“The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Peggy Guggenheim challenged boundaries as a patron and collector and is celebrated for her groundbreaking European and American modern art collection. This exhibition focuses on a lesser-known, but crucial episode in Guggenheim’s collecting: her turn in the 1950s and ’60s to works created by artists in Africa, Oceania, and the indigenous Americas.
Migrating Objects represents a remarkable occasion to view 35 rarely seen non-Western artworks Guggenheim collected, shown at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as a cohesive whole for the first time. This exhibition presents Guggenheim’s African, Oceanic, and indigenous Americas objects in groupings privileging their original contexts or, alternately, in dialogue with European works from her collection by avant-garde artists who appropriated ideas from cultures beyond Europe’s borders. These opposing approaches enable an exploration of the flawed narratives that Western culture imposed on objects of this kind.” — Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Installation views of Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. February 15–June 14, 2020. Photo Matteo De Fina © Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was curated by Christa Clarke, R. Tripp Evans, Ellen McBreen, and Fanny Wonu Veys, with Vivien Greene.
Title image: Two-faced helmet mask (wanyugo), probably mid-20th century. Unrecorded Senufo artist, Côte d’Ivoire. Wood, 44 x 71 x 33 cm. Photo © manusardi.it
Images courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
*PLEASE NOTE: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is temporarily closed to the public.