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Art and Museum Review / Compte rendu d'exposition
At last the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has a permanent gallery for exhibiting African material culture. The Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific opened in April of 2008. It is housed in the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, which is the centrepiece of the "ROM Renaissance," an expansion project guided by architect Daniel Libeskind. A permanent African gallery was never established in the ROM's nearly 100-year history, despite the institution's status as a universal museum and the fact that it holds approximately 6,000-8,000 African objects, not including the significant Egyptian and Nubian archaeological collections. This absence was acutely felt by the public and museologists when a temporary exhibition called Into the Heart of Africa caused deep controversy at the ROM in 1989 and 1990. Indeed, while the new gallery can be assessed in terms of current trends in displaying Africa in other major museums, it must also be read as a specific response to the legacy of Into the Heart of Africa.
The new gallery includes about 400 objects, which are displayed in four large, deep cases (compare this to the Sainsbury African Galleries in the British Museum, which show about 600 objects in four rooms). The ROM's installation is framed by a notion of celebrating diversity, but the more subtle subtext is a plea for visitors to imagine the power and presence of aesthetic objects in everyday life in Africa, both historically and at the current moment. In this, the exhibit is gently reflexive, recognizing the alienating effects of museum conventions. But the exhibit is also authoritative, providing clear ethnographic information about material culture and creativity, visual power, architecture, spiritual life, everyday objects and community. Visitors will recognize some objects from Into the Heart of Africa, but gone is that exhibit's flawed attempt at representing voices of collectors and missionaries. Only one of the main labels (for an Igbo deity figure) refers to a collector. The labels are dense and small, so some visitors peer purposefully to read texts. The gallery does not create the sense of surprise and beauty that the new installation of dinosaurs does on a lower level of the Crystal. It does create a foundation - a...