Eye on Africa Series: African Art in America, Provenance Research, and Restitution

Presented by Cory Gundlach, Ph.D. in collaboration with CSU’s Africa Center

Lory Student Center, Room 386 (in-person and via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95426988704), Monday, February 24 at 4 p.m.

Please also join us on Sunday, February 23 at 3 p.m. for a Critic & Artist Residency Series talk by Dr. Gundlach!

In a restitution ceremony at the Oba’s Palace in Benin City, Nigeria, on July 15th, 2024, the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art became the first in North America to return an object from its permanent collection directly to the Oba of Benin.

In this presentation, Dr. Cory Gundlach, Curator of African Art at the Stanley Museum and Director of African Studies at the University of Iowa, will discuss his work leading up to the historic event, how and why this restitution took place, and what it means for the future of the Stanley Museum and other museums in America. To do this, Gundlach will also explore differences between the restitution and repatriation of African art in an international context, as well as the factors involved for museums that engage with each approach.

It has been roughly six years since Felwine Sarr’s call for a “new relational ethics” among French museums. This presentation considers the importance of this call for American museums, and how the ethical value of provenance research might complement the value of art historical, object-oriented research for African collections.

Free & open to all!

This is a hybrid program, available in person at the Lory Student Center and via Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/95426988704.

Attendees are also invited to attend the Critic & Artist Residency Series with Dr. Gundlach on Sunday, February 23 at 3 p.m. in Gregory Allicar Museum of Art’s Robert W. Hoffert Learning Center.

ABOUT CORY GUNDLACH, Ph.D.

Curator of African Art, UI Stanley Museum of Art

In 1998, Gundlach began his museum career at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California. From 2004 to 2010, he worked in public art administration and museum exhibition design in Fort Collins, Colorado. He enrolled in Iowa’s graduate program in African art history in 2010 and completed field research on Lobi-style figure sculpture in southwest Burkina Faso in 2011 and 2012, and later researched contemporary art in Senegal and Ghana.

Gundlach began work as a curatorial research assistant at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art in 2012 and was appointed full-time as curator of African art in 2015. He defended his dissertation on Lobi art history in 2019. In 2021, he organized and moderated a three-part, multidisciplinary symposium on African art with nine international scholars. In 2022, he curated five exhibitions of African art for the inaugural installation at the Stanley Museum of Art. His student-curated exhibition, Alternate Paths: New Histories of Art from African to America, is the result of his spring 2024 class, “Curating African Art in America,” and is the Stanley Museum’s first traveling exhibition. Since 2019, Gundlach has taught multiple courses in African art history and museum studies.

In 2023, he and museum director Lauren Lessing received a $400,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support two-years of provenance research on the museum’s African collection. This Mellon grant also provided support for the Stanley Museum’s restitution project. In 2024, Gundlach and Mellon Curatorial Fellow Peju Layiwola returned two objects directly to the Oba of Benin, thus marking the Stanley as the first museum to do so in North America.

Gundlach holds a B.A. in fine art from Cal Poly Humboldt, a B.A. in art history from CSU Fort Collins, and a Ph.D. in African art history from Iowa. He was appointed Director of Iowa’s African Studies Program in 2024.

SUPPORT

Ongoing support for the museum’s exhibitions and programming is generously provided by the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund and the FUNd Endowment at CSU

Fort Fund