE

Female figure  -  Nayarit, Mexico  -  100 BC–250 CE

Images and information courtesy of the Fowler Museum, UCLA

LACMA appoints curator to guide new African art program

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has named Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts Consulting Curator of African Art to help launch a program and establish a gallery dedicated to the arts of Africa. Dr. Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, and was Senior Curator of the Museum for African Art in New York from 1984–1994 and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Fowler Museum at UCLA from 1999-2008.

The goal of Dr. Roberts’s appointment is to bring greater visibility to African arts in Southern California while creating programmatic linkages between LACMA and UCLA. As LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan states, “We have looked forward to launching a program for African art for several years and the timing seems right. We are excited to work with Polly Nooter Roberts as we explore new ways of understanding and presenting the richness of African artistic expression.”

LACMA’s growing collection of African art is diverse in form, material, and purpose. Works include masks and figures of wood and ivory, metalwork, textiles, beaded crowns, stools, and body adornments. Notable in the collection are a bronze plaque depicting a seventeenth-century official of the Benin Kingdom; a boli figure from Mali; and a selection of works from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Courtesy of ArtDaily.org and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art