"Silenced Mbembe Muses"

Alisa LaGamma, Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, has been a curator at the Museum since 1996. In 2012, the Bard Graduate Center recognized her contribution to rethinking the history of sub-Saharan African art and culture with its Iris Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her 1995 Columbia University dissertation "The Art of the Punu Mukudj Masquerade: Portrait of an Equatorial Society" was based on a year of fieldwork in southern Gabon. Her exhibitions over the last two decades have addressed individual authorship, divination, genesis, duality, reliquaries, textile design, contemporary art, and portraiture.