 Humans have been telling stories through objects since the beginning of time. The museums have been collecting objects to tell stories that help amplify a culture or a tradition within the museum setting. We learn so much about a people by looking at objects. Our goal with this current phase of African innovations is to use this moment of dislocation to look at familiar objects in new and unexpected ways. The previous iteration of African innovations attempted to tell a chronological story, narrating a linear history of African creativity through time. This temporary and experimental installation attempts to take the opposite approach to instead find stories that connect objects across sometimes vast distances of time and space. This pair of objects tells an interesting story about art making. On the left, we have a work by Madalina Dundó, a British artist of Kenyan descent from 1990 entitled Vessel. On the right, a male head from the Knot culture of central Nigeria, an archaeological work that may date as early as 550 BCE. If we push beyond the surface, we find that there is in fact a very interesting story that connects these two works. Both are made from the same basic material, fired clay or terracotta, and made actually from a very similar coiling pottery technique. In addition to the works in double take, you can see an even larger selection of African objects in the storage in its next door. However, the Brooklyn Museum is the custodian of over 6,000 African objects. Our goal is then to present an even larger selection of this collection in our next installation to come. In this exhibition, the curator is putting together pairings and groupings of objects so that we can take a closer look and come up with a new understanding of what these objects might mean when they're side by side. We're really excited to have this opportunity to invite you to make some selections from some of the objects that are not in the cases, but in storage, and choose from these objects pairings or groupings that we can place in the last case at the end of the show. We're very interested in the connections that you'll make and in the choices that you'll make that you want to share with other people who are coming through this exhibition of African art.