Project Development March 2003

Benin Art Exhibit, British Museum ©Thomas Dowson, 2003

The School of Art history and Archaeology at Manchester University currently offers undergraduate Art history students a wide range of optional courses at Levels 2 and 3 which include Western art historical and archaeology topics which cover non-European regions. However, interest in the arts of ancient societies amongst Art history students has been low. To raise the profile, Thomas Dowson (who has been teaching two courses on Prehistoric Art at levels 2 and 3) requested GLAADH funds to create a new course and improve the resources available in the department. His project forms part of a wider departmental strategy which aims to broaden the range of topics available to students and encompass research topics that go beyond traditional areas within the western tradition. For this purpose the Department recently hired a specialist in Islamic Art.

Since submitting his first proposal it has become clear to Dowson that consideration needed to be directed at introducing students to non-Western art traditions at a much earlier level than was currently available, which would help students to overcome their reticence about taking subjects that appear to be 'alien', 'foreign' or 'other'. Therefore the first stage of the project, which took place during the Autumn term 2002, involved adding a series of lectures on non-Western art (collectively called Globalising Art and Architecture) to the Introduction to Art History course, a requirement for all Level 1 students. This consists of 6 lectures encompassing Indian art, Maori art, Islamic art, pre-historic art, South and West African art, a lecture on Colonisation and Landscape and another on issues of Post Colonialism.

The aim is to familiarise students with the debates surrounding the study and interpretation of non-European visual cultures. Until recently these issues were introduced during Levels 2 and 3, but by switching to Level 1, it is hoped that it will generate interest at an earlier stage and trigger a demand for the specialist optional courses in non-Western traditions currently on offer. Although the take up at level 2 and 3 is as yet unestimable, student feedback has so far been very positive.

As part of the GLAADH Initiative, Dowson will also write a syllabus for a new level 3 course titled African Art. This course will build on and develop the introductory sessions of level 1 by focusing on the sociopolitcs of African art and its representation; including collecting, display and transit of African objects, in particular those originated in the Benin region in Western Africa. Students will use objects from the African collections at the Manchester Museum to be displayed in the new Ethnographic Galleries that will open to the public during the summer 2003, and have access to letters in the museum's archives, in order to track the 'cultural biographies' of objects, and the processes by which they come into a museum's acquisition.

The Museum has been very supportive of the initiative, but Dowson recognises that the student's experience will be limited to working with objects that are on permanent display. However, once the Museum is open students will be able to experiment and engage with new forms of display in the new small temporary display area. Dowson, with the assistance of a PhD student, has also been assembling an archive of images of private and public collections of African objects throughout the UK, which include museum displays and presentations. This visual resource will be stored electronically and will be available to students and staff for reference and analysis. The resource will allow students to consider questions relating to collecting policies and exhibiting strategies and how these have changed historically as well as the ways in which museum collections construct peoples' attitudes to 'other' cultures and societies. A set of books and visual resources will also be purchased for the library to improve the existing resources. However, contemporary Art History books still tend to deal with African art in stereotypical ways and a critical awareness of this will be highlighted within the teaching.

Dowson is also in the process of thinking about innovative ways of assessing the course. One possibility might be to set students the task of organising a temporary exhibition, focusing on the socio-politics of object acquisition, in which the group as a whole will be given a grade rather than individually allocated marks. Logbooks may form part of the course work as well as the production of the exhibition. This is currently under consideration.

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