All things African art: Philadelphia Museum of Art plans to build a home for diasporic works

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The Philadelphia Museum of Art has been a keystone of Philadelphian culture since its founding in 1876, making it one of the oldest public art museums in the United States. Now, the museum is looking to broaden Philadelphia’s art and historical culture scene by including a permanent center for African art.

PMoA’s goal for the newly-minted Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Arts is to provide an internationally renowned stage for art across African culture, which tends to fall to the wayside, according to the center’s recently-appointed curator, Imani Roach.

Roach has been a resident of Philadelphia since 2012 and has called the PMoA her home museum over the past decade. During her time in Philadelphia, she has been an educator at universities including the University of Pennsylvania and the now-closed University of the Arts before starting in research and curation of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

“My background is in education,” says Roach. “I was teaching at the university level before I started museum work and that was always the way that I shaped my curriculum.”

She wants to implement some of this knowledge of educating others into the center, making it interactive and collaborative.

“One of the impacts that I hope that the Brind Center will have specifically for young people is to create a greater sense of familiarity for them with the visual culture, the arts [and] the cultural history of the continent of Africa that I know is not available in a lot of school curricula,” says Roach.

The center will prioritize the study and care of African diasporic art. This is categorized as art made by African people who have dispersed all throughout the world. This allows the Brind Center to collaborate with other departments throughout the PMoA like The America’s department and its works that can be identified as African diasporic art as stated by Roach.

Some artifacts that museumgoers will be able to experience are beadwork hailing from western and southwestern Nigeria, as well as a mask from the same region.

Ira Brind, a Philadelphia Museum of Art Trustee, has donated his collection of African art to the museum for this center. Each piece from his collection has its own story and it took about 40 years to accumulate. The museum made him the namesake of the Center because of this contribution.

Brind has traveled the world to hunt down some of the pieces he now owns. One of the pieces that was collected by Brind is an approximately 250-year-old double ikat that was found in a person’s garage in Bali. An ikat is a textile where its threads were dyed and then woven, rather than the traditional practice of weaving and dying afterward.

Brind says that in conversation with both the museum’s CEO Sasha Suda and Chief Curator Carlos Basualdo, they all agreed that “what this center should be is not just travel artifacts… but really to be art of the diaspora: fine art, modern art, contemporary art. It’s going to try and be fairly broad-based.”

According to Brind, the museum is looking to have an opening exhibition in Spring of 2025, with regular exhibits to come two years later.