A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
by
Examining Committee Members:
ABSTRACT
“Materializing Blackness: The Politics and Production of African Diasporic
Heritage” examines how intellectual and civic histories collide with the larger trends in the arts and culture sector and the local political economy to produce exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) and structure the work that museum exhibitions do to produce race visually for various audiences. Black museums are engaged in the social construction of race through their exhibitions and programs: selecting historical facts, objects and practices, and designating them as heritage for and to their audiences. In tracking this work, I am interested in 1) the assemblages of exhibits that are produced, as a function of 2) the internal logics of the producing institutions and 3) larger forces that structure the field as a whole.
Looking at exhibits that engage Blackness, I examine how heritage institutions use art and artifacts to visually produce race, how their audiences consume it, and how the industry itself is produced as a viable consumptive market.
Undergirded by the ways anthropologists of race and ethnicity have been explored and historicized race as a social construction I focus on an instantiation of the ways race is constructed in real time in the museum. This project engages deeply with inquiries about the social construction of race and Blackness, such as: how is Blackness rendered coherent by the art and artifacts in exhibitions? How are these visual displays of race a function of the museums that produce them and political economy of the field of arts and culture? Attending to the visual,
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intellectual, and political economic histories of networks of exhibiting institutions and based on ethnographic fieldwork in and on museums and other exhibiting institutions, this dissertation contextualizes and traces the production and circulation of the art and artifacts that produce the exhibitions and the museum itself as a way to provide a contemporary concrete answer. Overall “Materializing
Blackness” makes the case for history and political economy as ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are as important to the visual work as a result. Further it takes the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement as a way to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city.
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For my mother, Donna Ventress, with love
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation and the research it relied on was aided by so many people who deserve recognition. First I want to thank my doctoral thesis committee, Dr.
Jayasinhji Jhala, Dr. Sydney White and Dr. Judith Goode for their service and guidance on and beyond this project. To Judy especially, I am grateful for so many years of training and feedback on this marathon of an endeavor, and glad to cross this finish line with you. Thank you to Dr. Monique Scott, who supplied enthusiastic responses and deep provocations on this dissertation as an external committee member. I look forward to continuing this conversation. To Dr. L. Christie Rockwell,
I appreciate your commitment to ending this process efficiently, and Yvonne Davis, your years of support and kindness make all the difference in smoothing out the rough, complicated parts.
The Graduate School provided education and research support, through the
Future Faculty Fellowship, as well as FSRI and SROP-AGEP summer research grants.
Cynthia Harmon Williams and Dr. Zebulon Kendrick in particular deserve thanks for crucial institutional support at its early stages. I have also been blessed to have been instructed by brilliant scholars, especially Dr. Jessica Winegar, Dr. Naomi
Schiller, and Dr. Lewis Gordon, whose rigor pushed me to read closer and grapple with texts in unprecedented ways. I could not have gotten through the later stages of this work without the support of Lorraine Savage and the Writing Center, and Dr.
John DiMino and the community of writers he brought together at Tuttleman.
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I am immensely grateful to Dr. John L. Jackson Jr. and Dr. Deborah A. Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania, for the kind of generosity, guidance and engagement that sets and changes intellectual trajectories. You model the best of what can be done in the academy and your impact on my development as a scholar cannot be overstated. As towering lighthouses in the field you also attract and shape a number of people I have been lucky to spend time reading and thinking with, including Wifredo Gomez, Ryan Jobson, Keon McGuire, Khwezi Mkhize and some of the best conference panelists to anthro with: Diana Burnett, Krystal Smalls and
Savannah Shange. Your care and brilliance have sustained me in important and immeasurable ways.
Sincerest thanks are due to Institute of Museum and Library Sciences and to
Leslie Guy, for creating a pipeline for junior scholars into museum work. Your vision, expertise and encouragement made it possible for nerds like me, J. Finley,
Nicole Ivy and Jimmy Kirby to find the kind of institutional environment that could feel something like a home. To you and so many others who have worked at and with the African American Museum in Philadelphia, but especially Stephanie
Cunningham, Dejáy B. Duckett, Gillian Golson, Ivan Henderson, Deborah Johnson,
Jeannette Morton, Cassandra Murray, Safa Robinson, and Adrienne Whaley, it has been a joy and a privilege to learn from and work with you. To Noah Smalls, every conversation with you is a lesson in theory and practice, I’ve learned more from you than you know. James Claiborne, you are Black magic and I hope we never stop dreaming up projects together. Richard Watson, it has been a blessing to see up vii
close why your perspective, work ethic and approach to art and life have made you beloved to so many. And to Dr. Helen Shannon, I remain in awe of your brilliance, your care for good museum practice and your ethical commitment to students and practitioners in the field. Rest in power, you are sincerely missed.
Thank you to the organizers of the Berlin Roundtables at the WZB, who provided me with my first opportunity to think about the work of museums and tourism with a group of scholars working all over the world. It also put me in community with Sarah Conrad Gothie, Elena Shih, Karma Frierson, who have been amazing thinking partners and conference buddies ever since. I look forward to gesturing wildly with you in the spaces of overlap among current and future projects. I have also been professionally and personally enriched by scholars Juli
Grigsby and Christina Knight, whose sharp intellect and critical engagement are satisfying and sustaining. Kelli Morgan, you are a miracle and it is so exciting to watch you mark your mark on these institutions.
To my sister scholars and magical thinkers: Biany Perez, Corinne Castro,
Diane Garbow, Laura Porterfield, Sahar Sadeghi , Jeana Morrison, Lacinda Benjamin,
Shari Gilmore, Teri Tilman, Karissa Patberg and Sally Gould-Taylor. As women who infuse your work with care, hold me and each other up and, in so many cases, show me how to PhD, your support has sustained me in so many necessary ways. It has meant everything to me to have all this time swapping books, notes and edits, arguing theory, exchanging side-eyes across grad seminars, sharing food, drinks, tears, fears, and laughing with you. You are how I got over. Sylvea Hollis and Nicole viii
Ivy, your insights and care in the late stage of this project have been a necessary affirmation, and I am grateful for them and so many more things. Thank you for being willing to talk through issues great and small, at all hours. Nicole, your perspective as a scholar of so many overlapping fields has been invaluable, and your loving critiques a useful push. Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidante.
To my anthrowives Diane Garbow and Savannah Shange: That I could spend years reading, writing, editing, conferencing, dancing, crying and finishing with you and your beautiful minds is an act of divination. Thank you for being better thinking partners than I ever knew enough to wish for. Diane, I am lucky to have had you as a blueprint and teammate since day one. Following your steps kept me from getting lost more times than I can count. Savannah, bless you for helping me see how to cut a new path every time I ran out of track. I am more grateful for your friendship, intellect, feedback, and love than I have words to express.
All my love to Lauren Webb and Griffin Webb: to the question of when I would be done, we finally have an answer. And to mom, who always encourages me to do the things I need to do, no matter how confusing the reason, the challenging the task or how long the flight is. And to Marco Hill, whose support and love is deep and unwavering, I thank you for being my partner on this long, arduous journey. We made it!
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………vi
LIST OF FIGURES OR ILLUSTRATIONS…………..………………………………………………………………...x
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION: MATERIALIZING BLACKNESS………………………………………………………….1
2. COLLECTING AND ARCHIVING BLACKNESS: AN EARLY HISTORY OF BLACK ARCHIVAL
PRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….30
3. WHERE AND HOW TO SEE: A HISTORY OF EXHIBITING BLACKNESS………………………...46
4. PUBLIC MEMORIES, INSTITUTIONAL NARRATIVES AND THE CRAFTING OF A
HERITAGE INSTITUTION………………………………………………………………………………………………76
5. SEEING LIKE A FUNDER: HOW ARTS AND CULTLURE FINANCING PRODUCES THE
MUSEUM…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….113
6. EXHIBITING SLAVERY……………………………………………………………………………………………154
7. BLACK WORK, WHITE GAZE: BLACK CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN BLACK SPACE…….194
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..207
APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..218 LIST OF FIGURES OR ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
1. Figure 1: “Come See About Me”, Gallery 3 at AAMP, January 2013. Photograph by author ………………………………………………………………………………………….………………..….26
2. Figure 2: “As We See It: Works from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of
African American Art” on view in Gallery 4 at AAMP, William Artis sculpture in foreground, March 2015. Photo by Marco Hill……………………………………………………126
3. Figure 3: “Michael (Head of a Boy)” by William E. Artis on view at AAMP, March
2015. Photo by Marco Hill………………………………………………………………...………………126
4. Figure 4: Electronic invitation to VIP opening reception for “Come See About Me,”
January 2013………………………………………………………………………………………….……..…146
5. Figure 5: Photo of William Mills, PNC Bank regional president, Ramona Riscoe
Benson, President & CEO of The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Jerry
Blavat, radio disc jockey, Mary Wilson, of The Supremes, and Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia at media event for “Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes
Collection.” (October 10, 2012, WENN Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)………………………..152
6. Figure 6: Broadside collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (Portfolio 282-43 [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, LC-USZ62-44000]; http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98504459/….....158
7. Figure 7: “Remarks on the slave trade,” extracted from the American museum, for
May, 1789. and published by order of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the
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Abolition of Slavery, courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia: http://www.lcpimages.org/afro-americana/F32.htm ...... 159
8. Figure 8: “Passage” (2009) by Stephen Hayes on view at AAMP, photo by author……………………………………………………………………………………….……………………..167
9. Figure 9: “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...168
10. Figure 10: Detail of “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author………………………………………………………………………………………………………....168
11. Figure 11: Detail of sail on “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author…………………………………………………………………….…………………………169
12. Figure 12: “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..170
13. Figure 13: “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author……………………………………………………………………...………………………………………171
14. Figure 14: “E Pluribus Unum” (2010) by Stephen Hayes, installation view at
AAMP, photo by author…………………………………………………………………………………….172
15. Figure 15: “Gluttony” (2010) by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author………………………………………………………………………………………………………....173
16. Figure 16: Coffle chain and branding iron, on view at AAMP (loan from the Lest
We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery), photo by author………...…………….176
17. Figure 17: “Cash Crop” and “E Pluribus Unum” by Stephen Hayes, on view at
AAMP, photo by author…………………………………………………………………………….………178 xi
18. Figure 18: Detail view of “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author………………………………………………………………………………………...……………….180
19. Figure 19: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, courtesy of the
National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press
Kit……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………182
20. Figure 20: Portrait of Isaac Granger, courtesy of the National Constitution
Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit…………………...... 182
21. Figure 21: Thomas Jefferson portrait and digital projection of the Declaration of
Independence in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the
National Constitution Center, December 2014, photo by author…………………..……..183
22. Figure 22: Isaac Granger portrait and digital projection of “The Farm Book” in
“Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the National
Constitution Center, December 2014, photo by author………………………………...…….183
23. Figure 23: Text panel on view in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the National Constitution Center, photo by author……………………...... 184
24: Figure 24: Thomas Jefferson’s personal items, on view at the National
Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at
Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit……………………………………………………185
25. Figure 25: Thomas Jefferson’s personal items, on view at the National
Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at
Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit…………………………………………...……….185
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26. Figure 26: Topographic map of Monticello on view at the National Constitution
Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The
Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit………………………………………………………………...... ………..186
27. Figure 27: Statue of Thomas Jefferson on view at the National Constitution
Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The
Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit…………………………………………………………………………….187
28. Figure 28: Section of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” on the Gillette Family, on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution
Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit…………...…………..188
29. Figure 29: Section of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” on “After Monticello” on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution
Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit……………………….189
30. Figure 30: “Black Quasar in Capricorn”, 2016, photograph by Shawn Theodore.
Courtesy of Shawn Theodore……………………………………………………………………………198
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: MATERIALIZING BLACKNESS
This dissertation research examines the ways intellectual and civic histories collide with the larger trends in the arts and culture sector and the local political economy to produce exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia
(AAMP) and structure the work that museum exhibitions do to produce race visually for various audiences. In general, Black museums are engaged in the social construction of race through their exhibitions and programs: selecting historical facts, objects and practices, and designating them as heritage for and to their audiences. In tracking this work, I am interested in 1) the assemblages of exhibits that are produced as well as 2) the internal logics of the producing institutions and
3) larger forces that structure the field as a whole. Looking at exhibits that engage
Blackness, I examine how heritage institutions use art and artifacts to visually produce race, how their audiences consume it, and how the industry itself is produced as a viable consumptive market.
Anthropologists have long argued that, as products of nation-building projects, racial categories are particular to time and place and influenced by labor and material resources (Baker 1998; Brodkin 2000; Williams 1989). Undergirded by the ways anthropologists of race and ethnicity have explored and historicized race as a social construction I focus on an instantiation of the ways in which race is constructed in real time in the museum. This project engages deeply with inquiries about the social construction of race and Blackness, such as: how is Blackness rendered coherent by the art and artifacts in exhibitions? How are these visual 1
displays of race a function of the museums that produce them and political economy of the field of arts and culture? Attending to the visual, intellectual, and political economic histories of networks of exhibiting institutions and based on ethnographic fieldwork in and on museums and other exhibiting institutions, this dissertation contextualizes and traces the production and circulation of the art and artifacts that produce the exhibitions and the museum itself as a way to provide a contemporary concrete answer.
Black museums and historic sites figure prominently in the recent institutionalization of African diaspora in the United States. Historically, the bulk of these institutions emerged or solidified around World War II, where the push for establishing Black museums (or turning existing collecting organizations into Black museums) focused on highlighting Black history and artistic production for Black audiences. Initially Black museums in the United States were marked by an internal ethos driven by narratives that pushed back against the visual production in other mainstream or state-associated institutions, performing a corrective to a perceived misuse or absence of Black history, arts and culture in major museums and cultural centers (Burns 2013; Cahan 2016; Cooks 2011; Wilson 2012). Black museums’ alternative imaginings of history are part of a tradition going back as far as W. E. B.
Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (Du Bois [1935] 1992; Fisher 2013). Post-Civil Rights and Black Power movements helped the push for more inclusive educational curricula by framing Black heritage as a stolen birthright in the United States, which was a key factor in creating an audience and a market for Black heritage institutions 2
and their visual output. In contrast to this political project to re-think American history and heritage, deindustrializing urban cities today, where many Black museums are located, are increasingly looking to the tourism and arts and culture industries to upscale their cities culturally and economically (Clarke 2006).
This situation is particularly acute in Philadelphia, whose major Black heritage museum, the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP), was founded after years of community activism and in time for the city’s 1976 celebration of the United States Bicentennial. Currently, it is a mid-size museum navigating competing expectations about its local educational mission to correct myopic understandings of American Black history and its position in the arts and culture fields. On the one hand, the museum’s ability to fulfill its educational mission affects the public perception of its community outreach and ability to secure funding related to K-12 student audiences, while on the other hand the museum’s level of sophistication in exhibit presentation and entertainment affects its ability to attract adult audiences (especially potential donors), elite professional staffing, arts and culture grant funding, corporate sponsorships and prestige. This dissertation lays out the history of Black American collections and exhibitions that preceded what other historians have referred to as the Black Museum movement, considers the contemporary context of arts and culture funding in Philadelphia, and places AAMP at the intersection of the two, showing how both impact the way Blackness shows up materially in the galleries.
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Conceptions Of Race And Blackness
This project is influenced by the anthropological literature on race and
Blackness, as it intersects with production and consumption. Founded in a conception of race as an “intellectual device and social reality” (Harrison 1995) that is “neither fiction nor fixed” (Thomas & Clarke 2006:4), scholarship on racialization stresses the production of race through social processes, as well as the analytic and material inseparability of the process of race-making from those of statecraft and subject formation (Biolsi 2008; Brodkin 2000; Thomas 2011; Williams 1989). This work approaches blackness in the Americas as structured by the Transatlantic slave trade, formed in the crucible of the slave ship and, despite variations across British,
Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonialisms, codified into laws about miscegenation and hypodescent that gave pigmentocracy and racial hierarchy legal, political and sociocultural force. Ethnographers have written these legacies into the lived experience of Black people, from foundational texts like W. E. B. DuBois’ The
Philadelphia Negro, to contemporary examinations of Black heritage celebrations such as Jean Muteba Rahier’s Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an
Afro-Ecuadorian Festival or unexpected African diasporic religious community formations like Kamari Clarke’s Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the
Making of Transnational Communities or the circuits of popular culture exchanges like Marc Perry’s Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba.
These scholarly histories influence this project’s understanding of my interlocutors that self-identify as Black, how that identification is structured by myriad factors, 4
especially geography and generation, and what that means for the ways they produce, present, consume and critique others’ presentations of material Black culture, as well as the institutional politics that structure and result from the production and feedback circuits.
Consumption As Cultural Affirmation
This project is also situated within a framework in which political and popular cultural shifts in vernacular conceptions of blackness intersect with neoliberal capitalism in ways that make absences of knowledge about African diasporic history, heritage or cultural production a problem that can be solved by individual market consumption. From anthropology to art history to film and cinema studies to English, scholars have written poignantly about the ways that
Black Americans have sought the cultural affirmation denied by the American political or educational apparatus through the production or consumption of visual culture and heritage products.
In her contextualization of “roots tourism” Kamari Clarke identifies a number of popular cultural shifts that, along with political movements, fostered a widespread public appetite for consumptive experiences of Black visual and material culture, including the rise of Black Studies in universities and the (slower) changes to K-12 curriculum around Black history, Alex Haley’s book and miniseries
Roots: The Saga of an American Family, and the proliferation of Black bookstores.
Clarke, Paulla Ebron, Saidiya Hartman, Bayo Holsey and Salamishah Tillet have written about the ways that African Americans travel to west Africa on what are 5
sometimes called “homeland tours,” treating them as a pilgrimage to reclaim ancestry, as an act of “self-identification and cultural affirmation” that asserts
African diasporic membership in the face of U.S. civic estrangement (Clarke 2006;
Tillet 2012). These tours make visual culture—especially the visual and performing arts—central to their creation of authentic cultural experiences for travelers trying, through consumption, to recover pre-American African diasporic lineages, find
“lost” cultural practices, sensibilities, solidarities, seeing museum exhibitions, visiting historic sites and viewing creative public performances in the name of reshaping the contours of Black heritage and their place in the imagined diasporic community. (Ebron 2000; Hartman 2006; Holsey 2008). Travel to Africa and throughout the African diaspora figures prominently in scholarly explorations of how people find the language to articulate Black heritage claims and forge African diasporic connections. Bianca Williams’ ethnography of African American women tourists to Jamaica, The Pursuit of Happiness tracks “imagined community and diasporic longings” and hones on how people construct diaspora through leisure
(Williams 2018).
Travel can be an expensive endeavor, but one that repeatedly came up throughout my fieldwork in exhibition spaces that featured art or artifacts associated with Black culture in and beyond the United States. Docents for AAMP repeatedly spoke about their travels abroad or inquired about mine (in several instances affirming that I was especially “qualified” to talk to about an exhibition of
Afro-Cuban art, for example, because I had been to Cuba). Visitors to exhibitions 6
occasionally commented that they visited exhibitions about Black American or
African diasporic subjects because they could not travel to the places referenced in the exhibitions. For visitors who could not travel throughout the diaspora, museum exhibitions and programs (sometimes regardless of what Philadelphia institution staged them) served as a way institutions brought the diaspora to them. In the cases of both diasporic travel and seeking out Black exhibitions and cultural programming that cannot be found in schools, a neoliberal ethos of being personally responsible for opting in to African diasporic heritage configured cultural consumption as a kind of cure for cultural alienation in its promise of racial affirmation.
Theoretical Framing
In analyzing the work of the AAMP and the larger fields in which it is situated, I find it helpful to think with Pierre Bourdieu to apprehend AAMP as a site within a larger field of cultural production to untangle the material, structural, and symbolic forces that produce and structure it. Characterizing Bourdieu’s work in the introduction to The Field of Cultural Production, editor Randal Johnson offers:
Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field might be characterized as a radical contextualization. It takes into consideration not only works themselves, seen relationally within the space of available possibilities and within the historical development of such possibilities, but also producers of works in terms of their strategies and trajectories, based on their individual and class habitus, as well as their objective position within the field. It also entails an analysis of the structure of the field itself, which includes the positions occupied by producers (e.g. writers, artists) as well as those occupied by all the instances of consecration and legitimation which make cultural products what they are (the public, publishers, critics, galleries, academies, and so forth). Finally, it involves an analysis of the position 7
of the field within the broader field of power. In short, Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production and his extremely demanding analytical method encompass the set of social conditions of production, circulation and consumption of symbolic goods. (Bourdieu 1993: 9, emphasis added)
My ethnographic examination of the work AAMP does and the larger structuring fields takes this radical contextualization as a guide, in which the objects
(art/artifacts) and exhibitions comprise the works of the field, and I place this work within the historical development of possibility by considering the production and circulation of the objects themselves—who makes the objects that make up exhibitions? What kind of art/artifacts and collections/exhibitions can exist when we consider the history by which certain peoples’ creative work is treated as art, preserved as valuable, collected as important, and is able to be assembled for exhibition because particular institutional spaces exist to exhibit these object-based stories? How does the presence or absence of trained professionals and institutionally housed collections and museums structure what we can see and how we analyze it?
I figure producers of work of objects and exhibitions differently based on various visual and institutional subjects of analysis. Private collections are produced by collectors and their advisors while exhibitions are produced by museum professionals and their institutions. Comparing AAMP to other American museums suggests that even institutions may be said to have an objective position (as prestige filled or not) within the larger field of museums, collections, philanthropists or professionals. 8
Considering the structure of the field itself I am concerned primarily with the field of arts and culture exhibiting organizations in Philadelphia geographically, and the larger field of Black exhibitions. I acknowledge that, for museums, this field contains more producers, consecrators and legitimators than can be captured in a single dissertation: hundreds of regular people who collect and store objects, give money and donate objects to Black museums, unpaid and paid laborers—graduate and undergraduate students and interns, scholars, researchers, curators, volunteers, docents, board members; financial supporters—visitors, individual and corporate philanthropists, foundations, arts advocates and politicians, grant writers and grant evaluators, individual and institutional lenders, arts writers, exhibitions reviewers and journalists, bloggers, people who research and write about the work after it has been presented to the public (critics, arts/exhibition historians and museum studies and history scholars). But in placing AAMP within the larger context, I tried to participate in or observe as many of these spaces as possible. I visited museums and galleries, conducted research that went into exhibitions and for grant proposals, I contributed information to exhibits planned for other institutions, consulting and participating in focus groups and charrettes. I went to opening receptions for exhibits and galleries. I visited area collections and participated in exhibitions and collections behind the scenes tours. I posted photographs of exhibitions and objects on social media and various online platforms, and I repeatedly traveled out of state to see exhibitions because others posted photos that made me "need" to see the objects up close, in person. I answered questions for potential AAMP collection 9
donors and examined abandoned donations with no provenance or donor information. I created exhibition object lists and wrote exhibition labels. I processed exhibition object insurance paperwork. I was a docent. I taught docents and I attended local conferences for docents. I volunteered and I managed volunteers. I wrote website and newsletter copy. I networked with potential major financial donors socially as well as on behalf of an institution or the field. I was a grant application evaluator for arts organizations. I made donations to other museums and filled out visitor surveys. I attended political town halls in Philadelphia on the sustainability and needs of the arts and culture sector. I gave exhibition tours and was a featured panelist at AAMP and at several other arts organizations. I conducted interviews and I was quoted in media interviews. In George Marcus’ now-classic review of anthropological tracking methodologies that shifted the discipline toward mutlisited ethnographic production, his description of the ways anthropologists identify and follow relevant people, objects, narratives and money as they circulate through physical and discursive spaces guided my inquiry into which places to best see the production of museum exhibitions and the overall cultural sector (Marcus
1995). These many disparate spaces that structure and produce the larger fields of production in which I situate AAMP affect my ethnographic sense of the histories that produce AAMP and the visual work carried out in its galleries.
