Meret Oppenheim, African art and restitution

Episode No. 546 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Natalie Dupêcher and Laura de Becker.  Along with Anne Umland and Nina Zimmer, Dupêcher is the co-curator of "Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition," a retrospective that spans the Swiss artists' 1930s work in Paris, her engagements with surrealism, and her broad post-war synthesis of nouveau réalisme, pop, abstraction and addresses of nature. The exhibition is at the Menil Collection, Houston, through September 18 before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It debuted at the Kunstmuseum Bern last fall. (The Kunstmuseum Bern created a "digitorial" for the exhibition.) "Oppenheim" is accompanied by a catalogue published by MoMA. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for $27-45. de Becker is the curator of "Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution" at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The exhibition takes a unique approach to an examination of eleven objects from the museum's African collection: instead of researching their provenances' relationship to the era of colonization in private, the museum is conducting its research into those objects publicly and in near-real time via a gallery exhibition. Both the exhibition and the website UMMA has launched for the project are models of transparency. de Becker is UMMA's curator for African art and interim chief curator. She is assisted in the project by Timnet Gedar, Bridget Grier, Caitlyn Webster and Ozi Uduma.