The 2024 commission of “Kimi Masquerade Ensemble” by Burkino Faso artist David Sanou is complemented by an immersive video of a masquerade ceremony, giving visitors a deeper understanding of the cultural context behind the piece.
Re-envisioned African Art installation offers deeper cultural insight and focus on provenance
By Lisa Homann, PhD
Art isn’t created in isolation — it is shaped by the time, place, and people who bring it to life. That is why art historians rely on provenance, or the history of an object’s ownership, to better understand its story. Who made it? Why? How did it travel from its place of origin to a museum display?
When it comes to African art, provenance often poses unique challenges. Many museums in the United States only have records about ownership of a work of art in Europe or North America but lack information about African ownership. Detailed African provenance is the exception rather than the rule. Many records are incomplete or based on speculation, creating ambiguity rather than understanding.
In curating The Mint Museum’s African Art galleries, the approach is intellectual honesty over authority. Without knowing the name of an individual artist, the term “Unrecorded Artist” is used rather than attributing a piece to an entire culture or region. If there’s uncertainty about a work’s origin, it is described by its style and words like “possibly” or “probably” to acknowledge the unknowns. Without clear answers about who made a piece, or when, where, and why it was created, the focus is put on the types of objects rather than specific ones in the galleries. This approach explores the broader cultural and social roles
the works played, recognizing their diverse styles, materials, and purposes.
Provenance spotlights
To highlight the varying levels of provenance information, “provenance spotlights” are now dispersed in each section throughout the galleries. These spotlights share what we do know about an object’s history. The spotlights range from no data for a figural sculpture before it was donated to The Mint Museum (the most common possibility) to one showing scraps of paper found with a ceremonial hunter’s shirt that bear the names of several individuals (see image on page 33), offering clues as to who may have previously owned the work.
One particularly exciting spotlight is a Kimi Masquerade Ensemble, commissioned specifically for the Mint in 2024. Artist David Sanou (and a bodymaker who requests anonymity) created the ensemble in Burkina Faso. Sanou chose the iconography and color palette of the entire ensemble and allowed me to document him carving the headpiece. It is a rare instance of an African work of art in an American museum with fully documented provenance.
My hope is that visitors will not only admire the imagination and virtuosity embodied by these works but also appreciate the honest approach to sharing what we know and what we don’t know about them as individual objects.
Lisa Homann, PhD, is an associate professor of art history at UNC Charlotte and the guest curator of the reinstallation of the African galleries at Mint Museum Randolph.