Event Information

West and Central African Arts, Colonialism, and Pablo Picasso

Cleveland Museum of Art
Start: January 7, 2025 12:00 pm
End: January 7, 2025 1:00 pm

Address:
11150 East Blvd.
Cleveland, OH – 44106-1797

Admission Price: Free

Speaker: Kristen Windmuller-Luna, Curator of African Art Come to the CMA for a quick bite of art history. Every first Tuesday of each month, join curators, conservators, scholars, and other museum staff for 30-minute talks on objects currently on display in the museum galleries. Pablo Picasso created his art within the social context of French colonialism and the so-called “discovery” of African arts by Paris-based European modernist artists. Though he and his peers mistakenly believed the works whose aesthetics they appropriated were “ancient,” they were most often contemporary with their own creations. What art historians have defined as European modernism overlaps with a peak period of European imperialism, requiring us to ask why certain African arts became available to European artists and how they related to them. What follows is a brief discussion of the connections between Pablo Picasso, colonialism, and the works of West and Central African artists. The talk concludes by highlighting several named African contemporaries of Picasso whose works are in the CMA collection.