Museum Trains Heritage Workers

The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) is gradually bridging the knowledge and skills gap in Africa’s museums and heritage institutions since its opening in 2023.

Before its existence, West African museums and heritage institutions had struggled with limited technical infrastructure, climate pressures, ageing storage systems, vulnerable physical texts, and a shortage of trained personnel, which negatively impacted the preservation of art and cultural materials across the region.

With its opening, MOWAA has trained several professionals in the conservation of cultural materials, updated documentation, and storage systems, in line with global best practices.

This is achieved through the placement of conservators, collection managers, archaeologists, and registrars on internships, fellowships, and short courses at the museum’s conservation laboratories and research facilities. There, they observe treatments of cultural materials, participate in open lab sessions that make museum work more accessible, and are trained in stable environmental conditions for storage, as well as the digitisation of heritage contents/archives.

The result is the landmark exhibition ‘Nigerian Modernism’, which consists of 20 artworks from the National Gallery of Art of Nigeria, and private Nigerian collectors, at the prestigious Tate (Museum) London, early this year. MOWAA’s team of conservators stepped in to review and restore the artworks, readying them for the global stage. Thus, boosting their future value in the international art market.

Similarly, over two dozen archaeologists who have passed through the institution within the past two years have witnessed career boosts, going on to secure PhD placements, scholarships, and jobs in the heritage sector in Nigeria, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK).

With the network of the institution’s graduates embedded in several West African countries, like Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal, in Europe and the US, MOWAA is creating networks of practice that strengthen the entire institution from within.

And through its global partnerships with the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, UK, supported by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it is building lasting systems in conservation capacity, digitisation frameworks, archaeological documentation, and professional education.