African Art and the 'Virtual' Museum

Benjamin C. Ray, Religious Studies

1995 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~bcr/rela345.html

Mr. Benjamin Ray is planning to use the World Wide Web to bring images of African art to students in a new 300-level undergraduate course. In creating a digital environment for his class, his special focus is the development of innovative research projects for the students. Each student in Mr. Ray's class will create an electronic exhibition of African art. This active learning environment will enable students to become teachers themselves, sharing the results of their work with other students and teachers in the University and around the world. The exhibits will be accessible through a Web browser, complete with images, descriptive labels, and, later, music and video components. In the traditional arts-related curriculum, research projects on cultural themes are limited by the text-based medium of paper, while museum exhibitions highlight objects but relegate text to a minimal descriptive and informational role. Students involved in curating real-life exhibitions are also restricted by the excruciatingly slow pace of gathering materials, seeking permissions, and mounting the objects. Often an individual student's sole contribution is the writing of a few wall labels or catalogue entries. The World Wide Web opens up entirely new curatorial possibilities, offering the complete integration of still and moving images, text, and sound. Each student in Mr. Ray's class will be able to choose an exhibition theme, assemble a collection of images, and create an entire virtual show, displaying the possibilities of the new medium for a different kind of in-depth cultural analysis. Through the creation of their own richly layered visual and textual documents, students will enter the exciting new world of publishing on the World Wide Web, making their work and the subject of African art accessible to the wider world.This is the only course on African art currently offered at the University and Mr. Ray expects it to attract students University-wide, including from the disciplines of Art History, Religious Studies, Afro-American and African Studies, and Anthropology. The project's large data base of images will also provide a valuable research tool for the Carter G. Woodson Institute's Fellowship program. The data base of African objects that Mr. Ray is developing for this course will come from a variety of sources. The primary source is the Fowler Museum of Cultural Studies in Los Angeles, whose images are available to the University through our participation in the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project. Other important sources of material are the collections of African art at the University's Bayly Museum and the Hampton University Museum.Mr. Ray has already mounted three exhibitions on African art at the Bayly Museum. Using images from the Bayly's collection, undergraduates will be able to choose the option of assisting Mr. Ray in designing new themes and in creating attractive, computer-based interactive learning guides for Bayly's exhibitions. These guides might also be made available to the public schools.