Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
MIGRATING OBJECTS
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
February 15, 2020 — June 14, 2020
Peggy Guggenheim challenged boundaries as a patron and collector and is celebrated for her groundbreaking European and American modern art collection. Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection focuses on a lesser-known, but crucial episode in Guggenheim’s collecting: her turn in the 1950s and ’60s to works created by artists in Africa, Oceania, and the indigenous Americas.
Migrating Objects represents a remarkable occasion to view 35 rarely seen non-Western artworks Guggenheim collected, shown at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as a cohesive whole for the first time. This exhibition presents Guggenheim’s African, Oceanic, and indigenous Americas objects in groupings privileging their original contexts or, alternately, in dialogue with European works from her collection by avant-garde artists who appropriated ideas from cultures beyond Europe’s borders. These opposing modes of display enable an exploration of the flawed narratives that Western culture imposed on objects of this kind.
Migrating Objects emerges from an extended period of research and discussion on this largely ignored area of Guggenheim’s collection by a Curatorial Advisory Committee of experts, which has led to exciting findings, including the reattribution of individual works, among them the Nigerian headdress (Ago Egungun) produced by the workshop of Oniyide Adugbologe (ca. 1875–1949), which is on view in the exhibition.
The exhibition’s Curatorial Advisory Committee comprises Christa Clarke, Independent Curator and Scholar, Arts of Global Africa, and Affiliate, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; R. Tripp Evans, Professor, History of Art, Wheaton College, Mass.; Ellen McBreen, Associate Professor, History of Art, Wheaton College, Mass.; and Fanny Wonu Veys, Curator, Oceania, National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands; with Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, who edited the exhibition catalogue.
Watch the trailer of Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
An American expatriate like Peggy Guggenheim, Man Ray arrived in Europe in 1921 soon establishing himself as the unofficial photographer of the elite and artistic crowds of Paris. It was thus fitting that he was to record Peggy, on several occasions.
This print belongs to a photo session for the Swedish weekly Bonniers Veckotidnig, for an article on influential foreigners living in Paris.
This photograph has become symbolic of Peggy’s graceful youth and social standing. She is wearing a cloth-of-gold evening dress by Paul Poiret and a headdress by Vera Stravinsky.