How Libraries Pave the Way for Future Scholars of African Art

When Robert Farris Thompson earned his PhD in 1965, he became only the second professor in the United States to specialize in African art. When Susan Mullin Vogel started her career as a curator of African art the following year, it was at what was then called the Museum of Primitive Art.

Needless to say, the field of African art has come a long way since then. Once relegated to the purview of anthropology as objects of culture—and not as art in their own right—works from the continent were long sidelined in American museums. There’s a deep irony to this blind spot, as African art served as one of the biggest inspirations for the European avant-garde modernist movements that dominated much of the 20th century (which were lauded as “new”). And racial segregation in the United States, which wasn’t struck down until 1964, continued to perpetuate notions of “primitivism” and the idea of African inferiority to white European culture.

But with the generation of scholars who came of age around the Civil Rights Movement, things started to change. If no one is studying a culture, then that means no one knows about it, and thus no one is able to appreciate or understand it. Trailblazing scholars like Thompson, Vogel, and others carved out a field within academia, learned languages like Kikongo and Yoruba, and spent decades teaching, mentoring, writing, curating, and advocating for African art to have a seat at the art history table. They did this so that African creativity, in all its vast diversity across centuries, regions, and peoples, could be held up in the same way as European art.

Stewarding the Future

Fast forward to today, and with the retirement of this first wave of scholars comes the question of what will happen to their personal libraries—specialized collections that were built out because they didn’t yet exist elsewhere, registering their owners’ commitment to developing the discipline, and representing a lifetime of expertise. It’s hard for some to imagine what research was like before you could simply Google something and be fairly confident that it’s digitized somewhere. But what if the only written source on a topic is a French exhibition catalogue with a limited run? Or a 19th-century book that’s long out of print? The value of these records is not just their coverage of a subject area; it’s that they aggregate rare, multilingual, and often one-of-a-kind ephemera to help the next wave of researchers carry the field forward.

Any of these collections would be valuable in and of themselves, yet the Getty Research Institute has amassed four. In addition to those of Thompson and Vogel, the Research Institute owns the library of Doran Ross, a specialist of Ghanaian art and former director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA. There is also the Whitney and Lee Kaplan collection, which focuses on visual culture of the Black diaspora in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With the 2,000 books from Thompson’s library—focused on Nigeria and musical exchanges across the Black Atlantic (a foundational concept he named)—and Vogel’s archive—documenting her expertise in Francophone West Africa as well as her subsequent career as a filmmaker—you have materials on African art the likes of which are usually only found at Ivy League universities. They are currently being processed and, once available, all will be part of the Research Institute’s general collections and can be checked out by anyone who registers to become a Getty Library reader.

The hope is that those who use the Research Institute, whose mission is to advance the study of art and its histories, will utilize these resources to produce new knowledge that furthers appreciation and understanding of African art. One recent example is a Getty publication on African masks by Columbia professor Z. S. Strother, which centers emotional affects and uncanniness as modes of interpretation for these works, rather than Western metaphors for masking as obscuring “a hidden truth.”

In a 2018 interview, Vogel stated: “I think I’ve always wanted students and museum visitors to connect with African art on a basic human level—to be aware of the individuals who made and used and lived with these things in their lives, and to recognize that we all share the desires and concerns and needs that they were made to satisfy, despite what looked like enormous differences. And of course to see African art as a normal part of art history.”

Thanks to the legacy left by her archive, we are closer to that goal.