These nations are among those that benefited most from the systemic, centuries-long extraction of African life, labor, and natural resources. The dispersal of African art shown above can be best understood as the final hand of a card deck which has undergone several intense reshuffles.

The first iteration of the card deck is an influx of African art into the European art market beginning in the 18th century. As white imperialists began the systemic extraction of natural and material resources from African communities, wealthy European collectors reassessed the value of looted African art. Correspondingly, European leaders supported the reinvention of the natural science museum as a public institution as a way to show off how their citizens could be enlightened with expanded access to ethnography, obtained behind the scenes via the organized plundering of African nations. In this way, the mission of the European museum institution fused early with that of colonial expansion.

The deck is reshuffled in the late 19th century with a series of bilateral agreements between European powers that formalize a pecking order surrounding the invasion, occupation, and extraction of resources from African land. American and European leaders, invested in expanding their countries’ industrial power, strategically equated great public works like museums with a state’s aptitude for colonial violence. With museum institutions well-established as repositories to display the material reach of the imperial state, leaders like King Leopold II propagandized the language of natural science and philanthropy to attract investors to fund the systemic plundering of African communities. New institutions like the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), Colonial Museum (now Musée du Quai Branly, France), and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City joined the British Museum in generating massive amounts of capital off of looted African art.

The final reshuffle happens with the repossession of African art holdings by Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and then the subsequent seizure of African art by European museums as postwar reparations in 1945. The wide dispersal of German capital in reparations after World War II included both Germany’s significant museum collections of African art as well as African art taken from occupied countries by Nazi Germany during the war. This relocated a significant amount of African art into the postwar repositories of Allied European countries and increased the holdings of Allied nations that had not experienced Nazi occupation, like England and Switzerland. England and Switzerland also came out of World War II experiencing rapid economic growth; their ability to rebuild infrastructure after the war may be a reason why (other than the United States) England and Switzerland have the most museums currently holding African art.

Today, the United States has emerged as the country with the most museums (23!) that hold significant collections of historic African art in the global North. The reasons are numerous: certainly, the United States didn’t lose any of its art holdings to Nazi Germany under occupation during World War II; additionally, the United States’ postwar emergence as a late colonial superpower rumbled the art market in the global North, motivating European collectors to sell their African art to museums in the United States.

However, this analysis doesn’t appropriately address the complex diasporic history of African art makers, consumers, collectors, and curators in the United States, nor does it incorporate the ways in which museum collections are sites of power for African and African-descended communities around the world. There are academics, museum professionals, and community stakeholders who have written and are writing brilliantly about these rich narratives: I’ll link some of their work in my “Sources” endnote.

Why Canada, Israel, and Australia aren’t Outliers

Canada’s two museums and Israel and Australia’s one each aren’t outliers; rather, they fit my predictions for this dataset perfectly. This is because the common factor behind which countries hold African art is which countries have historically hoarded colonial wealth, and Canada, Israel, and Australia are all settler-colonial states. The fact that these nations are not located in Europe does not make them less part of the global North; rather, it highlights how the global North is not defined by binary location but rather by a set of structural requirements that advance imperialism.*

*This is a gigantic claim and if I add more to this blog I will back it up. For now, see Hollington, Tappe, Salverda, and Schwarz,  Concepts of the Global South (2015).

When Visualizing this Story, Color Matters

Without accurate collection metadata (as I struggled with in my Tableau lab), this vis is really limited in the narratives it can tell. I had to depend a lot on color for meaning, so I was playing around with two color palettes when I noticed that my vis was telling a very different story based on which I was using. When I colored the data points by country, I visualized a narrative of international hierarchy— which country had the most museums with African art holdings, which I’d set out to find. On the other hand, when I colored the museum location data points by institution name, I saw a narrative on the dispersal of cultural resources within an individual country, able to pick out clear regional distinctions and notice trends.