Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo
is participant at
A New Geography of Art in the Making
Abstract
Coming Out Of the Dead: Revisioning An African Museum – Example Of Lagos Museum
After over five decades of a seeming stubbornness to change and move with the times, the National Museum in Lagos, a little over a year ago, began a process of transformation into an institution that is working in tandem with the changing tastes and cultures of a modern society. The new move was facilitated by the intervention of the current Program Officer for the Arts and Media of the Ford Foundation, Mrs. Margie Reese, who had suddenly shown interest in the affairs of the Museum. She had gone ahead to design programs that could help capacity development, as well as physical reconditioning of the Museum which, with its over 40,000 collections of mostly masks and wooden treasures from not only Nigeria but across other ethnic groups in Africa, is regarded as the preeminent Museum in Sub-Sahara Africa. At the centre of the rejuvenation is an attempt to make the Museum reconnect to the society in which it operates. It is expected that after its repositioning, The Lagos Museum will motivate changes in the other 34 Museums in the 150 million-people Nigerian nation, as well as inspire serious public and private investment to rejuvenate the various museums scattered across Africa, which are currently suffering from abject neglect by the various governments on the continent. Prior to this time, the Lagos Museum like most of its counterparts in other parts of the world, had been sitting aloof, detached from its immediate surrounding and the society, even though it is located in the very heart of the Lagos business district. The elite and middle class people who operate their various businesses and who reside in its vicinity, had indeed perceived the museum as a place for ‘dead art’—with no bearing whatsoever to their own lifestyle or vocation. In the current move, the business elites, young professionals, students and other varied segments of the society, are targets in the radical program content that is being designed. Besides, Lagos being a cosmopolitan society, with communities of peoples from other nations of the world, it is being mapped in such a way that the programmes of the Museum will cater for interests of the divergent communities. For instance, there is a huge community of Asians, Europeans, Africans and others; and the new program design is to accommodate the interests of these varied cultures, i.e. through exchange of cultural and contemporary artifacts and artworks. The overall objective is to gradually make the museum reconnect to society. A second plank of the restructuring of the museum is to make it more accommodating of the features of contemporary art—a significant movement which had always been kept away from the doors outside of the commercially driven renting of its facility for exhibitions of paintings and sculptures of the works of artists. In my presentation, I seek to share with the conference the current re-visioning process at the Lagos Museum, which, as I have mentioned, is regarded as the preeminent Museum facility in sub-Saharan Africa because of its huge collections of artifacts from the varied countries in the region. I also wish , through the paper, to explore the relationship between museum as an institution and society at large as a way of projecting how the relationship could be mutually beneficial. Underscoring the presentation will be a reflection on how museums can move away from the traditional cloak of being a ‘storage’ or repository of ancient treasures and age-worn artifacts to being a place of the living arts and contemporary living cultures.
