The Art of African Art

Dr. Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi will serve as the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new African art collections curator.

Since completing his fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), Dr. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi has since served as the curator of African art at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art. Nzewi is also a practicing artist and was an independent curator in his home country of Nigeria.

Starting 8/1/2017, Nzewi will be serving as the new curator of the African art collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). He is the first black curator in the museum’s 101-year history and will be overseeing a collection of roughly 300 works of art from sub-Saharan Africa. The museum’s director, William Griswold, remarked that Nzewi “…is an exceptional curator with a remarkably creative approach.”

You can learn more about Nzewi and his future work with the CMA in a recent, online news article here.