In his approach to seeing museums as dynamic spaces of cultural production,
James Clifford (borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt) has offered a conception of
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museums as contact zones, where “cultural action, the making and remaking of identities” takes place (Clifford 1997: 6). For Clifford,
When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing, historical, political, moral relationship—a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull…. The museum, usually located in a metropolitan city, is the historical destination for the cultural productions it lovingly and authoritatively salvages, cares for, and interprets.” (Clifford 1997: 192-93)
This conception reveals all of the elements of museums and museum-making—the building and sustaining of the institution, the acquisition and borrowing of objects, the installation of exhibitions—as active, relational. It is the approach through which we can see the African American Museum in Philadelphia as a space both produced and constituted by historical and political forces, by sets of exchanges between activists, politicians and cultural elites; and by which we can see the
“cultural productions” that come from the Museum as the outcomes of similar exchanges (in addition to being a historical destination for art, artifacts, and the viewers who love them).
Finally, I think about AAMP’s positioning within broader fields of power in the arts and culture sector, and within the field of race making, in terms of the political economy that makes the field of Black museums possible or impossible to sustain, and in a larger sense, the field of race construction/history in the Americas that makes these museums such beloved or maligned vernacular teaching institutions to the general public. In “Forms of Capital” Pierre Bourdieu describes the ability of capital (as “accumulated labor” which can appear as “living labor”) to 11
present itself in three fundamental guises: economic, social, and cultural. Economic capital describes economic resources that are immediately convertible to money.
Cultural capital consists of forms of knowledge, skills, education, manners, habits, dispositions and other acquired or inherited traits that can increase one’s social status in society:
Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee. (Bourdieu 1986: 243, emphasis in original)
Social capital describes actual or potential resources based on group membership, relationships or networks of influence. Both social and cultural capital have the potential to be converted into economic capital, depending on the conditions under which they are deployed and the details of those deployments. This conceptualization of labor, power and finances as interrelated is especially useful for thinking about the arts and culture sector in which AAMP is situated and by which AAMP is constituted. The current state of arts and culture funding in late capitalist American cities has most museums relying on a mix of state/taxpayer funds, individual and/or philanthropic funds, and corporate funds to sustain their institutions. As the availability of state funding is unreliable and steadily decreasing, museums have increasingly relied on philanthropic and corporate funding for their
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operations, exhibitions and programs. These are forms of funding that must be coaxed out of individuals and institutions: applied for in proposals, argued for in conference rooms, talked out of donors. The ways that prized art and artifacts or uncommon historical narratives are presented as arguments for museum funding provide one way to see how museum professionals at AAMP convert social and cultural capital into economic capital in producing and sustaining the Museum.
Methods And Data
This dissertation draws on a range of data sources, including participant observation of exhibitions planning and execution, consumption and documentation
(photography and media collection) of exhibitions, sustained reading and analysis of contemporary arts media (journalism and social media), attendance at public events featuring artists, arts and culture scholars, arts and culture funders, arts advocacy and historical research with newspaper archives. Museums engage in knowledge production that is visual and object based and my inquiry into how exhibitions present race and how those presentations are contextualized in particular cultural fields required a deep engagement with the history of collections and exhibitions, with the contemporary field of exhibition practices, and with the political economy that supports the museums and galleries in which these exhibitions appear, and the professionals who produce the exhibitions and the field itself. Further, I am encouraged by the ways that anthropologists of arts and cultural institutions use
Bourdieu to inform their research methods. In her research on the ways that
Egyptian arts interlocutors in Egypt produce meaning and value in their work, 13
Jessica Winegar finds Bourdieu’s conception of “the field” a useful lens through which to view multiple urban spaces that constitute the field of artistic production.
Her ethnographic work among artists, curators, critics, and scholars takes her to exhibition receptions, galleries, conferences, college courses, and consuming media
(catalogues, books, journals, articles, television and radio) in addition to conducting ethnographic interviews with arts producers and consumers and having informal conversations with her interlocutors (Winegar 2006: 27). Similarly, I repeatedly entered these spaces in my ethnographic exploration of the production and consumption of Blackness in exhibitions and their exhibiting institutions in the urban United States.
My main fieldwork took place from 2012-2017, during which I aimed to observe how exhibitions are produced and consumed, how the institutions that produce them are produced and sustained, and how those institutions and their staff members are embedded in the field of arts and culture. My data and analysis are based on thousands of hours of participant observation in museums and galleries consuming exhibitions, attending public events including exhibition receptions, artist and scholarly lectures, arts advocacy events, fundraisers, political town halls, symposia and public exhibition tours and arts crawls. In addition to these events for the general public, this dissertation is also informed by more exclusive, private and personal engagements including behind-the-scenes tours of exhibitions and collections, participation in VIP or invitation-only receptions, symposia or roundtable discussions, and both formal interviews and informal personal 14
correspondence (conversations, emails, text message exchanges) with museum professionals, artists, and philanthropists. This correspondence included 23 staff members at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, 36 museum professionals and specialists at other institutions (including 20 curators and 8 institutional heads), 7 philanthropists and elite lenders and 23 visual artists.
Exhibitions
From 2012-2017 I worked at the African American Museum in Philadelphia in the exhibitions department, first as a research fellow and then as a curatorial assistant. In this capacity I worked on 22 of AAMP’s temporary exhibitions across several genres, including fine art, costuming, history and anthropology (see data appendix). I conducted interviews with artists and lenders on objects in exhibitions, recording and transcribing the interviews or taking notes when I did not have permission to record, did research to develop and support major exhibition themes, wrote text panels and object labels, researched and secured copyright and intellectual property rights for images, video and audio recordings, worked with teams of professionals on the development and layout of the exhibits, executed loan agreements between lenders and AAMP and assisted with condition reporting and insurance policy updating for incoming and outgoing objects. I occasionally assisted with associated educational and public programming associated with exhibitions and often gave exhibition tours. Working on exhibitions at AAMP was the most labor intense component of my participant observation, and it gave me a sense of how exhibitions can come together (or come apart), and informed the questions I asked 15
museum professionals at other institutions. As an ethnographic perch, the institutional affiliation sometimes helped facilitate my access into other institutional and private collections that would have been difficult to negotiate otherwise.
Drawing on my experiences planning and installing exhibitions at AAMP, I also visited exhibitions in other museums and galleries to see how other institutions presented Black art and artifacts and to help me contextualize exhibitions at AAMP within the contemporary field. During my main period of fieldwork I visited 128 exhibitions in three countries, taking photographs of the exhibitions and collecting any distributed institutional materials for them, such as gallery guides, pamphlets, press releases, or exhibition catalogues (see data appendix). These exhibitions were primarily in the genres of art, history, anthropology, and popular culture, and 86 of the exhibitions addressed or featured Black history or creative production explicitly.
Working on exhibitions at AAMP informed the way I viewed other exhibitions and vice versa—I sometimes thought about a particular lighting treatment or the height or placement of an object in terms of techniques I had seen employed at AAMP or other institutions in the past, or paid close attention to how the label in another museum credited the object’s donor or at what reading level or tone a gallery panel seemed to be written in. While this dissertation does not fully detail the 150 exhibitions engaged over the course of this research period, my working on and viewing these exhibitions significantly impacted which arts and culture professionals I engaged and what questions I asked, the kinds of literature I read about museums and galleries, and helped me develop a feel for the cultural field. 16
Conferences, Public Lectures, Political And Fundraising Events
The professionals who work in arts and culture produce and sustain the field through objects and discourse in very public ways. For this reason, conferences, public lectures and large political and fundraising events provided an opportunity to observe how arts and culture producers narrate, advocate for and theorize the field they create. The genre of the public address is set up to allow for an extended, in- depth sense of how a scholar, artist, philanthropist or institutional director works in the field. These events typically included a venue for attendees to question speakers, which meant that not only did I have the opportunity to ask an elite international curator or museum director questions about their professional practice, I also could see a local ecosystem among the other attendees, recognizing the individuals who always attend local public events, fundraisers or annual conferences.
Laura Nader’s 1972 appeal to anthropologists to “study up” into processes and cultures of powerful (rather than only powerless) groups and organizations identified access as a methodological barrier to research among cultural elites
(Nader 1972). Conferences, public lectures, political and fundraising events served as important spaces to lower access barriers to cultural producers that are sometimes difficult to gain access to without personal relationships, particularly when it came to the heads of organizations or elite philanthropists. When these events required an invitation, registration fee or other special designation for entry,
I was often able to have conversations after a panel, during a reception or over a meal with individuals professionally important enough that they employed 17
administrative assistants to impede general public access to them. They sometimes provided the impetus for me to engage in what Hugh Gusterson refers to as
“polymorphous engagement” which involves “interacting with informants across a number of dispersed sites, not just in local communities, and sometimes in virtual form; and it means collecting data eclectically from a disparate array of sources in many different ways” (Gusterson 1997: 116). These VIP events served as one way for me to deploy my own professional positioning, educational prestige or social capital in service of my research interests, sometimes interacting with a scholar, philanthropist, director or institutional board member over the course of several conferences or receptions.
Archival And Contemporary Journalism And Arts Writing
To understand the publicly circulating knowledge about AAMP and about museums and galleries more generally, I reviewed archival news articles about the
Museum and followed contemporary art writing about Philadelphia and New York.
While regularly working inside a museum with long term (and returning) employees provides one sense of institutional history, I am interested in the way that AAMP is situated in Philadelphia public memory. For this I read through forty years of print news coverage on the Museum in 350 articles, primarily across three
Philadelphia newspapers (see appendix), gaining an understanding of AAMP as it exists in media, which has the power to craft a sense of the institution even for readers who do not visit. I also followed current news coverage of AAMP, creating several Google alerts related to the Museum, as well as regularly checking the 18
hashtag and location tags for AAMP on the social media platforms Instagram and
Facebook. This provided a regularly updating flow of information about the Museum from professional writers and lay visitors. In the case of exhibition and program reviews, I actively compiled them for the Museum, creating an archive of media coverage in real time. Finally, arts and exhibitions-specific media outlets like theartblog.org, which covers the arts community in Philadelphia, culturetype.com, which covers Black arts production and publishing nationwide and large, New York- based outlets like Hyperallergic and Artforum magazine which cover elite arts institutions contributed to a sweep of the coverage and public conversations about the more elite, well trafficked exhibitions in the field. The reviews of exhibitions, fairs and catalogues, institution personnel changes, interviews, auction house sales results helped me develop a sense of the range of concerns and values shared among professionals engaged in high art conversations about the field.
My aim in looking at such disparate sites of analysis as the history of
Philadelphia museums and long-surviving exhibiting institutions, American museums with track records of collecting and exhibiting artwork made by people of
African descent, the contemporary spaces in which these artworks and artifacts appear in exhibitions physically and discursively is to illuminate the ways this circulation is produced by institutional histories and intellectual genealogies in the past, and a particular late capitalist political economy in the present. As an act of radical contextualization, I hope it produces an anthropological snapshot of a Black cultural field that is broad in its material scope, attendant to the hierarchies that 19
structure its conditions of possibility, necessarily partial and incomplete, but robust nonetheless.
In this project, I contend that history and political economy are the ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are as important as the visual work itself. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the academic and material histories that structure the cultural field of production in which the African
American Museum in Philadelphia emerges. This examination is routed through the local American history of collecting and exhibiting, and the academic disciplines that these collecting individuals and institutions are in conversation with. The history of early Black collecting and exhibiting produces the material and professional possibility for the existence of African American and African diasporic institutions later, especially in terms of available collections, professionals and audience expectations. It is an institutionally lived history that continues to structure Black museums and influence how other museums collect and exhibit Black material culture, and is important to know as a result. These chapters rely on a review of a range of data sources. Scholarly literature produced on Black collectors, material culture and the history of various museums, historic societies and university collections in
Philadelphia and New York provided a chronological sense of when collections were amassed by private Black art and history buffs, when collecting and exhibiting institutions in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. (the Smithsonian) began to include Black art and material culture. Because exhibitions rely on institutional collections and private collectors, the relationship between collections 20
and exhibitions is crucial to historicize. In addition to scholarly literature, the information produced by cultural institutions about themselves also informs my data analysis. The pamphlets, newsletters and magazines that museums and historic societies publish reveal how the institutions narrate their own history, while collections descriptions and finding aids contained provenance information about how objects came into various cultural repositories that were key to my understanding of the history of Black collections and exhibitions. While these chapters provide the structural underpinnings of the more ethnographic chapters that follow, they are deceptively historical. I was led to these histories by experiences visiting archives and museums, managing the loan forms for borrowing an object from another repository for an exhibition, seeing objects on view and closely reading the labels and sometimes just by walking around the city of
Philadelphia. I was led to the work of nineteenth-century collector Robert Mara
Adger, for example, after walking by a commemorative Pennsylvania Historical
Marker about him on South Street. Many of the exhibitions discussed in Chapter 3 still occupy important space in the memories of museums professionals and artists who work or exhibit in Black institutions, as well as the aficionados who visit them.
While it serves as an intellectual and institutional genealogy here, it is also a personal or professional history for a generation of artists, intellectuals, and museum visitors and volunteers I spoke with.
Chapter 4 outlines the public history of the African American Museum in
Philadelphia. I review the primary and secondary sources writing on the Museum’s 21
founding as either a story of activist triumph or a story of a series of compromises that function as a harbinger of things to come, the Museum’s exhibitions and programming from the 1970s through the early 2000s and the leadership turnover and staffing changes documented in Philadelphia newspapers. While this is a uniquely Philadelphia story that is important in the larger context of Black museum activism, the media coverage is especially important for the ways it contributes to the perception of the AAMP in public memory. The more than 300 articles from
Philadelphia area newspapers between 1974 and 2016 frame the AAMP as variously embattled or overcoming, shaping opinions of the institution even for readers who never encounter it in physical space. This helps me attend to vernacular public disappointments in AAMP, the feelings of (sometimes false) nostalgia, the cycles of rebranding and the internal staff senses that the museum is always on the verge of great collapse or great comeback. It also helps me attend to the AAMP’s inability to consistently archive its own exhibits and corresponding programs, as a function of the staff presence and absences, institutional priorities and to the ways the museum itself shapes and uses journalism coverage—as an account of institutional history or as a sense of itself.
While the African American Museum in Philadelphia is a product of the histories of collecting, exhibiting, and of civic activism, it continues to be produced by overlapping arrangements of social and financial capital. Chapter 5 considers the political economic circuits of social, cultural, and economic capital that produces the museum and the arts and culture sector in Philadelphia more broadly. I engage this 22
ethnographically in three spaces: an elite auction house, a fine arts storage facility and a VIP reception for the exhibition “Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson
Supremes Collection.” These are crucial spaces in the production of recent exhibitions at AAMP, and they provide an ethnographic perch from which I examine the government, corporate and private philanthropic funding that supports these exhibitions. As the first and longest-running auction house to organize auctions specifically for African American art and artifacts, Swann Auction Galleries is an important contributor to the circulation of African American material culture. I engage it here to illustrate the ways the auction house serves as a lens into the private wealth that finds its way into the Museum. Swann also provides an opportunity to see how the histories of Black collections and exhibitions detailed in
Chapters 2 and 3 are deployed as research and as justifications for the value of the lots for sale. I also consider the ways that fine arts storage signifies as a “best practice” to funders seeking to verify that museums are adhering to the highest field-wide standards of excellence. Finally, the VIP reception is a constituted and constituting social field that produces and is produced by circuits of social capital, political power and financial arrangements that most of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions are engaged in. Each of these spaces reveals the ways that economic, cultural, and social capital is in some way created or deployed in service of the
Museum. Paying attention to the kinds of labor, the social networks, and the arguments marshalled in service of the Museum in each of these spaces reveals the machinery that makes AAMP and its racial, cultural output in concrete ways. 23
James Clifford’s conception of the museum as a “contact zone” is concerned with the participation of the subjects of an exhibition taking part in the creation of the exhibition. In Chapter 6 I examine the shifting racialized subjects of exhibitions about Black history and art in several Philadelphia institutions. I provide an overview of two major slavery exhibitions, Stephen Hayes’ Cash Crop at the AAMP, and of Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty at the National
Constitution Center. These exhibitions about American chattel slavery both relied on fine art, historic artifacts and various lenses on the history of slavery and labor in the Americas. I look at the production teams, budgets, perspectives and public feedback, to triangulate the extent to which the institutions that produced the exhibits and the resources at their disposal affected audience reception (particularly in reviews and social media). While there are major differences in the resources invested in the production of these exhibitions, the curatorial perspectives and centering of racial slavery as thought problem, human rights tragedy or structuring force of history had as much to do with budget as institutional lens in constructing an affective racial experience for viewers. Putting these two exhibitions in conversation allows us to see how intellectual and institutional histories interact with the political economic forces structuring the field combine and play out on the walls in the galleries of these museums. Finally, I conclude by using a moment of public art criticism to consider what’s at stake in mounting Black exhibitions in Black institutions, in terms of how elite audiences read the space of the institution in conversation with or instead of the exhibitions. Overall this project makes the case 24
for history and political economy as ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are important as a structuring feature of the visual work exhibitions do. Further, it takes the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement as a way to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city.
Point Of Entry
In 2013 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP), I was giving a tour of “Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes Collection” to a group of chaperoned elementary students. Transitioning from a section of the exhibit of early 20th century photography illustrating a history of African American self-representation, I stopped in front of a “Colored Waiting Room” sign from
AAMP’s collection to talk about the the Chitlin’ Circuit—the network of performance venues Black performers were confined to during segregation. As I began to explain the way the Chitlin’ Circuit facilitated the careers and the connection of Black performers to Black audiences, a woman with the students interrupted and asked them, “Do you know what segregation means?” I froze in surprise as the students stood in silence before a tiny voice asked, “Is it like separation?” I looked at the woman who had asked the question hoping that she was their teacher, and would answer her own question with an explanation appropriate to their age level. She looked back at me expectantly, and I took a deep breath and tried to think about the right way to effectively define segregation and introduce the concept of state- 25
engineered racism to a group of children to whom the idea might not yet have occurred.
“Yes. It…is…like separation,” I began awkwardly, trying to remember how I first learned about racial segregation and feeling my face get warm. I had not prepared for a children’s tour of “Come See About Me,” that included introducing
American racism.
Figure 1: “Come See About Me”, Gallery 3 at AAMP, January 2013. Photograph by author.
The display of photos, artifacts and historic media was designed to set the tone for the two-gallery exhibition of costumes on loan from Mary Wilson, the longest-running member of the Motown singing group The Supremes (see figure 1).
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Institutionally, “Come See About Me” was expected to be a “blockbuster” exhibit for
AAMP, drawing atypically large audiences, media coverage and admissions fees.
Despite the fact that the Supremes historic costumes had been previously exhibited at art museums in the South, in Seattle and in the United Kingdom, displaying the gowns at AAMP provided an opportunity to contextualize the gowns differently— racially—than other institutions. Rather than presenting The Supremes’ gowns as a fashion exhibit, a music history exhibit, or as an exhibit about the history of
American popular culture, “Come See About Me” was framed as an exhibition about
The Supremes’ impact on popular culture in general and the work their image- making did to change widespread perceptions of African Americans in particular. To accomplish this, the costumes, as well as performance and publicity photographs of
Mary Wilson, Diana Ross, Florence Ballard, Cindy Birdsong, Jean Terrell, Lynda
Laurence, Scherrie Payne and Susaye Greene wearing them, were contextualized within the history of media depictions of and performance circuits for Black
Americans.1 On the walls (ramps) leading into the exhibition there were reproductions of early African American studio portraits, posters from Black stage productions from 1920 to the 1960s, historic photos of Marian Anderson and Zora
Neale Hurston. On staff- or docent-led tours, visitors were urged to think about the production of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century images of Black
1 The Supremes were signed to Motown as a quartet of Florence Ballard, Barbara Martin, Diana Ross and Mary Wilson in 1961. When Martin left the group in 1962, the group continued on as a trio and remained so for the rest of their career, despite several high-profile lineup changes, especially the departure of Florence Ballard in 1967 (Ross and Wilson were joined by Cindy Birdsong), and the departure of Diana Ross in 1970. The lineup would change another four times until the group disbanded in 1977. 27
Americans—in studio portrait photographs taken for personal use, in posters advertising plays and vocal performances by Black celebrities—as largely for Black
Americans throughout the Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement. Talking about U.S. racial segregation and emphasizing that most white Americans consumed images of Black Americans in print journalism and the only-occasional Black celebrity, the exhibition was designed to frame The Supremes’ fame as a technology- abetted pop culture phenomenon consisting of beautiful, wholesome Black girls being beamed into millions of households via radio and television, in the period that the teenager became a coherent cultural figure and teenagers a viable demographic and market. 2
The exhibition team of exhibitions manager, collections manager, registrar, exhibitions designer, conservation specialist, graduate research fellows, consultants and volunteers remains the largest exhibition team I have ever worked on. In the months leading up to the exhibition opening, our concerns about framing the conversation, securing rights and reproductions for images, videos and songs, graphic design, lighting, wall construction and writing text for panels and labels had been debated and workshopped over meetings and emails. In the process of writing as a group, editing for substance and perspective, and debating exhibition content, significance and voice in the panels and labels we knew there were certain kinds of work that we wanted race to do in this exhibition for an audience that we imagined was mostly Black, and interested in the history of Black music and performance, pop
2 Joseph F. Kett, 1977. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. 28
culture, and The Supremes/Motown. We wanted it to make sense to viewers that the glamour work the costumes did for The Supremes impacted mainstream conceptions of Black Americans because they emerged in a culture moment when there were so few widely-circulated images of glamourous Black women in pop culture; that this was a function of racism in the production of popular culture.
When people gushed praise about the exhibition at the opening receptions, we felt we had accomplished our goal—that the exhibit made visual sense.
When I stumbled through Jim Crow after being prompted to explain segregation to a group of children on a class trip, I had a visceral experience of the work AAMP does as a site of racial production and sense making, where visitors encounter art, artifacts, the histories of generational groups and academic disciplines to grapple with the visual assemblage in real time. The interaction was structured by a sedimented history of racial marginalization that produced the artifacts on view, the months-researched narratives about them and the museum itself. I realized I was in a cultural field of visual racial production.
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CHAPTER 2: COLLECTING AND ARCHIVING BLACKNESS: AN EARLY HISTORY OF BLACK ARCHIVAL PRODUCTION
…an archive should also be understood at the level of a discursive condition of possible statements of knowledge, at the level of a generative discursive system that governs and regulates the production and appearance of statements—what can and cannot be said.3 David Scott, “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory”
…the presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into a fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created.4 Michel-Rolph Trouilout, Silencing the Past
While institutions devoted to the collection and display of Black cultural production mostly began to proliferate in the American cultural landscape in the twentieth century, efforts to preserve materials of Black life extend back much further. The practice of enslaved Black Christians passing on heirloom Bibles with the names of family births and deaths recorded inside has assisted many African
American genealogists by functioning as partial kinship charts. Expanding this vernacular tradition, more consistent collection and preservation of Black artifacts began around Emancipation, particularly among free and educated Blacks. Post-
Emancipation scholars, religious leaders and bibliophiles collected artifacts, pamphlets and other paper ephemera, crafts and works of art—the stuff that makes up museum exhibits—in an effort to ensure future generations of Black Americans
3 Scott 2008: vii.
4 Trouillot 1995: 48.
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did not conceive of themselves as people without history.5 These collections were often stored in individual homes, church basements or other community spaces, with public access facilitated through public and private events and by appointments to house museums. Many of these collections did not become part of formal institutions, but those that did consist of materials that reveal a great deal about collectors’ interests and networks, reflect a breadth and depth of Black cultural production and history, enrich the cultural landscape and make possible a great deal of scholarship.
In the late nineteenth- early twentieth-centuries, it was largely through the work of Black scholars, bibliophiles, artists and collectors that exhibition displays and institutionalizing later became possible. Historians, art historians, scholars and others have traced social movements that pushed for the inclusion of Black artists in
American museums and galleries, movements about elevating Black history to the status of national mainstream history and movements to create Black institutions to showcase these displays (Burns 2013, Cahan 2016, Collins 2006, Cooks 2011,
Kennedy 2015, Ruffins 2007, Wilson 2012). In this chapter, I engage the earlier history of Black collection formation to highlight the work of finding and assembling the objects upon which Black institution building depends. Naming collectors like
William Still and Robert Mara Adger undermines earlier mainstream institutional claims that Black Americans were absent in exhibition displays because there were
5 Wolf 1997. 31
no worthy items to display and elevates the work that made possible the creation of
Black archives.
