Fowler Museum receives $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Grant
The grant supports the museum's 2018 exhibition, Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths
The Fowler Museum at UCLA has been awarded a major grant for the international traveling exhibition, Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths, scheduled to open at the Fowler in June 2018. Assembled from public and private collections, it will include over 225 artworks from across the African continent, focusing on the region south of the Sahara, and covering a time period spanning early archaeological evidence to the present day. It will be the most comprehensive treatment of the blacksmiths' art in Africa anywhere in the world.
Striking Iron reveals the history of invention and technical sophistication that led African blacksmiths to transform one of Earth’s most basic natural resources into objects of life-changing utility, empowerment, prestige, spiritual potency, and astonishing artistry. Nowhere else in the world is there a more diverse and sophisticated corpus of forged iron utilitarian forms and artistic expressions than in Africa.
In his award letter, George Lazopoulos, Senior Program Officer in the Division of Public Program wrote to Fowler Museum Director, Marla C. Berns: “With respect to your proposal, panelists appreciated the proposal’s treatment of Africa ‘as a place of invention and innovation, as a world leader, spearheading iron technology.’ All of this, the panelists declared, reflects ‘years of thought and care’ on the part of the co-curators and advisers. ‘I could go on and on’ exclaimed one panelist who felt the exhibition scored ‘high points for all of the NEH goals for advancement of humanities.’”
The curatorial team for Striking Iron is headed by MacArthur Fellow and Santa Fe-based artist and master blacksmith Tom Joyce, and includes Allen F. Roberts, UCLA Professor of World Arts and Cultures; Henry John Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; William J. Dewey, Associate Professor of African Art History at Pennsylvania State University; and Marla C. Berns, Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
To see the full list of NEH grantees, click here.