“Moving Across the Threshold“: Alisa LaGamma on Curating the Arts of Africa

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Alisa LaGamma, a specialist of African art and Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she has been a curator for twenty-five years. Alisa discusses the formative influence of her childhood spent in the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, South Africa, and Italy, her abiding interest in Renaissance art, and how she landed in curatorial work. She reflects on several of her exhibition projects that have sought to anchor African art historically and conceptually and shares her thinking behind the Rockefeller Wing reinstallation that is currently underway at the Met.