The exclusion of these collections from mainstream museums and historical societies in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries affects where and how we currently access their records and consider their cultural significance.
Information on the collections is located in their institutional acquisition and exhibition records when they have gone to universities and archives, and in scholarly literature across various disciplines when they have been lost to history.
Using Lee Baker’s research on the theories of race and culture developed by anthropology, I place this history of collecting, archiving and display firmly within concerns of the discipline. Baker’s documentation of the history of anthropology’s construction of race for the discipline and mainstream American thinking demonstrates the ways this construction treated indigenous natives as a racial group with cultures worthy of study, ethnographic and artifact collection and exhibitionary displays. This is in contrast to Black Americans who, despite continued desires and explicit requests for disciplinary attention to Black cultural history and practices, were largely left to American sociology. Without the attention of predominantly white universities, most philanthropists and other collecting institutions, Black scholars, history buffs, arts aficionados, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and community clubs filled the collecting and display gap.
More than forging African diasporic links, assembling evidence of the past and documenting social movements, I argue that the collecting and archival labor of 32
these scholars, archivists and institutions produced ‘Black history’ as a coherent and material body of work in United States sociopolitical discourse, the academy and in physical space. Following Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, this history of collecting and archiving constitutes the “historical development of the possibility” of
Black exhibitions. Understanding that production helps us contextualize various present and absent archival materials in Black institutions several decades later.
Anthropology’s Disinterest in Black Material Culture
In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture Lee Baker documents the ways early American anthropology developed theories of race and culture. Baker argues that the anthropological concept of race in the twentieth century is rooted in the concept of culture as it was deployed in the study of American Indians in the nineteenth century. He juxtaposes anthropologists’ study and analysis of American
Indians, who were considered worthy of preservation and exhibition despite pushback from the communities studied, with the comparatively scant study of
African Americans, who were not. This differential treatment was philosophical and disciplinary. Considerable anthropological expertise was developed through focus on documenting and authenticating cultural practices of American Indians for the discipline itself and for the United States government. The corresponding research on African Americans was mostly being done in sociology. This division is best exemplified by Franz Boas’ work at Columbia University and University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park. While Park believed that Black Americans had not retained
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any cultural traits from Africa and was invested in the idea that success was yoked to assimilation in the United States, Boas saw African American culture as a combination of influences from Africa and Europe.6 While Park and American sociology were committed to a particular vision of racial uplift for Blacks that required sociopolitical distance from Africa, the distinction between his and Boas’ views are important for two reasons.
First, Boas’ intellectual work took many forms. Beyond traditional ethnographic monographs and teaching, Boas also engaged in collecting, preservation and exhibition—most notably on the World’s Columbian Exposition of
1893. Boas oversaw the physical anthropology exhibits featuring American Indians in a world’s fair in which African Americans could only participate as labor, despite
6 Melville J. Herskovits, one of Boas’ students, argued in The Myth of the Negro Past that one could find African cultural retentions or survivals in American Negroes, linking Africans to Blacks in the Americas. Articulating why this shift toward studying and theorizing continuities across the African diaspora was important to anthropology, Deborah Thomas observes that “it helped legitimate New World, and especially Caribbeanist, research within a context that had previously considered new world Black populations uninteresting due to their various lacks: of ‘primitivity’” of time depth, and of the fantasy of the pristine.” This theoretical shift was institutionalized in the academy: Herskovits founded the first interdisciplinary program in African Studies at Northwestern University, established the African Studies Association, and The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern is the largest standalone Africana collection in the world. Jerry Gershenhorn examines this in Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. A similar split regarding the influence and significance of the work of Black American artists in early twentieth century art history is found in discussions of the different perspectives of Alain Locke and his Howard University colleague James A. Porter. Locke believed that Black Americans had lost, but could regain the “spirit of African expression” in the production of visual and material culture, and argued for a Negro Art that would counter negative stereotypes of Black Americans. Porter, whose Modern Negro Art was the first comprehensive study of artists of African descent and their work, argued that Porter argued trying to exploit the ‘racial concept’ and wanting to see evidence of racial traits in the work of Black American artists limited their potential expression and advocated for treating African American art as uniquely American and central to the history of American art and culture. See Lisa Gail Collins, “Arts, Artifacts and African Americans: Context and Criticism.”
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notable objections from prominent Black intellectuals.7 Baker notes that this is emblematic of a trend in the discipline, where “anthropologists did little to support, exhibit, or study African American cultural patterns and processes, while they engaged in Herculean efforts to collect, preserve, and exhibit American Indian cultures. Despite the outcries of reformers and American Indian intellectuals, ethnologists played a critical role in cementing a racial politics of culture in which out-of-the way Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while in- the-way Negroes did not” (Baker 2010: 68-69).
Second, Black intellectuals like Arthur Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson, Zora
Neale Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois and others associated with the New Negro movement used Boas’ perspectives on and documentary practices concerning culture to authenticate and promote a distinctive Black culture. Largely ignored by anthropology as a discipline, many of these figures (who would eventually be recognized in history, literature and African American studies) simply did anthropology elsewhere.
Black Collectors in Philadelphia
In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, Black intellectuals, businessmen and everyday people collected books and artifacts related to Africa and Black history that they shared with friends and in social clubs. In his sketch of one collector, William Carl Bolivar, William Welburn writes that “many African
7 Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. 35
Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were excluded from emerging cultural institutions and faced rejection of their history and culture. They labored in relative isolation or formed associations of common collecting interests to ‘dispatch their duty’” (Wellburn 2007: 168). Robert Mara Adger, a Philadelphia bookseller and local bibliophile William H. Dorsey “painstakingly clipped magazines and newspapers to fill scrapbooks with material relating to African American life.
Also carefully gathered were Black church and music concert programs, photographs, and other ephemeral material; wood carvings, clay sculpture, sketches, and paintings by Black artists; and records of early Black churches, schools, and beneficial societies going back to the 1820s….Dorsey collected everything —news items about burglars as well as bankers, the ugly as well as the noble” (Nash 2002: 311). Adger amassed a private collection of rare books, pamphlets on slavery and books by Black authors in general. Journalist William Carl
Bolivar was a historical researcher and collector whose collection eventually contained over 3,000 books, magazines and journals. In his weekly column for the
Philadelphia Tribune titled “Pencil Pusher Points” he wrote about the history of the
19th century Philadelphia Black men and women for audiences, effectively using his column as a mechanism for the dissemination of Black history.
The associations between collectors sometimes congealed into formal organizations, and many Black social organizations and clubs formed for intellectual exchange also engaged in collecting and exhibiting, especially in New York,
Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Prolific Philadelphia bibliophile, collector and 36
scholar Charles L. Blockson notes that “the most important repository of African-
American letters in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century was the
Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons (1835), the first successful literary organization of its kind founded by African-Americans in the United
States.”8 In 1897 the American Negro Historical Society was founded in Philadelphia with the expressed purpose of collecting Black history materials. Founders and prominent members included Adger, Bolivar, Dorsey, attorney Theophilius J.
Minton, Leon Gardiner and Jacob C. White, Jr. They met monthly in the parish house of the Church of the Crucifixion in South Philadelphia, “to discuss matters related to race, collection of materials, and the publishing of pamphlets and other printed material to share the history of African Americans.”9 That same year the American
Negro Academy was founded in Washington, D.C. as an organization dedicated to
Black intellectual work, and included many of the same members in the American
Negro Historical Society. Later Black scholarly organizations such like Negro Society for Historical Research (founded in 1911 in Yonkers, New York by John Edward
Bruce and Arturo Schomburg) and the Association for the Study of the Negro10
(founded in 1915 by the architect of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson) held meetings and lectures, published scholarly work and were the forums for intellectual exchange.
8 Blockson, 1996. 9 Echevarria, Willhem. Finding aid for “Leon Gardiner collection of American Negro Historical Society records,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
10 Now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).
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While a number of these individuals are known for their more prominent intellectual or civic work, they collected as a way to preserve the material evidence of unique Black culture and as a racial uplift project; to “counter pseudo-scientific racism” prevalent at the time, to “provide a body of information for posterity” and to
“correct the record of American history” by introducing the contributions of Black people and to restore “perhaps even initiate” a Black perspective on Black history. 11
This is reflected in the collectors’ correspondence between one another (in letters currently preserved in archives) and in their own writing. Charles Blockson describes his motives for collecting as follows:
My own path to collecting books and documents pertaining to African American history and literature began in a most inauspicious way in my hometown in Norristown, Pennsylvania. When I was in the fifth grade in an integrated classroom during a lesson on American history, after listening to a litany of contributions made by white Americans to our country I raised my hand and asked my teacher about the notable contributions made by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Marian Anderson, and several others that I heard my parents and relatives talk about. My teacher betrayed no hint of uncertainty: “Negroes have no history. They were born to serve white people.” Out of the confusion of the moment grew anger so great that I set about deliberately seeking more knowledge about my people. (Blockson 2006: 214)
…Whose History?
The misinformation and disinterest in African American history by white historical institutions is partly a function of academic historical framing, in particular an overwhelming preference for conservative Great Man Theories of what had historic value in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. But all of this
11 Martin 1990, 29-31. 38
happened at the mercy of philanthropists, institutional leadership, collectors and other economic and social elites. Historians Gary Nash and Emma Lapsansky, among others, have engaged in analyses of Philadelphia institutions only recently collecting and displaying elite white historical objects and narratives, while art historians
Susan Cahan, Bridget Cooks and Lisa Collins have addressed the exclusivity of mainstream art institutions (with a notable exception of the Harmon Foundation, discussed in the next chapter).
Historian Emma Lapsansky argues that “through the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania (HSP) and its collection history we can watch an evolution of ideas about the "uses" of history and artifactual evidence.”12 Founded in the 1820s its goals were “to guide the museum visitor—subtly or not so subtly—to appreciate and to emulate the established social order and its implied values of patriotism, morality, public service, and excellence in craftsmanship. Artifactual remains of
Philadelphia's statesmen, the Society's founders hoped, would remind Philadelphia citizens of the noble tradition to which they should aspire.”13 Founder John Fanning
Watson and his colleagues sought to preserve and present people like William Penn, traditions like “Quakerism, patriotism, the dignity of fine craftsmanship, the excitement of scientific exploration and experimentation, the challenge of capitalist competition” and objects that demonstrated “ideals of utopia, predictability,
12 Lapsansky 1990, 67
13 Ibid
39
stability, and—if unavoidable—gradual transition.” This is a deliberately selective editing of history: “Memorabilia of public life, and of the private life of the city's leaders, were displayed in a context and sequence that reinforced those values, with evidences of the seamy, the ignoble, the distasteful or unhealthy or even the ambiguous omitted.”14
While the early history of HSP was devoted to crafting heroes and building a legacy of upper class life, the collections have diversified and the objects reflecting
Native American or Black American life were later reinterpreted as such. Observing that “the modern historian now is just as likely to be interested in the maker of artifacts as in the users, in the peddlers as in the purchasers, in the music-makers as well as the ballroom guests, in the conflicts as in the unity,”15 Lapsansky notes that, like later generations of scholars, collectors and other institutions, HSP is “focusing some of its interpretive energy on people who differed in religion, gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, or political persuasion from the white male Anglo-Saxon- dominated perspective that had heretofore been held forth as the model of exemplary status. Materials generated by—and not simply about—Native
Americans made their way to the display cases. Likewise, the papers and memoirs of women, Afro-Americans, Germans, Jews, Catholics, union leaders, agitators, and the mentally ill expanded the Society's mission—and its audience.”16
14 Lapsansky 1990, 70. 15 Lapsansky 1990, 77.
16 Lapsansky 1990, 80. 40
In First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Making, Nash’s examination of memory-making by Philadelphia institutions highlights the specificity of institutional missions, intents, and inequalities. His work carries out
Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s insistence that by focusing on the process of the production of historical narratives, we can see the ways history and historicity (both what happened and what is said to have happened) overlap and “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others”
(Trouillot 1995: 25). Nash’s elucidation of how Philadelphia’s collecting and exhibiting organizations gathered and preserved the past, constructed their audiences, generated and perpetuated their own authority while presenting a very particular version of history and were contested at every step addresses the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library
Company of Philadelphia, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent, among others. While their institutional collection and display practices currently reflect more breadth and depth of subject matter and a wider, more inclusive sense of their audiences, this tends to be due to more recent collecting initiatives and modern reinterpretations of the existing collections. In the early 1800s when many of these organizations opened,
For the founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the city’s other cultural institutions, the great change-makers were men like William Penn, the founder; James Logan, the statesman and scientist; Benjamin Franklin, the diplomat, civic improver, publisher, scientist, and statesman; and a panoply of revolutionary heroes from 41
Washington and Jefferson to Adams and [John] Dickinson. Great men made history; ordinary people followed their lead. Hence remembering the past in heroic, almost providential, terms was an exercise in stabilizing society and legitimating order, authority, and status. (Nash 2002: 9)
Both the orientation from the discipline of history and the belief among individuals powerful enough to found elite historical organizations converged upon a sensibility that the past should be preserved in a way that legitimated existing social hierarchies. This sensibility was reflected throughout institutional display and collecting practices, which necessarily requires assigning value to what should be acquired and preserved for the future. As an example of institutional choices, Nash
“reads” institutional collections for what is present and absent.
The Library Company directors of the early nineteenth century and Historical Society founders were interested in African Americans as objects of white reformers’ zeal because many of these leaders were part of the Quaker-led antislavery movement. This explains the society’s subscription from the beginning to the African Observer, an abolitionist journal edited by the Quaker Enoch Lewis. But Africans in Philadelphia were not themselves seen as fit subjects for commemorating the past or even as a valuable part of urban society. Their first newspapers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia, were never collected. John Fanning Watson, the city’s leading annalist, was fearful of the large free Black community. A devout Methodist, he hated the way Black Methodists were, as he saw it, “corrupting” Sunday services through exuberant music, dancing, and noisy exhortation; he hated even more, as he explained in his book Methodist Error (1819), that white Methodists were adopting Black Methodist churchly enthusiasm. Independent Black churches, which were sprinkled throughout the city and became focal points of the Black community, were a big mistake, in Watson’s view. (Nash 2002: 39-40)
42
By coupling the subscription and preservation of the African Observer with the absence of the AME Church’s Christian Recorder Nash is able to highlight the past institutional preference for apprehending African Americans as objects of history, rather than historical actors or cultural producers, despite existing evidence. This allows for a conversation about institutional stance and preferences—Trouillot’s assertion that the creation of the archive is not neutral, but a reflection of perspective is clear in this instance. Where African Americans did appear in archives and special collections, the materials collected were in lock step with the conception of American history Black collectors were working to complicate and undermine.
David Scott’s point about archives setting discursive conditions—what it is possible to say—is instructive here, with a caveat. One can imagine discourses and exhibits that could have been if those in the past had collected differently, but this stance requires knowledge of objects that existed, even in cases where their locations are unknown.
Where Are They Now?
While some early collections compiled by African American collectors are still intact, others were lost to history. The archival collection by William Carl
Bolivar, who wrote about early Black history and artifacts in the Philadelphia
Tribune, is believed to have been dispersed among other collectors upon his death
(Welburn 2007). Robert Mara Adger’s collection of rare books and pamphlets is currently at Wellesley College, donated by an alumna who was the school’s second
Black graduate. Most items in the collection compiled by William H. Dorsey, who 43
was known to show it in a museum in his house, are in special collections at
Cheyney University, with others at Howard University. The collections work by
Jacob C. White and Leon Gardiner, of the American Negro Historical Society, is currently housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which also holds the papers of its forerunner organization, The Banneker Institute, “due largely to the fact that the African-American community in Philadelphia did not have a museum to preserve its proud heritage.”17
Other prominent Black intellectuals amassed collections that are currently valuable parts of university collections: W. E. B. DuBois’ collection is at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Carter G. Woodson’s collection is in the
United States Library of Congress (Emory University also has some holdings) and
Harlem Renaissance architect Alain Locke, like a number of African American scholars and collectors, bequeathed his collection of archives, manuscripts and fine art to Howard University. Arthur Schomburg’s and Charles Blockson’s collections became the basis of entire institutions—the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture in New York and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at
Temple (which also houses the collection compiled by William Still)18.
At a time when mainstream collecting and exhibiting institutions were not interested in exhibiting African American culture and Black museums had not yet proliferated, early Black collectors amassed material evidence of Black cultural life
17 Blockson 1996. pg. 9. 18 Smith 2011, Welburn 2007, collection finding aids for Woodson, DuBois, Locke, Gardiner.
44
and facilitated public access to these materials as best they saw fit.19 The surviving collections often became the foundation of Black Studies and African American Art
History research in the American academy, and made it so some of the most compelling museum collections were housed on the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities.
This era of work of archiving and depositing Black cultural production eventually came to haunt Black museums established in the post-war era, who later confronted the expectations of scholarly and lay audiences that expected them to be the institutions that housed these sorts of materials, and were appreciated or maligned based on their responses to those expectations. Visual production in museums depends on the relationship between their collections and exhibitions.
This history of Black material culture that makes up collections covers one arm of that visual production. In the next chapter I attend to the history of exhibitions to take up the other arm. In the context of this history of what it was possible for institutions to exhibit, we now turn to what exhibitions of Black material culture were available to see.
19 With the exception of Hampton University Museum, which, founded in 1868, is the oldest African American Museum in the United States. 45
CHAPTER 3: WHERE AND HOW TO SEE: A HISTORY OF EXHIBITING BLACKNESS
Contemporary discussions about museums as community spaces have focused on democratizing museums, ensuring their contemporary and future relevance and being responsive to issues of the day, to visitors (particularly youth) as a matter of the survival of individual institutions and survival of the field as a whole. These conversations sometimes mask the particular history of the exhibition as a form of knowledge production and dissemination in the United States. Prior to the 1960s, museum exhibitions were produced by curators, from objects in permanent collections that were assembled by scholars on staff and elite members of museum boards. The authority and expertise of all involved was largely unquestioned by visitors and general publics. In keeping with the academic trends in the disciplines curators typically trained in, collections were usually made up of objects that illustrated the materiality of important figures and great civilizations. In these exhibitions, an absence of artifacts and fine art attesting to the achievement of
Black Americans was interpreted by viewers as evidence of an absence of Black achievement, or of materials that could illustrate such. This interpretation is important—more than just a general opinion, it was a structuring world view that conditioned the possibility of scholarly production and institutional collecting practices. Twentieth century collectors of African American artifacts and fine art often had their collecting interests spurred by the insistence that there was nothing related to Black people worthy of collecting. And in overviews of the history of preservation practices, Smithsonian scholars Fath Davis Ruffins and Michele Gates 46
Moresi note this widespread belief in the field, with Ruffins observing that “before
1965, many academically trained historians did not believe that there were enough primary sources even to study African Americans,” and Moresi noting that even the
Smithsonian, recognized as the repository for the nation’s material culture, made no effort before the 1960s to collect artifacts related to Black American culture, “the assumption being that African Americans had no culture” (Ruffins 1992: 507;
Moresi 2003: 2). The combination lack of institutionally produced research and collections—the two major forces that produce museum exhibitions—affected the possibilities of producing museum exhibitions about Black Americans in the twentieth century.
So what was there to see? Here I provide a critical overview of major twentieth century exhibitions featuring Black material culture. This exhibition history is another intellectual, institutional structuring feature of the cultural field of
Black visual production. These exhibitions illustrate the ways that Black artists, scholars, and publics pushed for integration into major exhibiting institutions because of the power they have to shape public opinion, scholarly output and the history as a whole, and because of their stated missions about presenting the greatness of American history, ingenuity and perseverance, or the landscape of
American art. On some level Black intellectual activists were attempting to hold these institutions to their missions. On another level, the idea that if you don’t like what you see, you should build your own version of what you want, has been a foundational principle of Black organizing and institutionalizing as a response to 47
racism. The tension of this duality is important to note in considering this history of
Black artifactual displays. Coupled with the history of collecting, this history of exhibiting forms the other major part of the development of possibilities for contemporary Black exhibitions.
A Century of Black Exhibitions
The period of 1876 to 1976 is punctuated by near consistent efforts to have art and artifact-based exhibitions of Black life in exhibiting institutions. During this time, many displays in Black community centers, YMCAs, libraries, churches and schools were mounted as what might now be called “pop-up” exhibits, making the objects and narratives of Black history and resilience available to viewers when no other institutions were interested. A look at major exhibiting events between 1876 and 1976 illustrates how Black civic and religious leaders, artists, collectors, intellectuals and general publics repeatedly pushed for Black inclusion in these exhibitions, and challenged the failures of these institutions to properly do so. While this critical review radically contextualizes the present, it also illustrates the ways that these exhibitions functioned in real time as contact zones. The real-time challenge to these exhibitions by visitors, by journalists in the press, and by activists on the picket line disrupted the idea of the neutral, authoritative, major-institution exhibition.
Black scholars, writers, professionals and community leaders have a documented history of collecting art and artifacts for personal and community collections. As discussed in the previous chapter, many of these objects were 48
viewable at HBCUs, historic societies and other civic intellectual organizations or if one had access to the private spaces of individual collectors and philanthropists.
Even among Black scholars and artists trained in elite institutions, racism and segregation relegated the material culture associated with their cultural and knowledge productions to places largely invisible to elite white exhibiting institutions. In laying out the historical context for the “Black Museum Movement,”
Fath Davis Ruffins observed that the history of nineteenth-century and late- twentieth century collecting of Black art and artifacts was centered first around an elite focus on bourgeois values and materials that could serve as evidence of racial excellence and uplift, then on more folk/everyday objects once the range of individual and institutional collectors expanded in scope.
In the nineteenth century, African Americans of means collected materials associated the achievements of great men and important Black institutions.
Bibliophiles and collectors preserved pamphlets and books linked to celebrated writing, oration and great Black literature, and of important Black churches. The late
1800s saw the opening of a number of major American museums—the Smithsonian
(founded in 1846) opened in 1855, The American Museum of Natural History (New
York City) in 1877, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), founded to bring classical art to Americans who could not afford to go on the Grand Tour, opened in 1880 and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) in 1893. At a time when scientific racism was at its height in the academy and in new American museum displays, when material Black culture was only on display in the form of 49
human remains in science and physical anthropology exhibits to demonstrate racial inferiority (if at all), Black American collectors influenced by “a Yankee, urban, and bourgeois cluster of values” selectively collected and preserved material culture reflecting “a history that extolled their vision of what they wanted Afro-Americans to be” (Ruffins 1992: 521).
Around the turn of the century, the Great Migration saw Black Americans moving to Northern U.S. cities from the rural south, enticed by the possibility of jobs with better wages, better schools and some relief from Jim Crow racism. The demographic change to cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia was sharp and led to the establishment of new organizations focused on racial uplift, like the
National Urban League in 1909 and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1910.20 Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, the first national African American preservation organization. It also had an accompanying journal (the Journal of Negro
History), marking this period a time where a number of Black organizations were engaged in sociopolitical, legal, economic, cultural and intellectual activism simultaneously. In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance (spurred by the work of
Philadelphia-born Alain Locke) ushered in an unprecedented celebration of Black creativity in literature, scholarship, fine and performing arts (especially creativity
20 Founded as interracial organizations, The Urban League focused on social-work solutions to the problems of racism and racial inequality while the NAACP focused on political and legal paths to fight segregation and lynching. Both organizations had associated journals: The Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life was edited by Charles Johnson, who later became president of Fisk University while the NAACP’s The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races was edited by W. E. B. DuBois. 50
influenced by links to Africa) that was appreciated by Black creatives and white liberals alike. It also initiated an interest in vernacular culture associated with
African Americans and the African diaspora and, arguably, had a hand in creating the first market for art by Black artists. At the same time, Arthur Schomburg, Jesse B.
