Insistent Presence: Introduction

Chazen Director Amy Gilman sets up Season 2 of Meet Me at the Chazen, which focuses on Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection.

Meet Me at the Chazen is a podcast about the the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, the largest collecting museum in the Big Ten. As we report what’s happening here, we'll also explore what it means to be an art museum at a public university and how art museums can help enrich and strengthen the communities they serve. Meet Me at the Chazen theme and incidental music is “Swinging at the Pluto Lounge,” composed and performed by Marvin Tate and friends, and is used with permission of the artists.

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Transcript

Gianofer Fields  00:04
Meet Me at the Chazen. I'm your host, Gianofer Fields. Welcome to Season Two. The focus for this semester is on a new exhibition entitled Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art in the Chazen Collection. Director Amy Gilman shares her hopes for how the audience will respond to the exhibit.

Amy Gilman  00:26
Part of my interest in this, and I, I hope, and I really believe that part of the interest of the donors, was helping everyone understand that Africa is not a single entity. It is not fixed in time. It has vital communities who have very wide ranging histories and traditions. And there are contemporary artists living in all of these spaces, or who were born there and live elsewhere now, who are sometimes, sort of appropriating some of the looks of the, in quote, "African art," or those traditions specifically, but really talking about them, as you know, in contemporary practice. So not trying to replicate certain things, but really trying to understand our world, which is one of the things that contemporary artists are particularly brilliant at, actually taking our world and reflecting it back to us in ways that help us think about it differently.