UChicago center brings scholarship to the public through art of Betye Saar, Otolith Group and Art Institute’s ‘Project a Black Planet’.

Ten years ago, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society opened its doors on a bustling corner connecting the University of Chicago campus and the historic Hyde Park neighborhood. For the past decade, the Collegium has also positioned itself at a crucial crossroads of research—connecting scholars and practitioners, humanities, arts and sciences.

Since 2012, the Neubauer Collegium has funded nearly 140 collaborative research projects that address complex human problems like climate change and declining democracy. Driven by UChicago faculty, these projects aim to break down barriers between academic disciplines and form bridges between the university, artists, policymakers and the public.

“Our mission is to demonstrate how important qualitative or humanistic thinking is to solving the biggest problems that we face,” said Roman Family Director Tara Zahra, the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at UChicago.

This year, the Collegium is celebrating its ten-year milestone with a series of exhibitions and events, including several linked to the multi-year research project Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics and Politics. The research team collaborated as curators on a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and they are organizing a series of discussions and performances called ‘Panafrica Days’ to be held March 5-8 across Chicago.

The group also worked with the London-based Otolith Group on a project titled Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy, which included a mural commissioned for the Art Institute lobby and a film essay on view in the Collegium gallery during the Fall Quarter. Another Panafrica-themed exhibition, Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, opens Jan. 30 at the Neubauer Collegium.

A Black Planet

In 2021, UChicago political theorist Prof. Adom Getachew and a group of curators and art historians received funding from the Neubauer Collegium to address a question: How has the ongoing legacy of Pan-Africanism shaped Black politics and culture—specifically art production?

Pan-Africanism refers to connected political and cultural movements that arose at the start of the 20th century, with the aim of liberating and uniting people of African heritage worldwide.

The group traveled to countries in South America, Africa and Europe to conduct research and lead a series of site-specific conversations with artists, historians and curators. In Dakar, for example, the group discussed Négritude—an anticolonial, black empowerment philosophy developed by francophone intellectuals including Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

The group also spent time in archives and collections searching for materials that shed new light on Pan-Africanism.

Guided by their findings, the research group curated Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that pulls together 350 works from the past century including painting, photography, sculpture, video and ephemera documenting the movement’s history.

“We purposely used the term ‘planet,’” said Getachew of the exhibition’s title. “The hope is people think expansively about how this set of ideas and arguments are transforming on a planetary scale, and not on the scale of one community or one place.”

As a primarily text-based scholar, Getachew found that putting together an art exhibition was a “huge learning experience”—evolving her own scholarship in new ways. For example, a section of the exhibition focuses on interiors.

“Many people think of Pan-Africanism as people on the streets, occupying public space,” Getachew said. “One of the interesting things about the set of works we have in that room is to think about the self, the home, even the prison, as spaces in which individuals might articulate a kind of Pan-African vision.”

According to Getachew, the Collegium’s resources allow scholars to think differently about research outcomes. While traditional funding prioritizes academic books or articles, the experimental nature of the Collegium means a project could become a public exhibition, performance or symposium.

Getachew also says that the Collegium’s collaborative model, working closely with artists and practitioners, is “generative.” “It takes you out of your particular silo, your way of thinking and doing, and presses you to imagine the same thing from a different vantage point,” she said. “It makes me a better scholar.”

“Like an electric shock”

In 1974, the Los Angeles–based artist Betye Saar visited the Field Museum of Natural History during an art conference. Among the displays of objects from Oceania and Africa was a Bamum chieftain’s robe from Cameroon with tightly rolled balls of human hair sewn into it.

“It was so powerful, because not only was it a rough fabric and beautiful to look at, but it had a little bit of everybody on it,” Saar recalled in a 1990 interview. “For me, even in a glass display case, it was almost like an electrical shock that came through that display.”

Inspired, Saar began creating the work she’s best known for—assembling items found in flea markets and yard sales into mystical boxes that evoke tribal art and push against negative racial stereotypes. Her work was part of a growing movement among Black creators in the 1960s and ‘70s to center African aesthetics and culture.

For the first time, the robe, on loan from the Field Museum, will join Saar’s works in an exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium opening Jan. 30. Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar puts this pivotal moment in context with the artist’s early career as a costume designer and printmaker.

Saar, now 98, will also participate in Panafrica Days, a series of discussions and performances held March 5-8 across Chicago jointly organized by the Art Institute, the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University, Chicago Humanities and the Neubauer Collegium.

More collaborations with other public institutions are in store for the Collegium’s next decade, a future Zahra says is driven by the center’s guiding motto: “The solution is human.”

“There's a lot of focus on technology as a solution for big human problems, whether it's climate or AI,” Zahra said. “But I think humanistic thinking plays a critical role in helping us to think about the ethics and the consequences of these problems. We are keen to demonstrate that.”

This article was originally posted by UChicago News on January 22, 2025.