Moorland and others were privately amassing collections (and occasionally, advising other HBCUs) that would later become foundational to other exhibiting institutions.
In the 1930s, the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress and the Federal Writers' Project began to collect, record and catalogue the memories and folklore of rural Black Americans. These collecting initiatives were spearheaded by more populist white collectors and scholars, influenced by the field of folklore, and, aware of the generations passing away and the post-World War I economic factors forcing families off of rural lands in the American South, were interested in a kind of salvage ethnography. This inaugural effort of the federal government to collect oral histories, music practices and other materials representing the lives of everyday Black Americans resulted in the Library of
Congress and the National Archives (which opened to researchers in 1935) being the largest accessible collections of African American materials by the 1950s. The
Archive of American Folk Song (established in 1928), the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), the Federal Music Project and the Folklore Studies of the
Federal Writers Project collected oral histories of Black Americans—in the case of the WPA, that last living elderly generation that had lived as slaves in the U.S.—often 51
in collaboration with credentialed and amateur Black scholars as collections guides, field interviewers/recorders and oral historians like Zora Neal Hurston.21 These materials in federal collections, which became open to researchers and affected the academic production of history in the 1960s, were largely anomalous in the landscape of American collecting. Melville Herskovits, an anthropologist who studied African Americans and the African diaspora in Suriname, Haiti and
Colombia, is a notable exception—his collection of art, artifacts, documents, books and monographs (published and unpublished) was eventually lodged at
Northwestern University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in
Harlem.
World’s Fairs
World’s Fairs were international expositions meant to display a participating nation’s achievements in business, technology, research and culture, stimulate trade and educate and entertain lay visitors. World’s Fairs originated in Europe in the mid-1800s, and spread across the continent, to the Unites States and the rest of the world. World’s Fairs in America “were founded on the mutually beneficial tethering of the mythos of democratic republicanism to the liberalism of the market economy,” and were designed to serve “as public platforms to promote the promise of industrialization and American manufactures; and as international public spheres to advance American cultural hegemony by demonstrating its superiority and its
21 While Zora Neale Hurston was not described as one of the “professional” scholars on the federal projects, Hurston was trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Barnard College (where she graduated from in 1928) and Columbia University (which she was a student from around 1934-1936). 52
historical legitimacy” (Wilson: 4-5). While host cities showed off their civic pride and amenability to investment and businesses and inventors showed off new products and technologies, arts and scholarly contributions to World’s Fairs were often designed to spread awareness (and create a public appetite for) new institutions and fields of education and knowledge production.
Philadelphia hosted the first World’s Fair in the United States, the Centennial
International Exhibition of 1876. It celebrated the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was held in Fairmount Park from May
10th to November 10th and included the participation of thirty-seven countries and welcomed around ten million visitors. The relatively-new Smithsonian displayed exhibits in the Government Building and used the Centennial Exposition as an opportunity to build a major collection. According to Michele Gates Moresi,
When the Philadelphia Exposition closed, the Smithsonian acquired thousands of new artifacts; forty-two car loads of objects were shipped to the National Museum and it was only then that the institution finally obtained the approved funds to build its first museum building separated from the original Castle to store and exhibit its newest collections. (Moresi 2003: 21)21
The Centennial Exposition also included an art gallery known as Memorial Hall, that inspired Philadelphia’s educational and political leaders to build an art museum. A year later the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the
Philadelphia Museum of Art) opened to the public.
21 The Smithsonian’s second building, first called the Annex and now known as the Arts and Industries Building, was completed in 1881. Robert C. Post, ed., 1876: A Centennial Exhibition (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1976) 209-211. 53
While Black civic and religious leaders met repeatedly to develop a strategy for the inclusion of exhibitions that would tout the accomplishments of Black
Americans in the Centennial Exposition (including a plan to have sculptures commissioned by the artist Edmonia Lewis), Blacks were systematically excluded from participating in the representations of themselves in the exhibits:
…visitors saw African Americans represented only as shoeshine boys, gardeners, waiters, janitors, and an occasional messenger. Nor could black Philadelphians have been pleased by the prominence of the ‘Southern Restaurant,’ a concession granted to a white Atlanta businessman, where, as the Centennial Exposition Guide told readers, they could see ‘a band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’ who will sing their quaint melodies and strum the banjo before visitors of every clime.’ (Nash 2002: 270)
Subsequent World’s Fairs would follow a similar dynamic. The 1893 World’s
Fair in Chicago was similarly exclusionary in its exhibitions. The theme was the advance of civilization. Frederic W. Putnam, then director of the Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, headed up the department of
Ethnology and Archaeology for the Fair, where he oversaw the construction of the anthropological building, which is particularly notable as “the first time that archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology were housed, literally, under one roof and termed anthropology” (Baker 2010: 95). Putnam appointed Franz Boas as chief assistant and put him in charge of the physical anthropology exhibits. A number of scholars mark the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition as the opportunity to showcase and popularize anthropology as a legitimate academic science to the general public, and it marked the American debut of the “living life” exhibit type 54
(Baker 2010, Bank 2002, di Leonardo1998). In the exhibits, the static reconstructed displays of photographs and artifacts lead “seamlessly” to living ethnographic displays featuring Natives recruited to be on display performing their rites and customs—both ritual dances and more mundane practices like cleaning and caregiving—in full view of visitors at all times. While Boas merely meant for the live displays to show objects in use to demonstrate their cultural meaning and the exhibits were supposed “to challenge the evolutionary scheme that simply arrayed specific artifacts or industries from savage to civilized” the spectacle, in the context of the other exhibits meant to show of America’s technological advancement (and the Fair’s overall theme) emphasized the racial difference between visitors and display subjects.
In contrast to Native Americans, who were actively utilized and recruited by organizers for the Fair, various groups of Black Americans who wanted their history and progress represented in the Fair were rebuffed. They were only visible as labor—Black men were employed exclusively as uniformed custodial staff, performing guard duty and light cleanup during visiting hours.22 Ida B. Wells and
Frederick Douglass famously wrote and distributed for free an 81 page pamphlet,
The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Its
22 This was in contrast to the dirtier, more physical cleaning labor and trash removal being done in the evenings by working class whites, (largely newly-arrived immigrants) and in contrast to the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, where Fair organizers were criticized for not hiring Black people in a city with high Black unemployment. This segregated organization of labor was about a particular set of optics—it sent the message to business leaders “that Black men had a (and presumably knew their) distinct place in modern labor relations. If fair management could produce an image of these men as hardworking, docile laborers, then manufacturers might hire even more blacks in an effort to keep wages down and weaken organized labor.” (Lee Baker 2010: 99.) 55
introduction was written three languages and it outlined the progress made by
Blacks since the end of slavery, and criticized Fair organizers for excluding the narrative and evidence of said progress in the Exposition.
The 1895 Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta featured
Smithsonian exhibitions designed to demonstrate to the viewing public the value of institutionally produced scientific research and of museums. Michele Gates Moresi argues that the Smithsonian’s exhibits “presented white visitors with both authoritative evidence of their racial superiority and a source of national pride in a racialist cultural heritage which supported and advanced a New South agenda”
(Moresi 2003: 24). But the 1895 Exposition marked the first appearance of the
“Negro Building” at a World’s Fair, in which a group of Black contractors, designers, intellectuals, businessmen and other “race leaders” built and filled with exhibits a separate exhibition space near the Exposition. Financially and political supported by the same government and industrial sponsors as the Exposition, Black organizers debated whether or not the Negro Building was a poor attempt at interracial compromise and they should continue the fight for inclusion in the Exposition or if one of the first opportunities Black Americans had to control an exhibition space was too important a watershed moment in history.23 Still, Booker T. Washington was chosen as the speaker to represent Black Americans, and his opening
23 The New Orleans World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition in 1885 had a Colored Department in the main exhibition hall, headed by Blanche K. Bruce, a former slave in Missouri who escaped to Kansas in 1862 and became the first Black American to complete a full term in the U.S. Senate (1874-1880). (Pfeffer 2010: 447).
56
ceremonies speech emphasizing interracial harmony and (some criticized) Black deference is what is most often historically remembered about the 1895 Cotton
States Exposition.24
The displays in the Negro Building showed off the material evidence of Black productivity, creativity and respectability. The exhibits contained objects made and patented by Black inventors, images of Black Americans engaged in various kinds of labor and artworks by and featuring Black people. Three decades after the
Emancipation Proclamation, the exhibits meant to emphasize how far Blacks had advanced socially, culturally, economically and intellectually since slavery. By contrast, a section of the Smithsonian’s scientific exhibition in the main hall included a “Types of Mankind” section that displayed twelve costumed mannequin figures that represented “black types”, “brown-red types”,” yellow types” and “white types”—in ascending order of civilization. The “black” and “brown-red” types were placed closest to the displays of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles while the “yellow” and “white” types were further away, near exhibits of man-made objects like antiquities and technology. The exhibit catalog instructed visitors that the displays were “arranged to be studies in regular sequence” of their physical placement, and
24 Referred to as the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington’s September 18th speech at the Fair’s opening ceremonies credited Southern states and Northern philanthropists for the post-slavery progress of Black Americans, emphasized that Black Americans’ path to socioeconomic improvement was by should accepting segregation rather than engaging in political protest, and by focus on gaining industrial work in agriculture, mechanics, and domestic service rather than aspiring to higher education, stating, “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.” (Washington 1995: 107) 57
that the reverse would be “backwards” (Moresi 2003: 38-39). The combination of these displays and Washington’s speech upheld existing racial hierarchies.
Five years later, Thomas Calloway, a lawyer and educator, intervened in the planning of the 1900 Paris Exposition as an advocate for Black participation.
Congress had appropriated $1.25 million for the U.S. pavilion, which did not include any plans for representing Black Americans. Calloway, who had been a state commissioner for the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, sent over 100 letters to important
Black intellectuals, politicians, business and civic leaders arguing for the importance of inclusion and, as a result of their joint efforts, received a Congressional appropriation of $15,000 for an exhibit on the educational and industrial progress of Black Americans, four months before the opening of the Exposition. To mount the exhibition, Calloway worked with Daniel A.P. Murray, Assistant to the Librarian of
Congress and noted collector, and W. E. B. Du Bois, then a sociology professor at
Atlanta University. Together they created the American Negro Exhibit, which included “some five hundred photographs of people, homes, churches, businesses, and landscapes that captured the lives and communities of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century” (Billington 2003: 11). Many of the portraits came out of Du Bois’ special investigative research in Georgia, undertaken for the Paris
Exposition, although Du Bois also assembled photographs of African American educational institutions like Fisk, Howard, Hampton Universities. Daniel Murray provided a bibliography of “1,400 titles, 200 books and many of the 150 periodicals published by black Americans” (Osborne 2003: 17). The exhibit, which Du Bois 58
described as “an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves,” was displayed in the Palace of Social Economy and Congresses rather than in the United States’ national building, but still received extensive praise in the Black press (it was ignored stateside by white press), and earned Du Bois a gold medal at an Exposition that received 50 million visitors in the six months that it was open from April to November 1900.
In an era in which the failures of Reconstruction were being felt acutely by
African Americans in the South who saw their newly Constitutional voting rights eroded, Black Representatives and Senators pushed out of Congress and an uptick in racial violence, Du Bois, Murray and Calloway countered white supremacist depictions of Black Americans by presenting them as cultured, educated, productive and proud. Du Bois did not shy away from the repressive racial terror of the Jim
Crow south (he detailed the laws known as “Black codes” that restricted the possibilities for political, economic and mere physical mobility for Black Americans) but illustrated the advancement of Black Georgians in panels, maps and charts within that context. He reported upon the increase in public school enrollment
(from 10,000 in 1870 to 180,000 in 1897), land ownership (one million acres) and tax payment contributions. The exhibit was also internationalist in its comparisons, noting that the Black population in Georgia was equivalent to about half the number of Spaniards in Spain, and engaged in a very particular racial uplift politics. The photographs were intentionally composed rather than spontaneous: a class of 59
students attentively listening to an instructor, well-dressed church congregants in group portraits in the best Sunday outfits, a family portrait posted on the front steps of a house, elegantly groomed Black Victorians who had their portraits taken in professional studios. Photography historian Deborah Willis noted the ways that
DuBois’s choice to include portrait studio photography attends to the importance of self-representation by Black Americans, while the complimentary community images anticipated and understood “the importance photography would have as historical memory for future generations” (Willis 2003: 72). Although the politics of skin color in the sets of images seemed design to rehearse American preferences abroad. Many of the people pictured were lighter-skinned Blacks, “matinee-idol males with aquiline features and femmes fatales with coils of raven hair rebutted the denigrations of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” (Lewis 2003: 33).
Historian David Levering Lewis notes the aspirational tone of the endeavor,
In many ways, the Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition represented the last hurrah of men and women of culture and accomplishment who still aspired to full citizenship rights regardless of color. As the twentieth century dawned, white supremacy all but nullified the deferential vision of interracial cooperation and fair-dealing Booker Washington had credulously proposed at the Atlanta Exposition only five years earlier. (Lewis 2003: 39)
Twentieth Century Exhibitions
The earliest waves of the Great Migration saw 1.5 million African Americans move to northern U.S. cities from the rural south beginning in 1910. They were drawn north to the urban Northeast and Midwest by the promise of better paying industrial jobs, educational and housing opportunities (often in letters from 60
relatives and from reading northern Black newspapers) as well as relief from
Southern racism. This demographic shift hugely affected the political and cultural landscape in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. New York saw
90,000 Black Americans move into Harlem (from the South, but also from other areas of the country) over the course of a decade, many of whom were artists, scholars and activists whose presence and work made possible the first major Black
American artistic movement. The Harlem Renaissance was known in its time as the
New Negro Movement, named for the 1925 essay (and anthology) “The New Negro” by Alain Locke. A Philadelphia native and Central High School graduate, Alain Locke was chair of the philosophy department at Howard University when his essay
“Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” in the literary journal Survey Graphic. In the essay Locke triumphantly depicted the northern, urban dwelling “New Negro” and
New York in general (Harlem in particular) as intellectually, culturally and artistically flourishing. Locke also urged Black artists to embrace African aesthetic influences in their work, believing they could and should uplift Black people through their exceptional artistic output. In the 1920s, Locke’s Harlem was the epicenter of a spiritual coming of age for Black visual and literary artists, who saw the beginning of a number of opportunities for public engagement outside larger white cultural spaces. An exhibition of painting and sculpture by African Americans at Harlem’s
135th Street branch of the New York Public Library in 1921 became an annual event, and in 1926 the Harmon Foundation began to offer cash prizes to African Americans for achievement in the arts and education (among other fields). Established by 61
white real estate developer William E. Harmon, the Harmon Foundation began organizing juried exhibitions in collaboration with Locke, where they often purchased prize-winning work, and toured the exhibitions so that the widest possible audiences were introduced to art by African Americans.25 The Foundation’s
1929 exhibition, “An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by American Negro
Artists,” was shown at twelve venues, eight of which were museums, and for each of the museums, the first group show of all Black artists.
The Harmon Foundation exhibitions were not without critique. The artist
Romare Bearden called the Harmon Foundation “coddling and patronizing,” noting that the aesthetic preferences of Harmon and Locke overdetermined the visual output of the artists, and that the work was circulating on racial/sociological grounds rather than being appreciated for its technical qualities or aesthetic value.26
25 Michele Gates Moresi provides an extended analysis of a 1929 temporary exhibition of Harmon Foundation award-winning works of art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. At the time the National Gallery of Art did not actively collect or exhibit works by African Americans, and the works of art were on display at the same time as a recently-acquired permanent exhibition of the Herbert Ward African Collection (of artifacts, tools, weaponry, hunting trophies, along with Ward’s travel diaries from several years spent living the Belgian Congo). The collection of 2,700 objects made for an extensive research collection, but the only representation of blackness in the Smithsonian when the exhibition opened to the public in 1922 in the National Museum’s Natural History building. Moresi observed that the art work from the Harmon Foundation represented an alternative to the Ward African Collection exhibition’s racial narrative of Black primitiveness, despite being mounted for twelve days in 1929 and then again for ten days in 1930, in the foyer of the auditorium beneath the first floor where the Ward Collection was on view. While museum planners discussed displaying the Harmon Foundation art on the first floor in/near the art gallery where the lighting was best, they ultimately decided on the ground floor auditorium out of concern that a large number of Black visitors to the exhibition could be embarrassing to them. (Moresi 2003: 88).
26 Bearden, Romare (1934), “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Opportunity, vol. 12 (December), pp. 371– 372.
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Still, the Harmon Foundation has an enduring legacy for its unprecedented support of Black artists:
In the five juried exhibitions that it sponsored between 1928 and 1933, the Harmon Foundation showed almost 500 works by 125 American artists of African descent....When the Foundation closed its office in 1967, its important collection of works by Black artists was divided among several institutions, primarily Fisk University, Hampton University, the National Museum of American Art, and the National Portrait Gallery. (Reynolds 1989: 10)
Amidst these debates about the support, production and circulation of Black intellectual and creative output in exhibitions, the Chicago Institute presented an art show, the “Negro in Art Week: Exhibition of Primitive African Sculpture, Modern
Painting, Sculpture, Drawings, Applied Art, and Books” in 1927. This exhibition was conceived by architect of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and was organized by the Chicago Women’s Club with the goal of “decreasing friction existing between white and colored people by placing before the public an exhibition of the best work produced by Negroes in Fine and Applied Arts, Music and Literature, in combination with an exhibition of primitive African sculpture.”27 The idea of using the arts in service of social change came from Locke’s “The New Negro,” which was optimistic that the “cultural recognition” that could be won by Black artists in the 1920s could improve race relations in America by undermining the stereotypes believed about
Black Americans. This was the first U.S. exhibition of art by Black Americans in an
27 Document: Dawson, Charles C., b. 1889. ‘Negro in Art’ Week of the Chicago Women’s Club, November 1927. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 63
art museum, and it would not be the last time an exhibition was organized for the expressed purpose of working toward racial harmony. It featured works by twenty- two visual artists, including Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edward Bannister, Aaron
Douglass, Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Richmond Barthe, and 116
African sculptures by unnamed artists from the Blondiau Collection of African Art from the Belgian Congo, which was owned by the Harlem Museum of African Art.
Conceptually, the pairing was designed to show illustrate a relationship between
African sculpture and the visual art work of the New Negro. Art historian Bridget
Cooks wrote,
Simultaneously, and contradictorily, the subtitle of the exhibition announced the modern art of Negroes as distinct from the ‘primitive’ sculpture of Africa, distinguishing the New Negro as a contributing and productive member of society clearly evolved from what was widely perceived as an uncivilized and undeveloped African past. (Cooks 2011: 4)
Despite the participation of artists who are now recognized as part of a Black art historical canon and have works in some of the most elite, encyclopedic art museums in the country, “The Negro in Art Week” was not taken seriously by art journalists, critics or scholars (the exhibition was not reviewed at all) and the
Chicago Women’s Club only fielded requests to travel the exhibition from interracial clubs and religious groups “further confirming that it was perceived in sociological, not aesthetic terms” (Cooks 2011: 7).
The belief in the power of the art of the New Negro to undermine white supremacy through artistic excellence continued to confront the challenge Black 64
visual artists faced having their work exhibited and evaluated in art spaces, and being able to sustain an artistic practice at all. Through the 1930s
…proposals for Negro exhibitions from social organizations received mixed responses from art museums. Because the proposals did not come from within the art world and they requested inclusion of an excluded racial group, they were often perceived as impositions to fulfill a liberal social obligation instead of opportunities to fulfill missions already in place for exhibiting high-quality aesthetic materials. (Cooks 2011: 12)
After the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project (a New Deal program that funded the visual arts, funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935) created unprecedented federal support for Black visual artists. Sponsored by the
Works Progress Administration (WPA), it created jobs for artists in four areas, “the creation of art, art education, art as applied to community service, and technical and archaeological research,” and employed a number of Black artists as muralists, teachers, print makers and graphic designers, although artists had to organize to push back against their discriminatory hiring practices (King Hammond 1989).
Among this sociocultural landscape, Black artists started organizing themselves into collectives, starting galleries and working together in service of fellowship and cultivating their artistic practices. Sculptor Augusta Savage opened her Studio of
Arts and Crafts in 1933, and was a co-founder of the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935
(along with Arthur Schomburg), which pressured the WPA on behalf of Black artists and helped the Studio of Arts and Crafts become the Harlem Community Arts
Center, which provided training to Black artists. Artist studios, collectives and other
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community organized spaces nurtured a community of artists who were not receiving regular opportunities to create and exhibit their work. Still, the infrequent exhibition did engage Black creatives, they did so in varied ways. In 1937 the
Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited sculptures by William Edmondson, an untrained sculptor from Nashville who didn’t think of himself as an artist and did not have aspirations for art world recognition, and “whose work was displayed as evidence of the primitive roots of modern American art” (Cooks 2011: 25). In 1939 the Baltimore Museum of Art mounted its first ever exhibition of works by Black artists in “Contemporary Negro Art.” While the exhibition grouped the artists by race, it treated the artwork seriously as art and took a more expansive approach in its presentation of works by Black artists, about which Alain Locke wrote a glowing foreword essay in the exhibition catalog and a critical analysis of the blackness of the works on view in Opportunity.28 In 1941 The Museum of Modern Art in New
York and Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. collaborated to exhibit and tour Jacob Lawrence’s sixty panel painting series “The Migration of the Negro.”
Unlike the exhibition of Edmondson’s sculptures at MoMA,
28 In the exhibition catalogue, Locke wrote, “Many will anxiously scan this and other group exhibits of the work of Negro artists for clues as to just what characteristic things are cropping out. But to date, they are not too obvious, and who can say just what they will be? We must remember how long it was before American art itself began to exhibit characteristic and distinctive national traits. Then, too, under no condition need we expect the Negro artist to be too different from that of his fellow artists….If we are looking, therefore, for racial idioms apart from the more obvious ones of subject matter, we must look— or rather listen—for overtones, and that with not too many preconceptions.” (Locke 1939:unpaginated, 7) In the exhibition review in Opportunity however, he suggests that artists with works on view could improve their practice by having closer contact with “racial types” and actually recommended one artist undertake anthropological studies to make for more obviously blacker aesthetics in his work. (Locke 1939b). 66
The exhibition of Lawrence’s work fulfilled the competing desires for the role of Negro art in museums to be perpetually primitive and contemporary. Lawrence’s folk art aesthetic appealed to the 1930s and ‘40s interest in Negroes as “modern primitive” people. Yet his racially grounded and contemporary subject matter served as a corrective to the invisibility of Negro history and culture in museums….This groundbreaking exhibition set the stage for other mainstream American art museums to seriously consider the work of modern Negro artists through solo exhibitions. (Cooks 2011: 12-13)
MoMA and the Phillips Memorial Gallery each acquired half of the works, and the exhibition toured the nation for two years. In 1945 the Albany Institute of History and Art organized the exhibition, “The Negro Artist Comes of Age” which toured the northeast and was shown in Providence, Rhode Island and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. While Black press and scholarly journals could be counted on to publicize and cover these exhibitions extensively, the same cannot be said for major news outlets which, except for Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration of the Negro” and the Baltimore Art Museum’s “Contemporary Negro Art,” often mentioned the exhibitions as oddities, or in patronizing tones, when they covered them at all. And scholarship by Cooks, Gary Reynolds and Mary Ann Calo illustrates that the interwar years were marked by a tension between expectations that the best art work by
Black artists would either aesthetically illustrate their distinct, unique blackness— sometimes linked to either a proud or primitive Africanness—or would illustrate the same technical expertise, deep art historical knowledge and creative freedom as their non-Black arts working counterparts.
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This tension around aesthetics and expectations would continue in the post- war era, through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and a version of it would resurface during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Often situated as the cultural counterpart to the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts
Movement was burst of collective creative production in Black visual and performing arts in major U.S. cities (but especially New York, Chicago, Washington,
D.C., Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles). Black Arts Movement artists saw Harlem Renaissance artists as insufficiently politically engaged in the struggles for Black liberation, and their visual, literary and sonic aesthetic representations were less wedded to mid-20th century respectability values and much more leftist and Black Nationalist. Their embrace of Africa was not a primitive, antecedent Africa but an embrace of a living, thriving, anti-colonial struggling Africa.
