BROOKLYN, NY.- Double Take: African Innovations, an experimental installation of selections from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned African collection, invites new ways of looking at African art. Built around fifteen pairs of objects, the exhibition focuses on artistic themes, solutions, and techniques recurring throughout African his- tory that link seemingly dissimilar works. It will open October 29 in a temporary location while an extensive renovation of the first floor of the Brooklyn Museum is under way. The installation will also include some 150 selections from the Museum’s extensive African collection, one of the oldest and largest in an American art museum, in an open-storage display.

Double Take, the second phase in the Brooklyn Museum’s ongoing expansion of its African collection, continues and builds upon African Innovations, the critically acclaimed historical presentation that closed in late September, by exploring further connections between African artworks.

This installation of nearly forty objects will feature a number of major recent acquisitions. Looking Back Into the Future (2008), a work by internationally recognized Ghanaian artist Owusu-Ankomah, whose paintings depict a spiritual world inhabited by people and symbols, will be paired with an ancient hieroglyph-inscribed shabti of the Nubian king Senkamanisken (r. circa 643–623 B.C.E.) to explore the art of writing as a funda- mental embodiment of human expression in Africa over the course of many centuries.

Also recently acquired, and on view at the Brooklyn Museum for the first time, is Fiegnon (2011), by Beninois artist Romuald Hazoumé. Like many of his most celebrated works, this piece is built around a discarded oilcan. Fashioned to look like a man’s head, it marks the first acquisition by a public collection in New York City of a work by this sculptor, installation artist, and photographer. It is paired with the twelfth-century terracotta masterpiece, Fragment of a Head, by an unidentified Yoruba artist from Ife, Nigeria, to highlight continuities and innovations in African portraiture.

Other themes represented in the installation include performance, the body, power, design, trauma, satire, and virtue, among others. Visitors will be invited to recommend additional themes for paired works to be displayed in a special case. Visitor suggestions and questions will also help to inform the next, larger presentation of the Museum’s African collection.

Double Take: African Innovations has been organized by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of African Art.