Breelyn Webb

Abington Art Appreciation, the African Students and Latinx Students organizations came together to hold the virtual event, Race and Power: Revisiting Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit.

Guest speakers Alayo Akinkugbe and Abeyami Ortega were invited to engage viewers in conversation and presentations on the topic of race and power in art through Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, (1992-1994).

An excerpt from a reading was used to inform viewers about the piece. Couple in The Cage was a series of performance art pieces where Fusco and Gomez Pena presented themselves as “undiscovered Amerindians” from an island in the Gulf of Mexico in a cage outside of cultural institutions with xenophobic and colonialization history as described by Paige Shalits.

The piece was originally intended to be a satirical commentary, but spectators believed it was real. The conversation began around the question of what implications would the work encounter today if it were to be displayed outside of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Abeyami Ortega, described as a media scholar whose research intersects visual culture, social justice, critical race in gender studies, thanked organizers for the opportunity for a “collective reflection.” She explained themes seen in the piece and presented thought-provoking questions to think through as a group about the sense of “otherness,” and applied the piece to today, referencing detainment camps/cages and other social injustice across the globe.

Alayo Akinkugbe, an undergraduate student studying Art History at the University of Cambridge and founder of A Black History of Art, an Instagram account that aims to highlight and uplift black artists to encourage an inclusive approach to art history, began discussing what she referred to as the “human zoo” and how ethnographic objects are shown in museums.

Introducing the artist, Victor Ehikhamenor, she explained, traced how objects were acquired and the looting of objects in an Instagram post, essentially “mapping this idea of colonialism as a startup.” Walking viewers through his post, she explains the post about the sale of two sculptures allegedly in the same collection as other pieces that were looted during the Nigerian Civil War and earlier during British colonial rule.

She stated, “to link it to the idea of the human zoo, with human zoos we saw the commodifying of the actual bodies of humans and today we see the commodification of objects some of which had functional rather than artistic purposes which were looted in that way bodies were taken for human zoos and presented and sold to western collectors as this kind of exciting artistic artifact with complete disregard for the sentimental value of the objects for the people who are part of the cultures from which they originate.”

She also stated that these imperialist/colonialist ideas still prevail today at the British Museum, bringing up the case of people in Nigeria, where she is from, asking for the objects back, and that museum saying no

She offered her ideas on how to un-do the “colonial gaze” starting with education, citing her Instagram as her means of dealing with frustration surrounding the lack of black artists discussed during her history of art degree. The account started as a means of self-education, to avoid a “Eurocentric approach to art” with her degree, and has now garnered nearly 50 thousand followers.

Both speakers opened the floor for questions and further discussion on the piece as well as other issues.