While Black artists had been forming collectives, starting workshops and organizing alternative art spaces to the larger white exhibiting institutions since the
Harlem Renaissance, collectives further proliferated in the 1960s and were increasingly political. Black artists in New York actively and openly challenged the city’s major institutions about their exclusionary exhibition practices. In 1968 the
Whitney Museum of American Art mounted an exhibition, “Painting and Sculpture in
America: The 1930s,” that had no Black artists in it. Black artists mobilized in response. The director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s community gallery Henri
Ghent organized an exhibition based on art in the 1930s entitled “Invisible
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Americans: Black Artists of the ‘30s,” at the new Studio Museum in Harlem that same fall. Black artists also picketed the Whitney Museum exhibition.
This Black artist backlash to a major institutional exhibition would repeat itself again a year later, with the mounting of the exhibition “Harlem On My Mind:
The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968” at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Conceived by Allon Schoener, visual arts director of the New York State Council on the Arts, the exhibition was designed to celebrate the history of Black Harlem, and was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the New York State Council. The exhibition was discussed publicly for months before it opened. Museum president
Thomas Hoving stated publicly that the exhibition would mark a turning point in the
Met’s history of being unresponsive to sociopolitical changes and a grand appreciation for Black Harlem. Prior the exhibition Hoving boasted, “I don't know of any institution better qualified, by reason of its basic humanist orientation, its acute and intelligent sensitivity for a disparate range of cultural expressions, better qualified than this one to attempt such an exhibition” (Hoving 1969: 244). This despite the fact that in an exhibition preview held six months prior for a select audience received the ire of Black viewers, for its lack of both Black artists and of scholarly content. The multimedia exhibit consisted of over 2,000 unframed photographs, slides, reproduced magazine covers and advertisements for performances and taped interviews. Photos of prominent Harlem residents were mounted and speakers played ambient street sounds of the city. It was not the kind of exhibition that the Met typically displayed, and the abundance of photographs 69
(before fine arts photography was accepted as legitimate in major art museums) meant that an elite art museum had opted to present Harlem ethnographically, complete with “a closed-circuit television showed the real-time activity at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem” (Cooks 2011: 61).
Rather than the specific artistic brilliance Harlem was known for, the exhibition was largely a historical/sociological examination of Black Harlemites: “Harlem, the spiritual and psychological metonym for so much modern American culture, had simply become an avatar for all that was black” (Jones 2011: 399). The Harlem
Cultural Council publicly denounced the exhibition before it was finished and open to the public and the artist Benny Andrews started the Black Emergency Cultural
Coalition (BECC) in 1969 to respond to it, picketing the exhibition once it opened to the public. Art critics and the press were brutal in their coverage29 and this battle between Black artists, Harlem residents and the Museum over “Harlem on My Mind” became one of the great cultural case studies in the deep investments in politics and aesthetics of Black representation.30
29 The exhibition catalogue for “Harlem on My Mind” raised the ire of Jewish community groups in New York, led by the Anti-Defamation League. The introduction to the catalogue was written by a high school student, Candace Van Ellison, and in a section on intergroup relations included the lines, “…psychologically, Blacks find that anti-Jewish sentiments place them, for once, within a majority. Thus, our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice.” New York Mayor John Lindsay issued a statement denouncing the catalogue as racist “slander” and threatened to revoke city funding to the museum, which would have cost the Met $3.5 million. The Met first defended the catalogue, then issued a disclaimer that was inserted in it, then pulled the catalogue from its gift shop less than a week after the exhibition had been open. “Fourteen thousand had been sold. The remaining twenty-six thousand were taken out of circulation and stashed in the museum’s basement. (Later they were given to schools and community organizations.)” (Cahan 2016: 77)
30 The importance and continuing significance of the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition and its resulting fallout to the history of Black visual culture and the collective memory of Black arts and culture workers 70
In 1969 the BECC pressured the Whitney Museum of American art about increased representation of Black artists in their exhibitions, collections and staffing. These negotiations successfully produced a series of exhibitions: twelve exhibitions featuring Black artists—eleven solo and one group from 1969-1975. The first (paintings by Al Loving) in 1969 was followed two months later by a show of works by sculptor Melvin Edwards in 1970. Benny Andrews later lamented that these single-artist shows were in a lobby gallery where students and early career artists were usually exhibited, rather than in the larger, main galleries on the upper floors of the Museum. Still, in April, 1971 the Whitney mounted Contemporary Black
Artists in America in their major galleries. Despite how hard the BECC worked to fight for the exhibition, they were dismayed at the lack of Black leadership on the project, and specifically, the absence of a Black co-curator. They began planning protests of the exhibition six months in advance and by its April opening, fifteen of the seventy-five artists invited to exhibit their work withdrew from the show, some of the artist removing their work after the exhibit had already been hung in the galleries. The remaining exhibition of over eighty works by fifty-eight artists received terrible reviews. Critics lamented that the Whitney had mounted a show in response to the politics of the day (rather than the “higher” aesthetic values) and belittled the work of the artists. An alternative exhibition of fifty artists was
cannot be overstated. At a March 25, 2017 symposium at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, keynote panelist Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Chariman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art quipped about her graduate studies at Howard University “Oh my god, at Howard they use Harlem On My Mind to teach everything.” 71
mounted at the Acts of Art Gallery (which was owned by Black painter Nigel
Jackson) in the West Village called “Rebuttal To The Whitney Exhibition.” Art historian Kellie Jones assesses these contentious exhibitions as emblematic of this era, observing that
…like the standard museological and critical frameworks of the period, there was no real expertise being brought to the table that could provide an avenue to conceptualize how Black artists were at once part of, and still working in ways different from, Western canonical modes. (Jones 2011: 419)
This problematic staging of Black exhibitions cannot be attributed entirely to the absence of qualified scholars and experts. Henri Ghent became the first director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Community Gallery in 1968, and organized more than fifty exhibitions for them before his dismissal in 1972. In 1968 The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art hired artist/art historian Samella Lewis to consult for its
Education Department and the Oakland Museum hired artist E. J. Montgomery as an ethnic art consultant. In 1970 Edmund Gaither, a curator for the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, founded the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Art historian
Lowery Stokes Sims began working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, and art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell was a curator at the Everson Museum of
Fine Arts in Syracuse, New York before becoming executive director of the Studio
Museum in Harlem in 1977.
In 1976, museum-going publics finally got a historically comprehensive exhibition of art by Black Americans with the mounting of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art’s “Two Centuries of Black American Art.” Guest curated by Fisk 72
University Art Department chair David C. Driskell, the exhibition contained over two hundred works of art, from 1750 to 1950, and placed the history of the artists and their works in the context of both American history and art history. Driskell, who had been a student of James A. Porter’s at Howard University, aimed to counter exhibitions like “Harlem on My Mind” by providing an encyclopedic survey of Black
American creative production, in the year of the nation’s bicentennial when conversations in the world of arts and culture were mobilizing rhetoric about the ability of art to bring disparate groups of people together. The exhibition, funded by
Philip Morris and the National Endowment for the Humanities, was a watershed moment in the history of American art and of Black self-representation, and casts a long shadow in cultural memory partially due to its touring schedule. It traveled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in
Dallas, Texas and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Critics alternatively praised and lamented Driskell’s evenhanded, academic approach to the artists, or questioned his use of race as a structuring feature of the exhibit, or disagreed with the omission of Black artists they considered important to a show like “Two
Centuries.” Despite the array of conflicting reviews, the exhibition was extensively reviewed in major and minor art spaces, and in Black press outlets, marking it as unprecedented in the history of exhibitions featuring Black cultural production.31
31 In 1970, a large exhibition entitled “Dimensions of Black” was mounted at the La Jolla Museum of Art in La Jolla, California. The survey exhibition included 341 objects of African art and of art by Black Americans, lent from elite collectors and institutions all over the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Schomburg Center in New York, 73
Some critics admitted that the exhibition revealed how much they needed to learn to have a meaningful intellectual interface with Black American art.
Art historian Alvia J. Wardlaw notes that “What was critical to learn in Driskell’s exhibition was that holdings of African American art could be found additionally at previously unexamined institutions, such as historically Black colleges and universities (known as HBCUs) and major Black businesses” (Wardlaw 2009: 11-
12). Bridget Cooks argues that the exhibition improved the national recognition of
Black artists and that the exhibition catalogue has made a major impact on art history. Indeed, the exhibition catalogue today reads like a guide to the African
American collections of most major American art museums.
Conclusion
For decades, Black civic and religious leaders, artists, collectors, intellectuals and general publics repeatedly pushed for the inclusion of Black art, history and cultural practices in major exhibitions and World’s Fairs. Black intellectuals repeated wrote and spoke out against this racial exclusion from 1876 through the
1950s, which marks the beginning of a period sometimes referred to as the Black
Museum Movement (Burns 2013, Ruffins 1992). In the post-War era Black artists
The National Gallery and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Field Museum in Chicago, and several of the major public and university museums in California. “Dimensions of Black” was curated by Jehanne Teilhet, then on faculty at the University of California at San Diego, in collaboration with students from one of Dr. Teilhet’s African Art courses. Despite the impressive breadth and depth of the exhibition, its catalogue, and its strong visitation numbers (at least 2,000 visitors attended the opening reception), the exhibition did not travel and was not widely reviewed by arts writers in newspapers and journals, which may be a factor in the 1976 LACMA exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art” being widely described as the first major survey exhibition of art by Black Americans by a mainstream art museum. 74
themselves upped this ante by writing open letters and publicly protesting their exclusion from exhibiting spaces, framing the segregation as a failure to properly represent the creative production the institutions purported to provide to the public, and as an attempt to erase them from the historical/art historical record and as a threat to their livelihood as working artists. The era of the Black Museum
Movement is an outgrowth of a combination of demographic and political trends in major cities, like the Great Migration that brought new, Black populations to cities in the northeast and the Midwest, and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that revived thinking about Black political and cultural representation and as a right of American citizens. But the Black Museum Movement is also rooted in the long exhibition history of Black people having their efforts for meaningful representation and inclusion in museum exhibitions consistently thwarted. This historical backdrop explains why civic and intellectual activists set their sights on museums, and in the next chapter I turn to the site of Philadelphia and the founding of its activist-founded Black museum.
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CHAPTER 4: PUBLIC MEMORIES, INSTITUTIONAL NARRATIVES AND THE CRAFTING OF A HERITAGE INSTITUTION
“Is Richard still there?”
Like a number of long term Philadelphia residents, Frank had worked with the museum before, and his query when I told him about my working with AAMP signaled both his lingering investment in the museum and his present disconnection. A museum marked by publicized turmoil and high staff turnover,
Richard was the longest term AAMP staff member. His several decades with the museum, incredible memory of Philadelphia and institutional history, social connections to nearly every one of Philadelphia’s arts and culture institutions (as a fine artist in his own right) and uncanny abilities to charm all audiences and to solve any exhibition construction problem made him a crucial fixture in the continued functioning of the Museum. Part human hard drive, part beloved elder statesman, and part good will ambassador, I sometimes joked with visitors that Richard was
AAMP’s most important load-bearing wall. “Is Richard still there?” was a question that, depending on tone, could express shock, suspicion or hope. It positioned the speaker as a kind of insider, and the answer could occasionally facilitate miracles: if
Richard was still there, this artist, lender, vendor, or performer might entertain a staff request, even as they expressed a deep skepticism for the institution as a whole.
Frank’s refrain was one of many recurring responses I heard when expressing an affiliation with AAMP, including “Bless your heart,” “Good luck,” and
76
“They need people like you.” Each of these responses to me as a researcher-curator index the role of AAMP in the public memory of Philadelphia, shared collectively by those who had worked with the Museum before, had followed unfavorable news coverage of AAMP in local papers or had visited the Museum for a program, exhibition or event and been disappointed. Artists, academics and other museum professionals did not often say negative things about the museum directly to me.
Instead, a racialized in-group/out-group dynamic shaped the ways African
Americans framed their frustrated senses of AAMP in moments of miscommunication, frustration or institutional failure: “We gotta do better.” The often repeated refrain is more than an exasperated indictment of an institution by an unpaid vendor, disrespected volunteer or visitor catching typos on a brochure. It signals an array of complicated group dynamics—for the speaker, the “we” is sometimes AAMP employees, museums in general, small museums, Black museums,
Black people, cultural organizations in Philadelphia, or the arts industries overall.
This is part of the context with which I approach the history of The African
American Museum in Philadelphia. Looking at institutional records, news coverage of the museum and reviews of scholarly writing on AAMP since it opened frame the
Museum’s founding and presence as a story of activist triumph, of a series of compromises that would always be a challenge to the Museum’s success, or something entirely different altogether. A Museum funded by the city of
Philadelphia in preparation for the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations, The African
American Historical and Cultural Museum, as it was called from 1976-1999, had the 77
distinction of being the only museum funded and built by a municipal government to “preserve, interpret, and exhibit the heritage of African Americans.” This distinction, articulated in every internally generated description of the Museum, functions as a source of pride for some museum supporters, and a culprit for dissatisfying interactions with the Museum for others.
While it was not the only Bicentennial museum funded by the city of
Philadelphia, it was the only museum whose history of a protracted battle between city officials, museum activists, civic leaders, neighborhood associations and material financial constraints was so embedded in public memory that journalists still rely on four decades later as an explanatory alibi. In this chapter, I offer an account of AAMP in the public memory of Philadelphia, as glimpsed through several lenses —scholarly, staff, reporter and supporter. Through a close reading of journalistic coverage, I aim to balance the messy, complicated senses of a museum still affectionately referred to by some as “The Afro” as it exists at the cultural, political, and racial crossroads of a deindustrial American city. Like other Black museums, this cultural field—my cultural field—was founded, partly in response to the exhibitions and collections histories covered in Chapters 2 and 3, and I write
1970s Philadelphia into that history here.
During the Museum’s fortieth anniversary year, a number of politicians, arts community leaders and journalists congratulated AAMP on forty years in ways that glossed over the varied experiences of that history among visitors, present and former employees and the city itself. I attend to these variations here, making no 78
attempt to reconcile the highs and lows, joys and disappointments, or the surprised return of previously disappointed visitors, journalists or artists or disgruntled employees to the Museum’s galleries and staff rosters. But I want to contextualize these contradictory senses of AAMP within a nuanced reading of the Museum’s already complicated history. As an uneasy outcome of a battle between founders and city politicians in the 1970s, in some ways AAMP may have been doomed from the start. This uneasy early history is still in the bones of the institution—from its location to its architecture to its names. That this history played out in spectacular fashion in the local newspapers indicates the hurdles founders and staff confronted on their quest to create a Black heritage institution and over-determines the public’s sense of AAMP.
Arts Meets Politics: The Aesthetic Dimensions of Black Organizing
One could make the case that AAMP almost missed the Black Museum
Movement. Ruffins marks this period from 1950-1980, claiming that during this time
…well over ninety African American museums were founded in the United States and Canada….after 1950 scores of museums were founded in urban black communities, mostly as freestanding entities not part of a church, school, or any preexisting black institution. Often these new museums were founded by community activists who had worked in the civil rights movement at some level and now wanted to use that expertise for a cultural agenda. (Ruffins 1992: 557)
While museums founded in the 1960s in major cities like New York,
Washington, D.C., Detroit and Chicago were neighborhood museums spearheaded by individuals and community-based committees; AAMP is more unique in its origin 79
story. Its distinction as the “first major museum built by a municipality to tell the story of African Americans” marks it specifically as an institution that is not a neighborhood museum. The fact that the original neighborhood founders wanted for the Museum’s physical location was fought by neighborhood residents
(mirroring the way middle class Black families in the same era struggled to move into white residential areas) all but ensured that AAMP would not be a neighborhood museum, highlighting the unproductive slippage of referring to Black museums euphemistically as “community” or “neighborhood” museums without attending to particularities of space and place.
Further, AAMP’s origins are not just structured by the gains of the Civil
Rights Movement of the 1960s, but also its failures and disappointments. The Black
Power and Black Arts Movements, and the political economic developments of the
1970s that strained the ability of city, state and the federal government policies to ensure that major urban cities could thrive. With its initial funding tied to the city’s celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial and its planning and opening during the larger neoliberal turn in U.S. economy, an African American Museum for this city functioned rhetorically as a political concession, as embodiment of Philadelphia civic compromise, and as a cure for the political problems of racial disharmony caused by urban disinvestment and decades of discrimination in education, housing, employment and law enforcement. Not only can museums in general not cure these political economic problems, museums become ensnared by these very problems. In the case of AAMP, this structured the history of the institution in terms of its 80
location, the building’s architecture, and the ways that the individuals who had the political clout to get the institution funded had the project tied to a major public deadline—the 1976 Bicentennial—which affected the museum’s rocky early years as it struggled to have a life as a museum after the celebration ended. The struggle to meet an opening deadline meant that work of sustaining a museum—building a collection, supporting scholarly programs, assembling a dedicated fundraising apparatus—took a back seat until these issues were near-emergencies. Because this played out in full view of the general public through the media’s coverage, it is part of what viewers see when they look at AAMP, and sometimes why they do not venture inside.
A particular set of forces set the stage for the ability of a group of Black civic and political leaders to fight for support for an African American museum in the city of Philadelphia. Waves of the Great Migration from changed the urban demography, social organization and electoral political possibilities in the city of Philadelphia.
Enticed by the possibility of factory jobs and greater opportunities in the industrial north, an estimated six million African Americans left the south. Philadelphia saw its
Black population increase by 20.6% in the first wave (1910-1940) and an additional
7.5% during the second wave (1940-1970).32 Drawn by family, friends and labor recruiters attempting to fill worker shortages, new Philadelphians moved to escape
32 United States Census,“The Great Migration: 1910-1970” https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/508.php 81
Jim Crow segregation, racial terrorism and an inhospitable labor market, starting and filling Philadelphia churches, social clubs, and political organizations.
Despite the increasing number of African Americans in the city, twentieth century Philadelphia demography was marked by population loss. Its number of residents peaked at 2.1 million in 1950 and fell in subsequent decades, such that it was down to 1.95 million in 1970. This occurrence during the second wave of the
Great Migration meant that by 1970 African Americans accounted for one-third of the city’s population. The second wave also coincided with the city’s white residents disproportionately leaving Philadelphia for its suburbs, such that even after the end of the Great Migration the proportion of African American residents had increased to 45 percent by 1990, “not due to continued in-migration but to continued abandonment of Philadelphia by whites in the context of overall population loss”
(Goode and Schenider 1994: 34).
These changes in racial demography made possible northern strategies of
Civil Rights and Black Power activism that changed Philadelphia politics
(Countryman 2006). Disappointed by the limits of the liberal strategies of the Civil
Rights Movement and confronting the failure of a liberal faith the ability of political and legal reforms to materially reverse racial discrimination in employment, housing, political representation, law enforcement and education, Black Power activists turned to strategies of collective action and self-reliance that created a powerful coalition of Black Philadelphians. In contrast to Civil Rights perspectives, these activists sought equal outcomes rather than just equal opportunities to whites 82
in the city. They effectively protested employers and local politicians, sought to integrate and, in some cases, have control over schools in Black neighborhoods, and ran free health clinics and breakfast programs before turning their attention to electoral politics. While Countryman assesses the “mobilization of black electoral majorities and pluralities in major urban areas” as a failure in hindsight, the emergence of Black political bloc in 1960s and 1970s Philadelphia appeared as a formidable challenge to the ways that Black political organizing in the decades prior was dominated by middle-class professionals.33 Ultimately, “the Black Power movement in Philadelphia challenged the decision-making structures that controlled public and private investment in the city.” (Countryman 2006: 8) This structural change reconfigured the power and influence that Black entrepreneurs, community activists, and religious and civic leaders could exert over city planners and elected officials in the era (even when they did not hold political offices) and made it possible for figures like businessman Clarence Farmer, Civil Rights activist
Judge Raymond Pace Alexander and respected Philadelphia reverends to have the power to advocate for a Black museum.
Additionally, in the context of an economic recession and the increase of conservative elected officials, arguments that the arts and cultural institutions might offer a solution to the sociopolitical racial problems in urban cities gained steam,
33 For Countryman this strategy failure was “as much the product of urban deindustrialization and of suburban antitax politics—historical developments that can be directly traced to postwar liberalism’s policy making—as it was the result of a white working-class backlash against the ethnic political strategies of Black Power.” (Countryman 2006:9) 83
sometimes in lieu of directly addressing trenchant inequality. As observed by Judith
Goode, “business, political, and media elites in Philadelphia spoke in terms of a pluralist mosaic of cultures model that avoids race and power. They proudly evoked this model when the city staged the national bicentennial in 1976” (Goode 1998: 39-
40). The arguments for subsequent investments in AAMP and similar institutions reveal the insidious neoliberal conceit in the ability of the arts to solve problems caused by sedimented histories of racial inequality and urban disinvestment.
A Shaky Foundation: Birthing An Institution In Post-Industrial Philadelphia
In the midst of demographic and social change in Philadelphia, planning for the nation’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976 began to take shape in major cities across the country. Bicentennial commissions were formed so that major cities could plan celebrations that would draw visitors and media coverage that would position them as desirable tourist destinations. In what would come to be a hallmark of neoliberal urbanism, city and business interests in Philadelphia saw the
Bicentennial celebration as an opportunity to attract a mix of public and private financial support to redevelop and present to the world a shiny, new downtown.
The loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs in the city (75% of these jobs between
1955 and 1975 alone) resulted in additional loss of population as white city residents moved to the suburbs and tax base, which meant that Center City was becoming increasingly less white and less wealthy as it became postindustrial. In the
1950s development-minded Democratic reformers were elected to city government, breaking a decades-long Republican hold on Philadelphia politics. Beginning with 84
Mayor Joseph Clark in 1952 and continuing with Richardson Dilworth, these reformers began redevelopment projects that would rely on state and federal funds.
Their goals included developing a downtown central business district, a shopping plaza, a historic district and neighborhood revitalization around Independence Hall, and a transportation infrastructure that would make it easier for suburban residents to access downtown attractions as part of a 1960 Comprehensive Plan.
By the late 1960s President Richard Nixon took office and ended the federal funding that these development projects counted on, and successive Philadelphia
Mayors James Tate (1962) and Mayor Frank Rizzo (1972) had become known respectively for “corruptible leadership” and for a violently brutal application of
“law and order” policies, redevelopment forces needed a spectacular display to offer potential visitors and developers (Feffer 2004). Planning for the Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia began in 1963, and Philadelphia civic and business planners sought initially to mount a giant international exposition in the style of earlier, historically significant World’s Fairs. The exposition would have included projects stretching to 30th Street and engaging North and West Philadelphia neighborhoods, but after initially supporting the plans, the Nixon administration opted not to support them financially. The disappearance of federal funding for redevelopment and the promise of national attention meant that the plans for the celebration scaled back and essentially merged with the city’s plans for development, particularly targeting Society Hill and what would eventually become
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the Market East shopping mall. These became the areas that would be the “talk of the nation” after being developed for the Bicentennial.
