Migrating Objects: at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the exhibition on the non-Western objects of the famous American collector

From February 15 to June 14, Migrating Objects opens in Venice. Art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, an exhibition that highlights a lesser-known but decidedly significant episode in Peggy Guggenheim’s collecting: during the 1950s and 1960s, the celebrated collector crossed the borders ofEurope and the United States to exploreAfrica,Oceania and the indigenous cultures of the Americas, taking an interest in the art of these diverse locations.

The exhibition displays 35 non-Western works for the first time at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni revealing a core of the patron’s collection rarely seen by the general public. An absolutely unprecedented aspect of this original exhibition will be the presentation of these objects in groups that privilege their original contexts or, alternatively, in dialogue with some masterpieces of the European avant-garde in the collection of artists who supported the development of their own modernist language through the appropriation of these works. These include the headdress mask from Nigeria (Ago Egungun) created in the atelier of Oniyide Adugbologe (c. 1875 - 1949), which is one of the most distinctive pieces in the exhibition.

The purpose of the exhibition is to contextualize Peggy Guggenheim’s approach within the much broader and more problematic framework of the Western tradition that favors placing Western and non-Western modern artworks side by side on the basis of formal and conceptual affinities. Choosing to employ these two different methods allows us to consider how works, whose original meanings and purposes are often misunderstood, are placed in studios, galleries, museums, and homes, with often contradictory purposes. Tracing the trajectories of these objects is an act that reveals the entanglements formed between colonization, annexation, migration and reinterpretation along with the history of individuals, known or unrecognized.

The exhibition is curated by a scholarly committee that includes: Christa Clarke, independent curator and scholar of the arts of Africa and affiliated with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; R. Tripp Evans, Professor of Art History and Co-Chair, Department of Visual Art and Art History, Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; Ellen McBreen, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Visual Art and Art History, Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; Fanny Wonu Veys, Curator, Oceania, National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam, Berg en Dal, Leiden and Rotterdam, with Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Guggenheim Museum, who also edited the exhibition catalog.

For all information you can visit www.guggenheim-venice.it.

Migrating Objects: at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the exhibition on the non-Western objects of the famous American collector

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