Construction that will soon be bringing further major changes to the first floor necessitated moving the African galleries from their current home. Faced with a big move, I jumped at the opportunity to put a new spin on one of our most beloved and important collections.

Three-Headed Figure (Sakimatwemtwe). Unidentified Lega artist, 19th century, South Kivu or Maniema province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, fiber, kaolin. Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.486

Consisting of over 200 objects in a wide variety of media and genres, including a significant number of works not previously on view, African Innovations aims to build on our groundbreaking history of collecting and exhibiting African art, while moving towards new methods of display and interpretation for the 21st century. The signature work , a three-headed figure (sakimatwemtwe) by an unidentified Lega artist, is emblematic of the theme—with one large head rooted in its own 19th century moment, its additional faces might be said to be looking both back toward the past, and ahead to the future.

African Innovations will arrange the museum’s African galleries chronologically for the first time, to emphasize the continent’s long record of creativity, adaptation, and artistic achievement.

My aim is to emphasize how African art was created to solve important artistic, social, political, and cosmological problems. In so doing, it is my hope that you will further appreciate the works on view as creative solutions with a long history of formal and functional change. I wanted to move away from a primarily geographic presentation that suggested a comparatively static ‘ethnographic present.’

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Instead, African Innovations will open and close with galleries focusing on “Crossroads Africa.” The first display, beginning in ancient times, establishes Africa’s ongoing history of artistic dialogue with other parts of the world and neighboring cultures, while the last extends this story into the present (and creates Brooklyn’s first dedicated space for contemporary African art). Highlights of the exhibition range from our Nok head, created as early as 550 _B.C.E. to Vessel, by Magdalene Odundo, from 1990. Intriguingly, both our earliest African work and one of our latest were both made from a coiling pottery technique—how’s that for continuity and innovation!?

Skipping Girl. Yinka Shonibare MBE (British, b. 1962). London, United Kingdom, 2009. Life-size fiberglass mannequin, Dutch-wax printed cotton, mixed media. Gift of Edward A. Bragaline and purchase gift of William K. Jacobs, Jr., by exchange and Mary Smith Dorward Fund, 2010.8. © Yinka Shinobare MBE

African Innovations also offers me the opportunity to showcase a number of new acquisitions, such as Skipping Girl, by Yinka Shonibare, whose form evokes the layers of historical connections between European, Asian and African cultures and reveals the constructed nature of “authenticity.”

I’ll leave the other new acquisitions as surprises for the opening in August. Watch this space later this month for further updates on new features in the installation and insights into the construction and design process.

Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play is a work that was made specifically for our period rooms. Last spring when Yinka Shonibare was in New York, he visited the Brooklyn Museum to meet with the relevant staff and also to take a look at the Blum and 4th floor Schapiro galleries, where his survey Yinka Shonibare MBE would be installed. While he was here, we gave him a tour of our period rooms, and he was immediately enchanted by them. Before the day was over, it was decided that he would create a site-specific work for a number of those rooms. Once he was back in London, we emailed him the floor plans for the period rooms along with documents about the history of each of the rooms. Yinka seemed taken not only with the way the rooms look—the furnishings, the maze-like layout of the houses, etc—but also with the historical context of the rooms.

Months later, we started to receive “work in progress” shots of the children-size mannequins. First the preliminary sketches, then the sculpted clay bodies of the mannequins, and finally a picture of the girl with jump rope. Then the mannequins were packed and crated in Yinka’s studio and sent by ship to arrive here in time for the installation. Even though they were produced in London and there were no opportunities to try them out in the respective rooms before their arrival, they all fit perfectly in their new temporary homes.

As Yinka has said about the placement of the children, “It’s like the children’s game, ‘Where’s Waldo?'” There are no individual labels pointing out the specific locations of the children; the idea is for our visitors to wander through the rooms and stumble upon them. Hopefully those who usually come to the Brooklyn Museum to see contemporary works will discover our wonderful period rooms through Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play. And, those who are already familiar with the period rooms will rediscover these rooms and see them in a different way.

Photos: Yinka Shonibare MBE installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play in the Brooklyn Museum period rooms.  From top to bottom installations in the Cane Acres Plantation House, John D. Rockefeller House Moorish Smoking Room, and Trippe House.