Events associated with the celebration of the Bicentennial were meant to display national unity, despite 1976 being in the middle of one of the more turbulent eras of the nation’s political history. Feffer’s observes that “Rather than address the conditions of life in American cities and suburbs or the promise of American politics after Watergate and Vietnam, Philadelphia’s Bicentennial speeches and rituals merely gestured toward healing wounds opened by the social and political conflicts of the previous decade,” and that politicians sought to avoid the histories of
“abolitionism, industrialization, or immigration with their attendant reminders of class and racial conflict” that structured life in Philadelphia (Feffer 2004: 801). In the midst of pushback from everyday Philadelphians about the failures of the city to back up the narratives of unity with policies and funding34, several museums were constructed for the Bicentennial with city funds: the Mummers Museum, the Living
History Center and the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum.35
34 People’s ’76 counter events were staged during the Bicentennial celebration in North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia, where more of the city’s Black, Latino and working class whites lived. Most of these events fell through, due to lack of funding or lack of participation and “most activities by People’s 76 in Philadelphia were abandoned, the work of the project folded into that of the July 4th Coalition, a national campaign led largely by the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC, the aboveground affiliate of the Weather Underground), which planned the counter-Bicentennial march that eventually did occur on the Fourth of July.” [Feffer 2004: 810]
35 The Pennsylvania state legislature had planned to pay to have another institution built, The Port of History Museum at Penn’s Landing, that it would give it as a “gift” to the city for the Bicentennial celebration. While planning began in 1968, the structure itself wasn’t finished until 1977 and the $9.6 million building did not open to the public until 1981. The Port of History Museum was too expensive to operate and eventually the Philadelphia Maritime Museum moved into the building in 1994, renovated it, 86
At the time, several institutions devoted to collecting and exhibiting Black history, art and artifacts were open in other parts of the country. The collection that started the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture had been purchased for the New York Public Library in 1926, and the institution renamed in Arthur
Schomburg’s honor in 1938. Alonzo Aden and James Herring established the
Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1943. Several others opened in the
1950s and 1960s, including the African American Museum in Cleveland (1953), the
San Francisco Afro-American Historical Society (1956), and the Afro-American
Historical Society of Boston (1959). Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American
History opened in 1961 as the Ebony Museum of History and Art, while the Charles
H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit was founded in 1965 as the International Afro-American Museum. As we will see with AAMP, each of these name changes also index shifting political, bureaucratic, and cultural economies undergirding Black institutional life.
African American art and history museums were also operating in other cities with sizeable Black populations, including Boston (Museum of the National
Center for Afro-American Artists established in 1968 and the Museum of Afro-
American History in 1969), Charlotte (1974), and Dallas (1975). The Anacostia
Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. was established by the Smithsonian as an outpost of the museums on the National Mall in 1967 and the Studio Museum in and re-opened to the public as the Independence Seaport Museum in 1995. See: “Five Years Late, Philadelphia Opens Museum,” The New York Times, December 20, 1981, and “About the Seaport Museum,” Independence Seaport Museum website, www.phillyseaport.org/about 87
Harlem opened to the public in 1968. Several of these institutions were started by individuals as house museums, or as neighborhood museums geographically located in predominantly Black residential or mixed-use areas. What is unique about
Philadelphia’s Black museum is its relationship to the Bicentennial, both as an event that was planned to draw national attention to the city, and as a deadline for the institution as a civic project.36 Because of the high profile Bicentennial and the media coverage of it, every major detail of the museum’s planning played out in city newspapers like political ping pong—occasionally with museum founders adeptly using the media to advance the museum as a political project. But this strategic airing of dirty laundry left lingering effects on the public expectations and perceptions of the museum, especially by Philadelphia residents.
Making the News: The African American Museum and Public Memory
News media plays an important role in the production of collective memory.
Maurice Halbwachs theorized collective memory as fundamentally social, containing
“events that were rendered to an individual by other members of society” and as the active past that forms present identities and subjectivities. For Halbwachs, memory is formed and retrieved selectively and within a context that is social and spatial, relying on publicly available commemorative symbols and technologies, and tied to
36 Philadelphia was not the only city to have a Black museum have funding related to the Bicentennial exhibitions. The Museum for Education and Research in American Black Art, Science and History in New Jersey (opened 1972) received funds from the New Jersey Bicentennial Commission, the Great Plains Museum in Omaha received funds from the U.S. Bicentennial Commission for its 1976 opening and Michele Gates Moresi compares the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology Bicentennial exhibition with the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum’s exhibition for a discussion of how the two Smithsonian museums alternatively silenced and elevated the presence of African Americans in their exhibitions’ narratives of the nation (Moresi 2003). 88
the cultural and political needs of the moment. Both Halbwachs and Benedict
Anderson noted the importance of news media’s ability to construct collective senses of memory and community. Beyond the newspapers’ dissemination of information, the act of reading the news and discussing it with others makes it an important tool in the construction of collective memory for Halbwachs. For
Anderson, newspapers are important as a form of print capitalism that has a role in constructing an imagined community. Anderson conceptualized newspapers as helping make up the infrastructure of a nationalist imaginary, theorizing that newspaper reading creates a community of readers through the ritual of the reading.
Because newspapers—especially Black newspapers—are an important archive of Black cultural production, I consider coverage of the museum in national news, and especially in the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and The Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest continuously published Black newspaper. Due to their combined circulation of over
1 million people, the Philadelphia newspapers are one way that a public can interact with the Museum without setting foot inside.37 These articles were designed to generate interest in an upcoming exhibit or event, review an exhibition, report on a
37 In the late 1969 alone, the Philadelphia Bulletin and Philadelphia Inquirer had daily circulation figures at 648,000 and 473,000 respectively, while the Sunday edition of the Bulletin had circulation at 714,000 and the Sunday Inquirer 905,000. Edgar Williams, 2009. “A brief history of the Inquirer.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 2009. http://www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/inquirer/inq_history.html
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ceremony that honors important Black figures or an event that featured national celebrities and the stories that cover financial issues and major staffing changes. In their content, circulation and ability to construct community and memory, these news stories contribute to public perceptions of the Museum’s stability or the sense that, as one well-meaning longtime Philadelphia Black resident told me, “That place is a mess,” despite admitting that he had not been inside the building in several years.38
Other analyses of the history of museums cite news coverage, but my engagement here is focused on the volume and types of articles and their sources to highlight the sense of AAMP that newspaper readers can have even if—especially if—they do not ever go, and the ways that knowing this contributes to the proactive and reactive relationships staff have to media coverage. In some ways, the savvy relationship to media creates a fraught sense that journalistic coverage of AAMP can
(and should) be managed internally—a sentiment that is not uncommon in the neoliberal era of public relations and marketing, but challenging in an institution without a formal marketing department, and often without the kinds of curatorial staff that come to AAMP already vested in professional networks of arts critics and other writers that often begin in graduate school.
38 As an example, a 2004 Philadelphia Daily News article entitled “An Institution That’s Lost Its Way” began, “The African American Museum in Philadelphia is in trouble. So what else is new? Rather than be a beacon for Black art and history, the venue at 7th and Arch has become a conservatory of poor governance and frustration. In July, Harry Harrison, the museum's 14th executive director in 28 years, quit. This after he had to lay off staff and beg the city for a $150,000 advance on the annual $300,000 allotment it gives to the museum. The city gave $135,000. According to a 2002 audit, the museum had a $160,000 deficit, though the city and state ponied up $1 million, nearly half the museum's annual budget.” 90
Accounts of the founding and early history by politicians, funders, older volunteers and activists, former board members and corporate funders trend toward surprisingly positive or steeped in false nostalgia. Reading secondary source histories of Philly Black institutions that attend to the nuances of local
Philadelphia politicians, demographics, neighborhood movements and primary source documents and institutional archives lends itself to a useful historical analysis. My reading of four decades journalism here aims to capture a number of other things. First, the news articles on the Museum were often produced in collaboration with board, staff members, visitors and volunteers in ways that few other sources on the Museum are; second, they are helpful for understanding the contradictions in the senses Philadelphians have of the Museum (I often read a news item, journal interview or museum exhibition catalogue essay where someone characterized AAMP in a way that directly contradicted things they said to me); third, taken together they illustrate an almost ethnographic sense of the Museum that readers can have without visiting it. In some ways this sense helps account for the return of former staff members, enticed by how much more exciting the institution sounds in news items than it did when they left the institution in the past, or the visitors who have heard about budget problems in news items and are pleasantly surprised by an exhibition about a subject of their curiosity, or the artists who attend an opening reception for an exhibition that features work by them or their friends and comments, “I haven’t been here in years.”
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Various accounts of the early activism to push the city to contribute funding for a Black museum credit well-placed African American civic leaders with generating public interest in the museum, and convincing city planners of the wisdom of funding the endeavor. Scholars in Philadelphia argued in planning meetings and in newspaper opinion columns that it would be a mistake for city- wide celebrations of American history to leave out African American contributions to that narrative, pushing Philadelphia ’76, the non-profit set up by the city to plan the celebration, to consider a proposal to fund a Black cultural center in time for the
Bicentennial. Questions about whether or not a museum would actually be built plagued the proposal from the beginning. In October 1974, the city’s Black newspaper, The Philadelphia Tribune ran an article by Len Lear, “Black Bicen Plans
Run Into Roadblocks,” reporting on the proposal for the museum: “The Tribune has learned that the planners of the Bicentennial celebration are hoping to build a permanent Black History Museum to highlight the contributions of Black Americans to the millions of visitors expected here in 1976, but plans have run into roadblocks”
(Lear 1974). The article went on to state that despite a financial pledge from the
Haas Foundation, planning was being held up by community disagreement on the museum’s location and petty infighting among Black Philadelphians exerting influence over the planning process. An Afro-American Historical and Cultural
Corporation was pulled together to discuss and plan the idea—a group of 56 people that consisted of influential middle-class Black Philadelphians. While the Tribune reported that feasibility studies were already being commissioned and historian 92
Charles Wesley had already been tapped as project director, community pushback around the museum plans actually began to appear in the newspaper years earlier.
In a 1971 article “Militant Leader Opposes Negro History Museum,” the Tribune featured an interview with Edna Thomas, head of the Philadelphia Women for
Community Action, who criticized the Bicentennial planned museum. Ms. Thomas said,
In the first place, a few handpicked handkerchief heads like Sam Evans, Herman Wrice, Mansfield Neal and Harold Haskins who are all on the Bicentennial board appear to be using this as a gimmick to rip- off $10 million. Where have these Johnny-come-latelies been all these years when so many people were working so hard to get Black History into the Philadelphia Public School System? Sam Evans told me this museum was a great idea, but where has he been all these years when the Study for Negro Life and History has been conducting workshops and other programs to get Black History into the Philadelphia public schools? (Lear 1971)
Thomas’ public questioning of the activists’ intent frames their motivations as financial and personal rather than a true commitment to community uplift. By attending to the activists and organizations doing the educational work that a Black museum’s mission would be frame around, Thomas criticized the individuals trying to get the museum funded as being insufficiently interested in the museum as an end unto itself, stating “The few money-grabbers should not be allowed to use this subterfuge to fatten their own pockets through the Bicentennial. They are not interested in Black History or any kind, other than Green (money) History.” Beyond doubt about activists’ intentions, the project to start a Black museum in Philadelphia had even more roadblocks on the horizon.
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In the earliest stages of planning for Black inclusion in the Bicentennial celebration, there were suggestions for an exhibit that portrayed the African
American contributions to the nation’s history as well as the response suggestion for a permanent museum. After Philadelphia ’76 approved a proposal for a Black history museum, the Black History Exhibit Nominating Committee started to hold meetings in spring 1974. Gerard P. William, project manager and executive assistant to the chair of Philadelphia ’76, wrote to Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, a prominent Black judge, to ask about pulling together a group of elite Black members and white allies for the committee. Clarence Farmer, a member of Philadelphia ’76 who was also a prominent Black entrepreneur and executive director of the city’s
Commission on Human Relations, also started to hold meetings with civic leaders about the Museum. Black Philadelphians with social, political or financial standing were beginning to express interests, desires and concerns about the museum before the city committed funding to build the museum at all. The Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum’s articles of incorporation were filed by Reverend Gus Roman,
Ralph H. Jones, and the Honorable Raymond Pace Alexander in fall of 1974. One of its major purposes was to
…construct, maintain, establish, operate and/or support reading rooms, libraries, archives and museums commemorating and showcasing Afro-American heritage and the role of Afro-Americans in American history in order to contribute to raising the level of enlightenment of the people of the City of Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and all others, who, from time to time, may visit this city and state…. (AAMP 1974)39
39 Articles of Incorporation, AAMP. Signed August 29, 1974. 94
This was weeks before the discussions in the Philadelphia ’76 subcommittee planning meetings for the museum began to leak out across city newspapers. When the Tribune reported in October 1974 on the museum’s “roadblocks” it quoted Paul
Garabedian, coordinator for the ethnic programs for Philadelphia ’76, “In addition to the usual jealousy and bitterness you have with different groups of people, some
Black s won’t have anything to do with others. Some members of the ‘Black
Establishment,’ for example, won’t have anything to do with other Blacks.” The article ended with Garabedian’s insistence that Philadelphia ’76 was not a funding agency, giving readers the impression that there may not ever be a museum.
Garabedian later complained in private letters to the president and editor of the
Tribune that his words had been misrepresented by the article. On December 10,
1974 a Tribune article reported,
The Tribune has learned from highly reliable sources that the Black History Museum, a $1.5 million structure that was to be built as part of the Bicentennial celebration to highlight the contributions of Black Americans over the past 200 years, has been killed on orders from Mayor Frank Rizzo….The Tribune received the information from sources who were outraged at the Mayor’s decision, allegedly made in conjunction with Albert Gaudiosi, $50,000-a-year Bicentennial executive and former campaign manager for Mayor Rizzo. (Lear 1974)40
Charging racism and noting that Rizzo had ordered between $1.2 million and
$1.5 million to be budgeted for the Mummers Museum, the article continued,
40 Len Lear, “City Moves to Scrap Plans To Build $1.5 Million Black History Museum,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 10, 1974. 95
In addition, out of about $15 million in various Bicentennial construction programs, the only money going to Black contractors was that money for the Black History Museum. In October of this year, however, Gaudiosi allegedly told Mayor Rizzo that white ethnic groups were upset at the fact that so much money was going into the Black History Museum, adding that the project would offend his most zealous followers in an election year. The Mayor then allegedly told Clarence Farmer, executive director of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, to get the word out to those involved in the planning of the Black History Museum that it was being scrapped. Farmer passed the word along to a few acquaintances on the Afro- American Corporation’s board….The Tribune learned that the money will go instead, along with the rest of the $8.5 million to a ‘Living History Museum” which will deal with American history without reference to any specific ethnic group. (Lear 1974)
Several Philadelphia newspapers reported on this over the days following.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Philadelphia ’76 chair William Rafsky insisted that a museum would be built, but not in time for the Bicentennial, and that a temporary exhibit on Black history would be mounted instead. On December 13,
1974 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that City Council President George Schwartz was urging Philadelphia ’76 to commit to having a Black museum built by the
Bicentennial, citing complaints from Black Philadelphia residents and reversing his prior stance on building a permanent museum. On December 14th the Philadelphia
Tribune reported on a meeting with board members for the museum and William
Rafsky, describing it as a “heated confrontation” in which members responded angrily to the seemingly disingenuous demands for patience and asking why other museum building projects seemed to be moving forward more smoothly. As a parenthetical aside the article reported,
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Many board members said privately they feel the city’s trying to stall them and that if they wait until after 1976 for construction to begin, it never will begin. Furthermore, they said, after 1976 all interest in the Bicentennial will be dead, and there will be no Bicentennial Corporation to complain to. (Lear 1974)41
The “now or never” urgency tied to the Bicentennial may have confounded city officials and Bicentennial planners, but the board members’ impatience was informed by the long history of Black activism and rights movements. They were familiar with calls of patience as an effective stalling tactic to combat movements of progress. Still, once Rizzo finally agreed to city funding, the chosen museum site at
6th Street and Pine in Society Hill became a major dispute between founders and the neighborhood associations.
Sites of Struggle: Race, Planning & Philadelphia Neighborhood Politics
In the original architectural study for the museums, several building sites were proposed for the museum, including buildings at 7th Street and Dauphin, 6th
Street and Walnut, 15th Street and Walnut, Broad Street and Master, and Broad
Street and Christian Street. The site at 6th and Pine Street was the only site without a building, and was located near Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
This historic Black church was started by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in 1794, and had been an important site of religious fellowship, community building and
Black social life in Philadelphia for over a century. In the 1970s, however, Society
Hill as a neighborhood functioned as a shining example of one of Philadelphia’s
41 Len Lear, “Black History Museum Backers To Fight City For $2.5 Million In Building Funds,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 14, 1974. 97
more successful recent redevelopment efforts.42 The neighborhood’s new middle- and upper middle-class white residents did not want a Black museum in the area, and fought the planning of the museum through various neighborhood and homeowners associations, including the Society Hill Civic Association (SHCA), the
Washington Square East Project and the subtly-titled Neighborhood Organization
To Help Ensure a Residential Environment (NOT-HERE). Through these organizations, Society Hill challenged the museum planning project through civic tactics similar to the ones museum planners used on the institution’s behalf, including letters to city officials and the newspapers, petitions and public meetings.
They opposed the museum on the grounds of projected visitation numbers, charged that the building plans would violate the neighborhood zoning laws and objected to being left out of the planning studies and meetings with Philadelphia ’76 and city officials.
Museum advocates and city planners refuted most logistical concerns and when that did not satisfy the neighborhood associations, charged racism, citing that
42 Andrew Feffer challenges the notion of a redeveloped Society Hill as a success, noting that the “Society Hill project symbolized for many the misapplication of public funds to subsidize local developers, real- estate speculators, and the new urban gentry….a substantial cost of the Society Hill project was born by existing residents of the district, over six thousand of whom were forced out by demolition of cheap rental property and the inflation of housing costs. Even on its own terms, the Society Hill project could claim only limited success. The city failed to reap the promised increase in tax revenue from enhanced real-estate assessments, which grew in proportion neither to the skyrocketing property values nor to an extent sufficient to cover the massive investment of public funds.” (Feffer 2004: 807-808). Neil Smith’s work also subverts the narrative of the successful redevelopment of Society Hill, observing that it was only successful for residents and developers. As for how the expectations of increased tax revenue to the city were thwarted: “It is widely alleged that as a politically powerful community, Society Hill has succeeded in keeping its assessment values artificially depressed.” And since the bulk of the people evicted and otherwise displaced by the redevelopment were disproportionately African American, Latino and working class whites, “Society Hill was indeed one of the projects that earned urban renewal its sarcastic reputation as ‘Negro removal.’” (Smith 1996: 134) 98
proximity to Independence Hall tourism brought none of these objections. Insisting they just wanted to be included in the planning process, the Society Hill Civic
Association negotiated with board members for months, eventually submitted a resolution that would require a full building redesign so that the building was single-story, that they provide more parking, and that the neighborhood be allowed to limit the museum’s visitation numbers and approve its public operating hours, gift shop square footage, sanction food and beverage sales, and other time consuming or unreasonably detailed museum operations. Museum planners eventually gave up the fight, hosting a public ceremony in April 1975 where they commemorated the loss of the site by burning the original architectural model of the building and burying it.43
Despite the reasonable decision to abandon the fight for the Society Hill location (particularly given the Bicentennial deadline and NOT-HERE’s threat to file a lawsuit against museum planners), the decision to consider alternatives rather than continue to negotiate with Society Hill resulted in internal fallout. In April the
43 While it is likely that racism was a factor in Society Hill residents’ objections to a Black museum in the area, this would not be the last time neighborhood residents publicly expressed friction with a museum in Philadelphia. Residents of Lower Merion famously objected to attempts by The Barnes Foundation to increase its base of financial support to the institution by increasing visitation, which was a factor in the push to move the museum to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (to which some Lower Merion residents also objected). At an October 2014 arts advocacy event featuring Philadelphia Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and representatives from most of the city’s prominent arts organizations, in the midst of arts professionals advocating for city support for their organizations, an attendee commented that as a resident of the neighborhood around the Philadelphia Museum of Art she was concerned about the influx of people and traffic to events in the area and advocating for a way that, in the midst of the conversation about drawing audiences to the organizations, someone could be mindful of a way that the “residents could have peace.”
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Tribune reported on the board resignations over Society Hill, including Reverend F.
LeMoyne Whitlock, who objected to feeling manipulated by Clarence Farmer, and historian and collector Charles L. Blockson, who “allegedly has the largest known personal library on Black History in the country…and took his collection of 20,000 historical artifacts, rare books and documents with him.”44 Still, the reporting on the museum planning in the Tribune was smoother in tone after that, with articles chronicling the institutional search for objects, receipt of artifacts, and exhibition overview plans. While the Inquirer reported in spring 1976 about the anticipation of the museum’s post-Bicentennial financial problems, an April 1976 article in the
Tribune appeared to share credit for the museum, stating
Early during February 1973, Mrs. Anna J.W. James, Church Editor of the Tribune, called together a few people to express concern over the lack of planning for Black s in the Bicentennial planning for Philadelphia. Dr. Lawrence D. Reddick, Black History professor at Temple University, became involved and an “Ad Hoc” Committee was set up in his Mt. Airy residence. Senior Judge Raymond Pace Alexander (now deceased), Rev. Gus Roman, Mark Hyman, Ms. Vera Gunn, Ralph H. Jones and Harold Pilgrim were among the first Ad Hoc Committee members. This group, during March, 1973, met at Progress Plaza to broaden the base of participation. (Philadelphia Tribune 1976) 45
If the adage that “victory has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan” holds any truth, the willingness of the Philadelphia Tribune to publicly report that it had been involved in museum planning from the earliest days could be read as a sign of
44 Len Lear, “Black Museum Planners Sold Out To Racists, PUSH Claims,” The Philadelphia Tribune April 26, 1975. Blockson donated his collection to Temple University in 1984, and the Charles L. Blockson Afro- American Collection is located on Temple’s main campus in Sullivan Hall. 45 “Action for Erection of Black Museum Started at The Tribune,” The Philadelphia Tribune April 24, 1976. 100
confidence that the institution would be successful enough going forward that newspaper would benefit from being associated with it.
Opening Days: Expectations, Realities & Impact
In the lead up to the opening the Tribune reported on the five major subject areas that would make up the exhibition. Beginning on the ground floor, section one provided an overview of great African civilizations. Section two, called “Captivity and Resistance” was a spotlight on American slavery, featuring metal and paper artifacts, and covering the years between 1440 and 1860, followed by a section called The Struggle for Freedom covering 1861-1919, and a section called The Quest
For Equality that covered 1920 to the present, which included a spotlight on art by
Black Americans and a section called the “Black Hall of Fame” that celebrated the importance of contemporary figures. The building also included an auditorium for activities and performances. Once the museum actually opened during the
Bicentennial, the inaugural exhibition blended panels, artifacts, replicas, archival documents and fine art in the exhibition. The section on Captivity and Resistance included a large mixed fabric collage commissioned by the artist Romare Bearden for the opening, called “Captivity and Resistance.”
Travel between the sections was facilitated by ramps, likely out of concern for handicapped accessibility, but unfortunately constructed so that the ramps between floors occupy roughly one-third of the building’s overall space and only the basement auditorium could seal in sound. The gift shop was set up on the top floor.
The museum planners and board members gave interviews about how educational 101
they thought the museum would be to all visitors and the internal planning reports make it clear that planners did imagine that their visitors would not be exclusively
Black in their audience conceptions. A 1975 planning presentation overview includes this description of a planned film in the museum’s proposed theater:
A show of approximately 8-10 minutes tells the story of the Black today and tomorrow in such a way as to leave the Black visitor with a real feeling of pride and belonging and the white with a real feeling of brotherhood. (Wesley and Barry, 1975)46
When the museum opened, it was reported as a success, drawing 23,000 people in the first opening weekend, and praise from visitors and journalists in the newspapers. The favorable public response is notable in the context of the larger city-wide celebration of the Bicentennial, which reported a number of downtown events as under-attended, poorly planned or otherwise dealing with improper anticipation of turnout and visitor expectations.
