Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art
1133 East Seventh Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7509
1133 East Seventh Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7509
Allison Martino joined the museum as Raymond and Laura Wielgus Curator of the Art of Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous Art of the Americas in 2020. She oversees a collection of approximately 4,400 works of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (North and Central America, the Caribbean, and Latin America). Martino is also Affiliate Faculty in Indiana University’s African Studies Program and an Associate Editor of Africa Today, published by Indiana University Press. Previously, Martino was a Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), where she co-curated with faculty and students two exhibitions on African arts; she also curated Masks of Memories: Art, Ceremony, and Collecting in Nineteenth-Century Oceania, which is scheduled to open in 2022. Martino served as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. Her teaching background includes courses in African art and visual culture as well as global textiles and fashion that she taught at Bowdoin College, Arizona State University, and the University of Michigan. Martino curated Unrecorded: Reimagining Artist Identities in Africa (2018) during an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. She also curated Youth, Dancing, and Joy: Photographs by Malick Sidibé (2010) at the Eskenazi Museum of Art. Martino’s research interests include textiles and fashion, photography, and contemporary arts in Africa. She recently published an article in Textile History about the circulation of factory-printed cloths with adinkra motifs that was awarded the Pasold Research Fund’s Pasold Prize for best article published in Textile History in 2020. Fellowships and grants from Fulbright-Hays, American Council of Learned Societies, and the University of Michigan have supported Martino’s research on adinkra cloth in Ghana, England, and the Netherlands. She earned her PhD in the history of art at the University of Michigan, MA in the history of art at Indiana University, and BA in studio art at Denison University.
