The Théodore Monod Museum of African Art, Dakar

Created in 1936 and officially materialized in 1960, the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art has, like several other museum institutions, experienced a particular trajectory. An integral part of IFAN (the French Institute of Black Africa which became the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa), it was originally designed as an ethnographic museum dedicated to the arts and traditions of Black Africa. ‘West. Needless to say, this is a museum with a purely colonialist vision.  

The end of the 1950s saw the museum take a turn, that of prioritizing the aesthetic dimension of the objects. This vision was blurred a few decades later, when the museum was renamed the Théodore Monod Museum in 2007, named after the first director of IFAN. However, the current curator of the museum, Mr. El Hadji Malick Ndiaye specifies: “On the one hand, this name recognizes that it is the fruit of a colonial construction which, while claiming to be interested in African civilizations, denied their complexities: even when these cultures were glorified, they always remained exotic and confined to the antechamber of history. On the other hand, this name affirms that these collections are the breeding ground of a new vision, that of a modern museum. » The museum’s mission consists above all of preserving and promoting the cultural heritage of Senegal and of Africa as a whole. 

The institution includes two buildings of the same architecture, namely a combination of Sudanese and colonial style.   
 
In terms of collections, the museum has 10,000 pieces from around twenty African countries, mainly from black Africa. The reserve and exhibition areas are estimated at 600 m2 and 1400 m2 respectively.   
 

Examining the composition of the collections allows us to affirm that the collection of masks and statuettes predominates. This represents approximately 35% of all objects. The museum has a documentation center with a small library, a photo library, a space dedicated to archives and technical sheets for each work of art present in the reserves. In recent years, the museum has adopted a new orientation. It is a policy of openness towards the world of contemporary art with projects like that of “talking object” where visual artists are invited (in residence) to dialogue with the museum’s collections and, through their artistic practices, to create new works before returning them to the museum. This is an original approach with a view to renewing collections.

 In short, the Théodore Monot Museum of African Art is a pioneering institution which has also served as a driving force in the creation of several national museums in French-speaking West Africa. He is happy to see that those responsible, through perpetual questioning, are making it possible to reposition him in the direction of a certain dynamism. 

M.A.