In a recap of the Bicentennial, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the
“city spent more than $50 million getting ready at a time of grave fiscal shortages and impending tax increases,” and that although the construction of new museums
(and improvements to existing museums) added “lasting value” to the city, hotel managers complained about empty rooms, scheduled performers encountered
“scant and occasionally non-existent audiences” and the conversation about the city having overspent on Bicentennial preparations began to argue in favor of the long term benefits brought by expenditures:
46 “Afro American History Museum,” Dr. Charles Wesley and Bob Barry, Inc. Museum planning presentation, January 29, 1975, the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Emphasis in original. 102
The theory was that the city should build a tourism base for 1977 and beyond. It was deemed better to be than to have millions of visitors go home with a bad impression of the city each one a potential ambassador of ill will. (Corr 1976)47
The idea that government expenditures were good for the long term goal of contributing to a tourism base was unevenly applied in the discussion of the aftermath of the Bicentennial. In the case of federal funding, reports touted the idea that the Bicentennial presented an opportunity that had an expiration date, not unlike museum founders: “Because of the Bicentennial, Congress was willing to appropriate sums that, under normal circumstances might have taken many years and possibly decades to raise….the federal investment in Philadelphia for 1976 was substantial and lasting, and would not have occurred except for the Bicentennial.”48
The discussion of city funding had a slightly different tone. Some expenses (like those for museum construction) received more public and media attention than others (although restaurants near Independence Hall complained about the use of tax dollars to build the restaurant City Tavern) and it was not always the case that the larger expenses received more scrutiny:
47 John Corr, “A Bicentennial For All Season?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 6, 1976. On the same page as the Corr article, another article reported on the dénouement of the year-long wagon train of families who had traveled to Valley Forge Park to participate in the July 4th celebration. The train of 200 wagons was meant (somewhat confusingly) to commemorate both the military history of Continental soldiers who had frozen to death in battle at that site, and the nostalgic nod to pioneers associated with early American history. The combination of poor planning for the large crowds turned this particular site of commemoration into a fiasco, and reports on the remote location of the site, poor facilities for bathrooms and drinking water, no facilities for bathing and disgruntled participants proliferated: “By yesterday, all but 500 of the 4,600 horsemen and wagoners had pulled out, amid confusion and anger.” Richard Papiernik and Mike Leary, “Wagoners in a huff, leave in a hurry,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 6, 1976. 48 John Corr, “What remains from the bicen?” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 12, 1976.
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The city of Philadelphia did a lot of building, too the Living History Center, the Mummers Museum, and the Historic and Cultural Museum, among other projects. Chestnut Street became a mall, its appearance changed utterly and probably for good. The Art Museum got an $8 million overhaul, including installation of air conditioning. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts also got a face lift….The Afro- American and Mummers museums will both operate in the future as nonprofit corporations and not as dependents of the city government such as the Betsy Ross House. The same would be true of the Living History Center if it is placed under the control of the nonprofit corporation. In any case, the taxpayers would still end up paying $16 million for the construction of the three museums. (Corr 1977)49
While $16 million for three museums reads like a bargain in comparison to the $8 million vaguely-described overhaul for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was the Living History Center that drew a large share of frustration for failure to meet the expectations on its ability to attract audiences. It was being publicly deemed a failure less than a year after it had opened. In “The Bicen Museum: It’s a
Loser” John Corr reported:
The $11.5 million Living History Center, opened last year as the centerpiece of the city's Bicentennial, may be closed and the building converted to another use soon. The center, at Sixth and Race Streets, is expecting a shortage of more than $700,000 in operating funds in the coming fiscal year. That is more than half the museum's $1.2 million operating budget. "We're stuck," City Council President George X. Schwartz said. "We have it. We own it. We have to figure out what to do with it." Irvin Davis, city assistant finance director, told the council last week that closing the center would not produce substantial savings because the city would still have to pay the construction debt and provide security for the block-long building. (Corr 1977)50
49 John Corr, “Museums of ’76—financial headaches of ‘77” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1977. 50 John Corr, “The Bicen Museum: It’s a Loser,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 27, 1977.
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It is not uncommon for museums to have rocky early years, but it is telling that news coverage of the Living History Center branded it a “loser” eight months after it opened, and only four months after it was no longer being run by
Philadelphia ’76.51 The expectation that the museums built for the Bicentennial would quickly be self-sustaining and profitable defied trends among museums at the time that still largely hold true. Despite concerns about being government
“dependents” most of the major U.S. museums considered “successful” receive large amounts of government funding. The fact that this financial trend in museum support did not factor into the real-time coverage of these Philadelphia museums affected public perception and future journalistic coverage of these and other city museums. The commitment by Philadelphia politicians, city planners and civic organizers to development overdetermined the analysis of the museums in general and the new Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in particular. The
AAHCM was variously positioned as an outgrowth of activism, as a political compromise, and as an agent of development (if an ineffective one). These early assessments became attached to the AAHCM when it may have been more institutionally beneficial for well-meaning museum advocates to question assessments tied to neoliberal conceptions of for-profit institutions. Often, these conceptions of the museum as development, as community educational/activist space and as long-term repository for art and artifacts are at odds with one another.
51 The Living History Center eventually closed in 1979, and the building became occupied by the National Public Radio station WHYY. As of this writing, WHYY continued to operate studios and offices out of the building. 105
When it came to media coverage of the AAHCM after the Bicentennial, the staffing and board changes made headlines almost as often as the exhibitions and programs. Coverage by the Tribune tended to be wider in range, more frequent and more empathetic toward the institution than the other Philadelphia newspapers.
The frequency is understandable—as Philadelphia’s newspaper with a primarily
Black audience, the Tribune was more likely to have readers interested in pieces that publicized upcoming events such as performances, lecture series and new exhibitions featuring art and art collections of Black people. Still, in the first ten years financial deficits and the rotation of directors in and out of the museum dominated headlines. Adolphus Ealey, from the Barnett-Aden Collection in
Washington, D.C. replaced Gerard William as director in December 1976, but had resigned by the following October. In a scathing critique of the institution’s governance structure, Nessa Forman in the Philadelphia Bulletin assessed:
The Museum’s 24-person board is headed by Clarence Farmer, who insiders say, runs it like an absolute monarch, leaving no decision- making authority to the 11-person professional staff, now headed by [Adolphus] Ealey. This is not to imply that Ealey and Farmer have come to verbal blows. It is to say, however, that Farmer, who also heads Philadelphia’s Human Relations Commission, runs the Museum—even as far as approving all checks for more than $100—as if he were the executive director. Ealey put it this way at a press conference last week: ‘I would not be leaving if I had the power to correct the problems that exist. I have no power. The board has all the power.” (Foreman 1977)52
52 Nessa Forman, “Of Politics and Power at Black Museum, Why Two Quit Their Posts,” The Philadelphia Bulletin, October 23, 1977.
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More than simply a report on staff squabbles, this incisive analysis revealed a major structural problem for the Museum. Being a museum board member is generally thought of as service, taken on by individuals who bring field or scholarly expertise, and/or social or political capital to the organization which they serve in an advisory or fundraising capacity. Board members typically have occupational authority over the head of an organization, which they usually select by a committee process. Forman’s report that the president of the board acted as if he were executive director underlines a structural problem: when the president of the board acts as executive director, neither the board president, the executive director, nor the staff members can effectively do their jobs.
Coverage of board overreach appeared repeatedly in articles about staff turnover, nearly as often as mentions of the Museum’s financial constraints and original founding difficulties. In a 1982 Inquirer article describing new director Teri
Doke as “on probation” (noting “Most museums don’t place new directors on probation. But then, most museums don’t go through five directors in seven years”)
Maryanne Conheim outlined problems included the building’s design, air conditioning system, lack of collections and archival space, donor alienation, high staff turnover, and low attendance.53 The article tied the lack of community buy-in to it having been funded by Mayor Frank Rizzo: “many Blacks have scorned the museum as a symbol of appeasement by a mayor who did little to endear himself to
53 Conheim, Maryanne. 1982. “Problems suffocating Black museum’s hopes.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1982.
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racial minorities.” It linked the Museum’s lack of collections to the building itself:
“…the lack of a professional archive would prevent many important Black
Americans from donating their papers and memorabilia.” And it laid much of this responsibility on the original founders, suggesting that they did not have the expertise to match the task of Black museum stewardship: “most museums are built by collectors and curators—not by city officials.” It quoted a former director who
“charged that the museum's board, comprised almost entirely of businessmen and city officials, failed to understand what the museum could and should have been.”54
Even a praise-filled article in the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrating the
Museum’s tenth anniversary opened with, “For most of the first decade of its existence, when you talked about the Afro-American Historical and Cultural
Museum, you talked troubles.”55 This was in an article in which Charles Blockson, who had returned to the Museum’s board, praised director Rowena Stewart (the
Museum’s sixth director) as the first “who has a feeling for what an archives should be from an historical point of view.” Still, Stewart left the Museum in 1992, to be replaced by two more directors before the decade was out. In 2004 the Philadelphia
Daily News ran an article that began,
The African American Museum in Philadelphia is in trouble. So what else is new? Rather than be a beacon for Black art and history, the
54 Conheim, 1982. In her 1988 study of African American museums, Amina J. Dickerson observed that the phenomenon of board members being both too involved with daily operations and affiliated with museums for overly long periods of time is an issue shared among many Black museums. Dickerson specifically names museums in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and Denver, Colorado.
55 Stephan Salisbury, “At the Afro-American, a brighter 10th birthday,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 1986. 108
venue at 7th and Arch has become a conservatory of poor governance and frustration. In July, Harry Harrison, the museum's 14th executive director in 28 years, quit. This after he had to lay off staff and beg the city for a $150,000 advance on the annual $300,000 allotment it gives to the museum. (Philadelphia Daily News 2004)56
In it all of the familiar critiques—of board overreach, of funding difficulties, and of the need to attract strong arts and history professionals—were made in tandem with recommendations for actions that it is difficult for an institution to do without those specific resources.
What’s in a Name Change? Reinvention as a Strategy of Institutional Survival
Somehow, in the midst of these cycles of decline and resurgence, the Museum still managed to amass an impressive permanent collection and function as a space for transformative Black cultural programming that few other Philadelphia institutions can boast. In the first decade, the Museum exhibited single-artist shows of works by Beauford Delaney, Hale Woodruff, hosted an exhibition of fine art from
Howard University’s art gallery and showed Black photographers at a time when photography as a medium was beginning to be taken seriously as a fine art. In the
1980s its “Jazz Live” series hosted performances by nationally respected musicians including Max Roach, Sun Ra Arkestra, the Horace Silver Quintet, Abbey Lincoln, and
Benny Golson. Celebrated writers including Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni
Morrison, James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Brooks did public readings of their works for the Museum’s audiences.
56 “An Institution That’s Lost Its Way: What to Do About the African American Museum?” Philadelphia Daily News, August 16, 2004. 109
In late 1997, the Philadelphia Tribune reported that
Big things are happening over at 701 Arch Street. The former African American Historical and Cultural Museum has a new name and a new head. The new name of the museum is The African American Museum in Philadelphia. The new person in charge is Terri S. Rouse, executive director.(Davis 1997)57
The name change that rolled out across city newspapers in the tone of the “new and improved” marketing strategy associated with for profit corporations.
Characteristically sympathetic Tribune coverage of the name change read like press releases while other newspapers were optimistic, but critical. The Inquirer coverage mentioned the need to “reinvent” the Museum, describing it as lacking a “strong identity” and quoting a board member’s assertion that the old name “was unwieldy and seemed to indicate that the institution was trying to be all things to all people.”
The fact that the article went on to describe an “ambitious” plan for fundraising, artist residencies and changing exhibitions that “constantly introduce themes to give visitors a reason to return” despite this assessment of an institution that seemed to try to do too much is an irony that is in keeping with the era’s trends in neoliberal non-profit management. In response to the shrinking financial support of social institutions from all levels of government, cultural and civic institutions were newly being held to for-profit strategies and models for survival and success. While the African American Museum in Philadelphia was not the only institution needing to “do more with less,” the challenge of needing to attract more visitors and more
57 Anthony Davis, “African American Museum in Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 16, 1997. 110
elite philanthropic and individual funders to meet the challenge of too few financial resources with met repeatedly with plans to mount more exhibits and put on more exciting programs. While this sort of announcement may work temporarily as a rebranding strategy, it is unsustainable as a long term model for the professionals that must carry it out, and thus unsurprising that several more cycles of CEO resignations and financial troubles made headlines over the next decade.
From 2012-2017, journalistic coverage discursively positioned the Museum as in a “resurgence” stage, with little to no mention of staff or board friction. Its exhibitions calendar attempts balances the need to be all things to all people by alternating exhibitions based primarily in fine art or in historic material culture in its two rotating galleries, while the audio and video-based core exhibition
“Audacious Freedom: African Americans in Philadelphia 1776-1876” occupies the building’s two lower galleries. “Audacious Freedom” chronicles the same early
American history as other museums and historic sites in Old City, filling in racial gaps typically left open by exhibitions at neighboring museums like the National
Constitution Center and the Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent. In contrast to the Bicentennial era, all museums are now expected to be all things to all people. The funder, donor and professional expectations for museums to draw racially diverse audiences challenges and strains everyone programmatically and financially. I was reminded of this expectation after facilitating a tour of “Come See
About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes Collection” for a group of local museum professionals in 2013. In a roundtable discussion with AAMP’s Exhibitions and 111
Education staff members, a participant on staff at another Philadelphia museum asked what how AAMP was going to retain the “diverse audiences” drawn to the
Museum by the exhibition on The Supremes, prompting a few awkward moments of confusion before we realized she was asking how AAMP would attract white visitors, something that its location, in an area of Philadelphia heavy with tourist traffic assists with.
In the context of grand expectations for output among all cultural institutions, AAMP’s long term survival could be read as a success unto itself, which is suggested in effusive congratulations from local press and peer institutions on the
Museum’s fortieth anniversary in 2016. But what does AAMP’s response to diverse audiences’ expectations for exhibitions that celebrate and teach Black heritage look like in the building? And what social, civic and financial circuits are mobilized to produce them? These questions are the subject of the next chapters.
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CHAPTER 5: SEEING LIKE A FUNDER: HOW ARTS AND CULTURE FINANCING PRODUCES THE MUSEUM
While the African American Museum in Philadelphia is a product of particular histories of collecting, exhibiting, and political and civic activism, it continues to be produced by overlapping arrangements of social and financial capital. In this chapter, I examine three crucial spaces in the production of recent exhibitions at AAMP as a way to look at the government, corporate and private philanthropic funding that supports these exhibitions. As the first and longest- running auction house to organize auctions specifically for African American art and artifacts, Swann Auction Galleries are an important institution for the circulation of
African American material culture. Several pieces of art for AAMP’s 2015 exhibition
“As We See It: Works from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African
American Art” were acquired via Swann Auction Galleries, offering one way to see some of the ways that private philanthropic funding impacts what visitors see in the
Museum’s galleries. AAMP could not have acquired these objects at the auction directly, and these works of art entered the Museum as a temporary loan from a private collection. As an institution that generates and circulates research and wealth, Swann also provides an opportunity to see an instance of how the histories of Black exhibitions and collections detailed in Chapters 2 and 3 are deployed as research and as justifications for the value of the lots for sale.
I encounter “Captivity and Resistance,” a large fabric collage by Romare
Bearden, in an off-site fine arts storage facility. The tapestry was commissioned for
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the museum’s opening 1976 exhibition. Bearden’s “Captivity and Resistance” is an important piece of museum history and of art history, and featured in volume V, part 2 of the multi-volume set, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard
University Press), which was in production during the course of this field work.
When image rights managers working on The Image of the Black in Western Art requested a high resolution photograph of the piece for the book series, they were initially informed that it would require a visit to the fine arts storage facility where it was being housed. This kind of elite object storage is costly enough that the charge for a visit to the facility was too expensive for the book project’s budget, and I use this secured, climate-controlled facility as a way to think about the relationship between state funding of museums and everyday museum practice. The initial funding for the Bearden tapestry came from government agencies supporting
Philadelphia’s bicentennial celebrations (Chapter 4), but the subsequent storing, cleaning and transportation costs for the piece of art comes out of the institution’s general operating budget. In an economic climate where government and philanthropic grant funding of museums tend to target project funding, general operating funds are notoriously difficult to fundraise for. But the expensive storage signifies proper governance and institutional worthiness to funding agencies and other institutional lenders, making this “best practice” paradoxical in an economy of decreasing state funding of the arts.
Finally, I consider the VIP reception for “Come See About Me: The Mary
Wilson Supremes Collection” as a way to see how corporate funding shows up in the 114
Museum. While corporate funding for the arts is ubiquitous in major cities under late capitalism, the presence of their logos on museum exhibition posters and advertising often indexes patron client relationships between institutions and masks the labor that goes into initiating and maintaining those relationships. Each of these spaces reveals the ways that, economic, cultural, and social capital is in some way created or deployed in service of the Museum.
Sites of Production: Tracking Forms of Capital
In considering the items that make up exhibitions and how the physical spaces they circulate through are buoyed by particular intellectual arguments and financial arrangements, I put the material objects, the visual elements that make them important and the structures that produce them in conversation to show how these exhibitions are constructed and that every component of that construction is political. In George Marcus’ classic review of anthropological tracking methodologies that shifted the discipline toward mutlisited ethnography, his specification of the ways that anthropologists identify relevant objects and “follow the thing” as it circulates “through different contexts of a manifestly material object of study (at least as initially conceived), such as commodities, gifts, money, works of art, and intellectual property” is particularly suited to examining material culture and complex capitalist processes (Marcus 1995: 107). As such, tracking the circulation of the bronze sculpture “Michael (Head of a Boy)” by William Artis from creation through private collections via Swann’s auction and into AAMP’s gallery is in line with longstanding anthropological concerns. But I also consider the making 115
and the meanings of the sculpture itself. Like many studies of material culture, I take up Appadurai’s conceit that “focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly”
(Appadurai 1986: 3). Examining the importance of objects and how they move through disparate sites is a way to understand the significance of those sites to institution and exhibition making, and how those sites are both facilitated by and signifiers of funding in these varied institutional contexts.
In “The Forms of Capital” Bourdieu positions capital as “accumulated labor” that, once appropriated on an “exclusive basis by agents or groups of agents enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (Bourdieu
1986: 241). This can appear in three major forms: economic capital, which is
“directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights,” cultural capital, which includes cultural objects as well as forms of knowledge, skills, education, manners, habits and dispositions, and social capital which “is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition” in some kind of group where material or symbolic exchanges occur. Each of the spaces that produce the Museum provides a lens into how, forms of capital are created and converted. In auction houses where cultural capital and social capital (as an object’s provenance) can become economic capital for the auction house, while the objects retain their cultural and social values 116
that confer prestige upon their owners and the spaces where they are exhibited. The fine arts storage facility signifies as a kind of cultural capital in the eyes of funders and peer institutions—as the right kind of high end expense for a cultural institution to make. And VIP receptions for exhibitions are the spaces in which social capital is sometimes converted into economic capital to produce the museums, and always performed by the individuals for one another and (typically) the press.
Aesthetic Geographies: Swann Auction Galleries and the Production of Racial Value
The auctioneer stepped up to the podium at the front of the room, sporting a grey curled mustache and an eclectic plaid suit that seemed to match his personality. Over the microphone, he announced, “I realize that some of you are here today to watch the auction. Some of you are here today to bid. Some of you are just here,” which was met with laughter from the full audience. As the auction house landlines began to ring with phone bidders he continued, “For those of you who are trying to make up your own mind I would like you to hear Dr. Angelou’s own words.
In a 2012 letter she wrote to her fifteen year old self, she advised, ‘Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of
Chopin, find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.’ About half the crowd responded with a church hum, “Mmmm,” as Nicholas Lowry, principal auctioneer for Swann Auction Galleries began the auction with the first lot, a drawing by
Charles Sebree, “Untitled (Boy with a Pearl).” It opened at $1,100 and participants 117
bid at $100 intervals (minus a few phone and online bidders, who occasionally jumped a few hundred dollars in their bids). After a $2000 bid, the participants bid at $200 intervals until the piece sold for $4,400, not including the standard 25% buyer’s premium. The sale was completed, from introduction to final gavel, in less than two minutes.
Seeing Mr. Lowry call an auction was like watching an orchestra being conducted in reverse—he nodded his head and waved hands in different directions in response to bidders (or staff on phones and laptop computers with clients bidding by proxy) verbally confirming their offer with, “I have $3400,” before quickly moving on with the sale. For each item an image of the artwork appeared on large flat screen televisions at the front of the crowded room as it was introduced by its number in the lot sequence, title and maker. It looked like an art history lecture and sounded a bit like the broadcast of a horse race.
While this particular auction for fine art by African American artists had an extra aura of historical importance due to the collection of works having been collected by Maya Angelou, auctions in general play an increasingly important role in the circulation, display and valuing of African American art. Many of the Black art and historical objects that appear in museums and other exhibiting institutions enter public space via an auction. The paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and artifacts are accessed and authenticated by staff members at some of the most established and elite auction houses in the world. Auction house staff members research the provenance of these objects, assess their contemporary importance 118
and recruit potential buyers to highly performative sales. The provenance research and historical significance shows up in the catalogue listings for the objects, which detail biographical information about the object’s maker, any exhibition history of previous owners, or citations of scholarly research that contextualizes the item. The listing becomes part of a public record of the object’s existence and important, even
(and especially) in cases where the item does not ultimately find a buyer and returns to a private collection. Typically, there is some overlap between the information in the catalogue listing and the information that might appear on a museum label for the object in an exhibition. This information offers a lens into the political economy and social geography of some of the material culture the makes up
Black exhibitions. In addition to being an exchange site, these “tournaments of value” serve as a generative site for Black art and artifacts.58
Swann Auction Galleries was founded in 1941. Initially a rare and antiquarian book specialist, the house now conducts around forty sales of works on paper, fine art and various historical objects a year. At the time of this writing, it is the only major auction house to regularly offer auctions for African American artifacts, ephemera and African American fine art. Swann’s annual printed and manuscript African Americana auction began in 1994, and their first African
58“Tournaments of value are complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-defined way from the routines of economic life. Participation in them is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status contests between them. The currency of such tournaments is also likely to be set apart through well understood cultural diacritics…Finally, though such tournaments of value occur in special times and places, their forms and outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power and value in ordinary life.” (Appadurai 1988: 21)
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American fine art auction was in 2007. In interviews about the auctions, specialists from these departments emphasized that, in both cases, they had to convince the auction house that these events should happen at all. Swann’s rare manuscript specialist Wyatt Houston Day reported that "When I came up with this idea, they didn't think there was enough of a market for this…”59 which is an experience that was echoed by African American Art specialist Nigel Freeman, over a decade later.60
Some of the work that auction house specialists had to do to make the case for these specialized sales is likely due to the labor required to stage an auction.
Auction house staff source and authenticate items to present both the material history of an object and its cultural significance to potential buyers. Researchers uncover an object’s provenance and filter out replicas and fakes, historic preservationists consult on objects and their histories, staff photographers meticulously document the object and its condition. All these things factor into estimates made for what an object might sell for, and all of this information appears in catalogues produced for public sale ahead of the auctions, and made available to visitors during auction previews where all the objects are presented—deliberately arranged and well lit—to the general public for several days ahead of an auction.
This work directly replicates so much of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into producing major museum or gallery exhibitions for the public, with a major
59 Sturgis, Ingrid. 2006. “Bidding For History: Swann Galleries' auction of rare manuscripts and printed African Americana draws buyers who appreciate its importance.” Black Issues Book Review. (52-53)
60 Hicks, Cinque. 2014. “Interview: Nigel Freeman of Swann Galleries.” International Review of African American Art, 25(1): 27-33. 120
variation being that in museums, object pricing information is generally only known to staffers handling registration and insurance for the institution.
