Panorama: Dahomey
After the screening, join us for a discussion with Victoria Reed, Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Sandro Capo-Chichi, specialist in the history and culture of the kingdom of Dahomey. Moderated by Christa Clarke, Director of Curatorial Strategy at the Williams College Museum of Art.
In 2021, 26 objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey leave Paris and are returned to present-day Benin. How should these art treasures, stolen from ancestors, be received in a country which has reinvented itself in their absence?
About Victoria Reed
Victoria Reed has been conducting provenance research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 2003. She is responsible for the research and documentation of the ownership history of the MFA’s encyclopedic collection. She has overseen the successful resolution of several ownership claims for the Museum, and has lectured and published extensively on provenance research, museum ethics, and restitution
About Sandro Capo-Chichi
Sandro Capo Chichi is a PhD candidate studying historical African arts with a focus on the Bight of Benin area in West Africa. He received his M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne in 2019. His dissertation there dealt with the 18th-19th century royal arts of the Kingdom of Dahomey and their intersection with national identity, imperialism and metaphysics. Sandro also received a PhD in Linguistics from the Université de Paris 7 in 2019 and hopes to use this field of research as a tool for a better understanding of African Art History.
About Christa Clarke
Christa Clarke recently joined the team at the Williams College Museum of Art as Director of Curatorial Strategy for their new museum, scheduled to open in 2027. From 2022 to 2024, she served as Senior Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a museum leadership program which she also participated in as a 2012 Fellow. Previously, Clarke was Senior Curator at the Newark Museum, where she instituted its Arts of Global Africa department in 2013 and led a major reinterpretation and reinstallation of its collection supported by the Mellon Foundation and the NEH. Since 2018, she has been a consultant to numerous museums, including the MFA Boston, the San Antonio Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and served as President of the Association of Art Museum Curators from 2017 to 2019.