This labor intensive work is offered as the reason there aren’t more auctions focused on African Americana. In an interview, a director of Sotheby’s American
Paintings, Drawing and Sculpture department is quoted as saying, “It costs a few thousand dollars in staff time to catalogue, photograph, research, exhibit and handle each lot in a sale,” he said. “If we receive a 25 percent buyer’s premium for a lot that sells for just $5,000, it just isn’t worth it for us.” 61
Part of the prestige that accrues to objects sold at auction is due to the auctions’ audiences beyond the buyers—the journalists who report on sale prices, researchers who are encouraged to attend sales, and collectors who observe auctions without buying, to see what today’s sale prices might indicate about objects they own and have been purchased in the past. In Seven Days in the Art World Sarah
Thornton quotes a curator who tells her, “The function of museums is to make art worthless again. They take the work out of the market and put it in a place where it becomes part of the common wealth.’” 62 But the relationship between auctions and museums is more complicated. Nigel Freeman and Swann justified the African
American art auctions out of the sense “there was a need for special attention for
61 Grant, Daniel. 2014. “Changing Demographics.” International Review of African American Art 25(1): 39- 47.
62 Thornton, Sarah. 2009. Seven Days in the Art World. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company Inc.
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African American art because the existing market opportunities for it were too narrow for the growing demand. They also felt that many exceptional pieces of the art were being overlooked and undervalued.” And Black art researchers argue that
Swann's establishment of its African American Fine Art department is significant because it provides a valuable resource for researching provenance (detailed in the catalogue entries for works) establishing public sales records for the art. Further, the reporting of high auction sale prices can be deployed to support an argument for more museum exhibitions about Black artists. In press materials publicizing a fine art auction in 2015, Swann reported on a retrospective exhibition of artwork by
Norman Lewis that was on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The text read:
Dear Collector,
With the highly anticipated retrospective of Norman Lewis opening this week, there has been a rapid rise in interest in his artwork. I wanted you to be aware of the scarce Norman Lewis works from the 1940s-60s that are part of our upcoming December 15 auction. We’ve assembled a preview of Norman Lewis lots from the catalogue, and an overview of Lewis’ changing place in both art history and the art market. The entire catalogue will be online next week. If you have any questions, or if you would like additional information on any of these pieces, please feel free to contact us. (Swann Auction Galleries, 2015)63
The letter was signed by Nigel Freeman and included his contact information at the auction house. The inclusion of these objects in elite auctions, particularly when it comes to Swann, is market driven; which means market demand for these objects
63 Email from Swann Galleries’ African American Fine Art Department, November 12, 2015 122
led to their inclusion (and special designations) in elite auctions, which increases their prestige in the press and in the collections they go into, which increases the social and monetary value of these collections and affects how likely they are to be purchased for private, rather than public collections.
In addition to using information about a museum exhibition to increase attention to objects for sale, their catalogue listings also provide the kind of information about the sociohistorical significance of an object that museum catalogues and labels provide to visitors and readers. As these objects are listed for sale, the production information, provenance (where an object has come from and the collections and exhibitions it has been in) and academic writing it may have been the subject of are presented in the listing as things that attest to the object’s monetary value. In the 2014 auction catalogue listing for the sculpture, “Michael
(Head of a Boy)” by William Artis, the listing describes the bronze sculpture as previously being in the collection of photographer William Anderson, Jr. before continuing on,
This beautiful bronze is an unusual medium for this sculptor, but the geometric simplification of this African-American head is typical of his mid-century sculpture. Another cast of this head is in the University of Delaware’s Paul R. Jones collection. Artis usually worked in clay or stone and only a handful of his terra cotta works have come to auction. (Swann Auction Galleries 2014)64
This description is meant to provide context for the sculpture in terms of Artis’ work
(“typical of his mid-century sculpture”) and in terms of other institutions (the
64 “Shadows Uplifted: The Rise of African-American Fine Art” February 13, 2014, Sale 2338, Swann Auction Galleries, lot 82, page 119. 123
University of Delaware), seeing the value in collecting Artis’ work and the relative unavailability of sculptures by William Artis for public purchase. Biographical information about Artis in the listing described his background, artistic training and awards.
Born in Washington, NC, William E. Artis moved to New York during the Harlem Renaissance like fellow North Carolina native artists Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Artis took private sculpture lessons with Augusta Savage and studied with Robert Laurent at the Art Students League with a Harmon Foundation scholarship. After service in the air force during World War II, Artis studied at the New York State College of Ceramics. Following the successful completion of his second certificate program, according to Daniel Schulman, Artis applied to the Rosenwald Fund in 1946 (for the second time); he was awarded a fellowship 'to work with the native clays of Alabama in the production of creative sculpture and sculptured free form ceramic ware. Artis decided late in the process to collaborate with the Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883-1962), newly appointed to Syracuse University. According to Rosenwald scholar Jonathan R. Nolting, Artis improved his technical skills and learned new media in sculpture under Mestrovic. In his master's thesis, Nolting uses Michael to show Artis how now used texture and geometric abstraction to instill his heads with both a naturalism and the influence of African sculpture, particularly masks of the Dan peoples. Schulman p. 134, Nolting pp. 58-59, 89.”65
This catalogue description of William Artis and “Michael (Head of a Boy)” places
Artis firmly within the history of the sociopolitical circuits that have produced so much African American fine art in the twentieth century. It tells readers that he was in New York during the Harlem Renaissance with well recognized fine artists like
Romare Bearden and Augusta Savage, and that he was a recipient of funds (and associated prestige and attention) of the Harmon Foundation and Rosenwald Fund.
65 Ibid. 124
Beyond just a narrated CV, this listing uses academic scholarship to underscore the importance of Artis’ social, professional and philanthropic networks. By noting that
Artis was awarded a fellowship from the Rosenwald fund in 1946 after a prior rejection and “improved his technical skills” as a result, the listing also suggests that the particular sculpture listed, made around 1950, is one of the stronger works of
Artis’ oeuvre. All of the cultural capital the piece represented—the forms of educational knowledge and artistic skill it displayed—contributed to its social value and its potential price. The estimated sale price of $8,000 to $12,000 listed in the catalogue was higher than many arts institutions would have been able to afford in the post-recession era of arts funding. When it sold it seemed likely that Artis’
“Michael (Head of a Boy),” like many other pieces of fine art, could pass from one private collection to another, with only a brief stop on view in between during five auction preview days at Swann’s location in New York.
A year later, visitors to AAMP could see the bronze Artis sculpture in the exhibition “As We See It: Works from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of
African American Art.” The temporary exhibition consisted primarily of artwork on loan to the museum by the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection, a collection of art by some of the most celebrated artists of African descent that was described by the foundation as a teaching collection. While William E. Artis was not as well known to the general public as other artists in the collection like Bearden or Henry Ossawa
Tanner, Artis was one of the few sculptors in the collection and “Michael (Head of a
Boy)” was the only sculpture in the exhibition. (See Figure 2, Figure 3.) 125
Figure 2: “As We See It: Works from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art” on view in Gallery 4 at AAMP, William Artis sculpture in foreground, March 2015. Photo by Marco Hill.
Figure 3: “Michael (Head of a Boy)” by William E. Artis on view at AAMP, March 2015. Photo by Marco Hill. 126
Within the exhibition the sculpture was presented as evidence of both the technical expertise of an artist trained by institutionally well-placed teachers, and of the belief in Black people as subjects worthy of sculpture and display—his
“Michael” is a bronze head with full lips and nose, facial features associated with people of African descent. Artis and his work served as evidence of Black brilliance and beauty—both the creator and the object an individual testament to how far a race of people had come in America. The label for this sculpture named the title, artist, creation date and medium. But the social, intellectual and political economic networks that produced this sculpture for AAMP’s visiting public is only hinted at on this sculpture label and exhibition acknowledgments panel. Most visitors would be unable to see that “Michael (Head of a Boy)” came to AAMP’s viewers via several generative and prestige conferring sites: the Harmon Foundation and Rosenwald
Fellowship Fund (which supported Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance),
Swann Auction Galleries’ semiannual African American Fine Art Auction and a number of scholars, collectors and arts professionals working with James Petrucci, including curator Hilary Hatfield, Philadelphia collector Lewis Tanner Moore, and artist-scholars Curlee Raven Holton, Leslie King-Hammond and Berrisford Boothe.
The assembling of the collection of art by Black artists took years of time and expertise, and involved acquiring art from individuals and auctions, and several items acquired at Swann Auction Galleries were included in the “As We See It” 2015 exhibition.
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“As We See It”: Teaching the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection
The collection became available for exhibiting at AAMP through relationships between AAMP staff and board members and Mr. Petrucci. The collection already consisted of several hundred works of art (and counting) during the exhibition planning process, and had a website that was regularly updated with images of new acquisitions to the collection. The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection was described as a teaching collection and also had a mission statement, which read, in part,
The PFF Collection of African American Art is a targeted initiative to bring focus to the full range of African-American visual creativity and its essential place in the history and discourse of American art. An understanding of African-American art history is vital to a full understanding of American art history. The PFF collection offers continuing proof that African American art is integral to the rich tapestry of American creative tradition. Long overlooked, art of this caliber with its specific cultural voice is both essential and enlightening. (PFFC website)66
The artwork in the collection included many of the most recognizable names in the history of African American art, and artists who lived and worked in Philadelphia and New York were well represented. Further, many of the artists with work in the
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection also had work in AAMP’s permanent collection, so it made institutional sense to exhibit the work. AAMP is the kind of institution where the Museum’s staff and target audiences presume that art by
66 Petrucci Family Foundation Collection website, https://pffcollection.com/mission-statement/ 128
African American art is integral to conceptions of American creative traditions; where other institutions might overlook this work, AAMP is where viewers expect to be able to look at it. The discursive framing of the PFF Collection as a teaching collection (rather than a body of work brought together by the collector’s passion or research interests) made for a slightly uneasy fit. In preparing the exhibition, staff conversations about the mission and educational focus raised the question, what made it a teaching collection? Who had been educated by it?
The educational mission was integrated into the exhibition planning process.
The curatorial department planned workshops for local youth, where AAMP’s artist in residence, Richard Watson, whose work the Petrucci Collection had acquired, provided instruction in art history and artmaking in local schools. In the workshops,
Watson would use images from the collection instructively, and some of the work made by the youth would be integrated into the exhibition. Titled “Explorations in
Creativity,” this initiative was part community outreach, part education, part exhibition component. It turned out to be the component of the exhibition that was most attractive to funders, which may have been related to the similarity in content to the exhibition “Represent: 200 Years of African American Art” at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art (PMA). The PMA exhibition of works from their permanent collection was on view at the same time and included many of the same artists represented in the “As We See It” exhibition, but was planned and installed with a larger team, over a longer period of time in the city’s most prestigious art museum. Conversations about “Represent” among museum and arts professionals during the planning 129
stages reflected high expectations. With a major catalogue edited by University of
Pennsylvania art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (who also served as a guest curator on the exhibition), “Represent” was a hotly anticipated exhibition with media buzz, a video trailer, and the kinds of institutional and academic prestige that attracts the individuals and organizations that often fund exhibitions in
Philadelphia. Indeed, some of the past and future supporters of exhibitions at AAMP
(including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lomax Family Foundation and PECO, the energy company) were credited sponsors of “Represent” at the PMA. In the post- recession arts funding climate, internal conversations about external funding for “As
We See It” tended to acknowledge that it was not the best time for AAMP to submit funding proposals for an exhibition of a private collection of fine art that sounded similar to what a larger, more prestigious, better resourced institution had likely submitted to the same sources earlier. This reflects a savvy understanding of how funding agencies “see” the arts and culture landscape of the city of Philadelphia. The simultaneous run of “Represent” also made it more institutionally sensible to frame the exhibition as a populist presentation of elite works of art that had been used as arts education, rather than just a collection show. The emphasis of the exhibition was on the cultural and art historical excellence of the art work and, just as important, what the excellent work can do in the world for youth. The second gallery of the exhibition had fine art from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection on view alongside flat screen televisions playing video interviews with several of the living artists in the collection, whose participation in the exhibition was largely due 130
to their respect and fondness for fellow artist and friend Mr. Watson. The first gallery of the exhibition had art from the collection on view alongside flat screen televisions playing photo slideshows of the youth artmaking workshops and the art that they made. Visual evidence of funder desires, in the form of the art collection and the images from the youth workshops, both shared prominent exhibition space.
Paying to Play: The Hidden Costs of Museum Operation
On a brisk spring morning, several AAMP colleagues and I stood outside of the steel door to a giant North Philly warehouse so nondescript I worried that we had the wrong address. I quickly reassured myself by remembering that I was the only new visitor to the facility, in time for a warehouse staff member to open the door and for me to notice some of the building’s high end security features. I looked up and down the block that contained several empty lots in between row houses, a handful of parked cars and no other pedestrian traffic. Entering into the warehouse’s dark labyrinth of a stairwell I thought, this is where the Museum keeps its finest fine art?
Upon reaching the top of a disorienting set of stairs, we all signed into the warehouse’s visitor entry book and entered a reception area, where another staff member greeted us and led us through a set of doors that led into a chilly, well organized storage area much larger than the building’s outside façade suggested.
We walked across the concrete floor, past steel shelves that held furniture, tapestries, and unidentifiable objects of all sizes. Some of the objects were in wooden crates while others wrapped in plastic, tissue or bubble wrap with the 131
business’ sticker labels attached and, occasionally, the name of another Philadelphia exhibiting institution written. We entered a viewing room full of cardboard boxes filled with wrapped artifacts and sculptures, large wrapped paintings and a table with a packing blanket spread across the surface—objects from AAMP’s permanent collection. I watched the warehouse staffer return to the reception area through the viewing room window, looked at the giant expanse of climate-controlled storage areas that extended a full city block and realized, this might be where all
Philadelphia collecting institutions keep their offsite collections.
It took over an hour of collections review that day before my colleagues and I asked a warehouse staff member about a major piece of work from the permanent collection, Romare Bearden’s “Captivity and Resistance,” to verify that it was located in their facility as indicated by institutional records. A warehouse staffer led us down another corridor, to where the fabric tapestry was being stored in its wrapped, climate controlled, monthly-billed slot. The path we walked to the
Bearden tapestry led past aisles of other art and artifacts stored by some of the largest institutions and collectors in Philadelphia. The shelves likely contained a significant slice of the cultural patrimony of the city. They represented countless hours of cataloguing and organizing labor in a facility built to exceed the American
Alliance of Museums’ guidelines for object storage, and, if our several hundred dollar appointment invoice was any indication, countless line item expenses in general operating budgets all over town. General operating expenses like the best high security climate controlled facility in the city signify good institutional practice 132
in external grant proposals, funding applications and reports to boards and philanthropists. These expenses are the kind of “best practice” that are attractive to state and private funders, but are also the kind of expenses that there are rarely funding pools for. This is one of the conundrums of the current state of arts and culture funding: where private philanthropic funding of museums can make institutions somewhat beholden to the whims and interests of foundations or individual donors, public funding has become increasingly need-blind, project focused and merit based, where institutional merit is measured by a close adherence to the institutional practices of the largest, richest institutions who essentially set a merit curve for the cultural field. The initial public funding for the commission of “Captivity and Resistance” came from city funds in preparation for the Museum’s opening as part of the city’s celebration of the Bicentennial (see
Chapter 4), a funding detail that is included on a label or as a line credit whenever the piece is exhibited publicly or appears as a photo in publication.
In addition to being a major work of art, it is also an artifact of the 1970s civic activism that produced the museum. The years of advocacy and pressure on the city, linked to the summer 1976 deadline reveal the idiosyncratic, contingent nature of the production of the institution and its contents. “Captivity and Resistance” only became viewable by the visiting public because Black civic leaders with sociopolitical capital were in a position to pressure the municipal and state government to fund the creation of a museum, and pull together financial and professional resources to pull together a core exhibition that features art by a major, 133
living Black artist. These deployments of social, political and financial capital only hinted at by the object label are the process that makes it possible for the Bearden tapestry to serve as a monument to Black resilience in the Americas for museum visitors and as an important work of museum history for AAMP staff and board members.
Bearden’s tapestry has been loaned to other exhibiting institutions, professionally cleaned and housed in various storage facilities over several decades.
Off-site storage costs are part of the institution’s general operating budget while professional cleaning or fine art courier fees, if associated with a specific exhibition, might be accounted for under grant funding supporting the exhibition, or under a restricted donation. Without sufficient, stable funding for general operations museums risk being unable to properly steward and exhibit their permanent collections, so many museums devote significant institutional resources to fundraising. While top-level executive staff members are typically responsible for raising money for the organization as part of their job functions, larger museums often have departments devoted to fundraising. Under the label of “development” or
“institutional advancement” these professionals are typically charged with identifying and pursuing public and private funding opportunities, including government, corporate and foundation grants, and individual donors. Black museums, which typically have fewer than ten full time staff members, are generally challenged in this area. According to a 2008 field assessment commissioned by the
Association of African American Museums, most organizations identified 134
fundraising and/or grant writing as their greatest need. This reflects both the financial concerns (and limitations) of the organizations, and field-wide trend of donations and grants as the primary sources of income for these organizations.67
While museums in general count on these sources of income, the primacy of these sources for Black museums makes the funding, and the work it takes to secure it, an important engine of producing Black cultural institutions.
News articles on the staffing and budgeting challenges of the Museum’s early years often mentioned its city funding as if it was too dependent on government funding, without noting that budgeting and staffing challenges for museums are generally linked.68 Over the institution’s history, AAMP secured more prestigious grants from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Ford
Foundation when there were more full time staff members employed. Institutional records suggest this is cyclical: more staff members allows for more resources to devote to fundraising, whether that meant a singularly focused department, or several staff members being expected to contribute to grant applications for their subject area, with curatorial staff members applying for grants to support
67“Assessment of the Field: African American Cultural Organizations,” report commissioned by the Association of African American Museums, 2008. This field analysis included 159 institutions and found that “most organizations rely on a wide range of income sources, especially donations, grants and parent organizations” while income “from admissions, memberships, sales from gift shops and publications is a modest source of financial resources for this field.” A widely cited 2015 study by the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland similarly found that “African American and Latino organizations have fewer individual donors and are more reliant on grants from foundations and government sources.”
68The city of Philadelphia provides financial support to several arts institutions as an annual budgetary line item. Local newspaper coverage of AAMP’s finances have regularly reported on the Museum’s receiving $300,000-$400,000 from the city annually. 135
exhibitions or acquisitions, or museum education staff members applying for grants to support educational programming or youth outreach initiatives.
Under various kinds of political initiatives, federal funding becomes available to cultural institutions through application-based systems. Save America’s
Treasures, for example, was an initiative started in 1999 through the National Parks
Service to help preserve and protect “nationally significant historic properties and collections that convey our nation's rich heritage to future generations of
Americans.”69 The program funded over 1200 recipients (non-profit organizations as well as federal, state, local and Native tribal entities). AAMP received funding through Save America’s Treasures to catalogue and re-house a collection of celluloid film negatives, moving them from archival cardboard boxes to expensive space- saving steel cabinets that lock and are designed to keep the internal temperatures low. The program Museum Grants for African American History and Culture started in 2010 through the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and resulted in the grant that facilitated mine (among a class of researchers’) path of entry into AAMP.
Securing funding from an elite granting agency can create a kind of momentum— after announcing a new NEA or National Endowment for the Humanities grant, fundraising staff members find it easier to secure additional money from corporate and private donors to support the institution. And as government support of arts and education institutions has been on a steady decline, grants from federal agencies and private foundations have become both more necessary and signal
69 The National Parks Service, https://www.nps.gov/preservation-grants/sat/ 136
more prestige, making grant application writing an increasingly important part of museum practice. This current field-wide reality is also partly how grant application reading and evaluation labor gets mobilized.
Seeing like a State Funder
The decline of government funding for the arts has made these funds increasingly necessary and harder to receive. This challenge to institutions has made a strong case for soliciting grant application evaluators for granting agencies.
City, state and federal granting agencies typically frame the time consuming work of reading and evaluating grant applications to busy arts and culture professionals as service to the field that is good experience that evaluators can use to enrich their organization’s ability to secure future grant funding. The idea behind this assertion is that learning how applications are evaluated and discussed helps professionals develop a sensibility about how what makes a compelling application for evaluators, which helps them in writing applications for their home organization. As a grant application evaluator for both city and state level allocations of taxpayer funded grants for cultural institutions, I was assured that reading grants for the city or state would improve my capacity to apply for grants at the recruitment, training, and review stages of grant evaluating. The hours it takes for evaluators to attend orientations, read applications, meet with other application evaluators to discuss and judge the applications and (where applicable) make site visits to the applying organizations is unpaid volunteer work, so the emphasis on that labor as a civic and professional positive was consistently reiterated. 137
Serving the Sector, Being the State
Arts and culture funding comes from the government in Pennsylvania in a number of ways. The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is a state agency that provides “support and information to enhance the delivery of cultural services” throughout Pennsylvania. The Council was established in 1966 and is funded through an annual appropriation by the state General Assembly and from the
National Endowment for the Arts. The Council is governed by four members of the state General Assembly and fifteen private citizens, and participates in arts advocacy and granting. Its grants are broken up into three categories: responsive funding, arts in education and other (including folk and traditional arts and diverse cultures). In
2014, the granting program had a budget of $8.9 million. The Philadelphia Cultural
Fund is non-profit corporation established in 1991 by the mayor and City Council in
1991 to support and promote arts and culture in the city. The Cultural Fund engages in grantmaking to Philadelphia-based arts and cultural organizations, from funding that comes from the city’s annual budget allocation. The Cultural Fund’s grantmaking budget has fluctuated between $2.7 and 2.9 million a year since 2014.
Both the state (Pennsylvania Council on the Arts) and the city (Cultural Fund) have a two-track granting system by funding level. The Pennsylvania Council’s two levels are project funding (which provides up to $2500 for projects) and program funding
(which provides general operating funds to organizations), while the Cultural
Fund’s two tracks are for new and emerging organizations that have been operating for less than five years, and established organizations. Cultural Fund applicants can 138
apply for project or general operating support, while Pennsylvania Council applicants are only invited to apply for general operating funds after they have previously applied for and received project funding. While state project funding is limited to $2500, applications for general operating support can be for hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the general operating budget for the organization overall. It is common for small to mid-sized organizations to apply for grants for state project funding in the hopes of executing small or short term projects efficiently enough to be eligible to be in the general operating funding applicant pool.
Taxpayer money funds both of these (and other) state and city budget- allocated arts grants.70 But the organizations applying submit to a process that is somewhat like peer review, where the applications are evaluated by other arts and culture professionals in the region. State and city recruit hundreds of professionals, solicit and evaluate the suitability of volunteers to read and discuss grant applications, send out a series of the applications and organize panels of adjudicating the applications in regional batches all over Pennsylvania (in the case of the Council on the Arts) and Philadelphia (in the case of the Cultural Fund).
Applications to be a grant evaluator require a submission of contact and
70 These two application-based granting systems are not the only ways that cultural institutions in Philadelphia are funded at the city and state levels. In fact, one of the eligibility categories for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund grant is that an organization must not be “a line item allocation in the City’s 2018 General Operating Budget OR have received unrestricted monies, pledges or commitment of monies from any City department in excess of $10,000.” This criterion made several institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mural Arts, the Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent and AAMP ineligible to apply for Philadelphia Cultural Fund grants for at least the past several years. 139
professional placement info, as well as a resume/CV. Training takes the form of online modules/presentations and phone interviews. Evaluators were given several organizational applications to read, with 1-3 designated as the applications to be the
“lead reviewer” on and several to be the secondary reviewer on. Lead reviewing meant presenting an individual evaluation out loud to the group of reviewers on panel day—one’s sense of the organization in general, its grant application in particular, and their assessment based on the process-imposed scoring rubric. As a secondary reviewer all of these responsibilities worked similarly, with the added stipulation that the secondary reviewer served as the lead reviewer if the lead was unavailable to evaluate the organization for any reason.
Training for evaluation focused on application components and gaining understanding how applicant organizations and grant writers are prepared ahead of time to apply for these grants. In cases where site visits were part of the evaluation, evaluators were encouraged to find any red flags in the narrative or budgetary portions of the application to ask about during a site visit, to give the organization a chance to speak about anything in the application that was questionable to the evaluator. Evaluators were told that although some organizations applying for grants would have elaborate departments dedicated to filling out these applications, others would be small and might only have a consultant, volunteer or someone who was not a full-time employee completing the applications, and the submissions were to be judged similarly—that evaluators should read for the merit of the project or organization, not on the quality of the grant writing. In practice, the differences 140
between applications written by part time volunteers or consultants, and full time employees vested in the everyday life of the organization are clear to the reviewing arts and culture professionals. And because the evaluation process is designed to create a discerning pool of readers who can deploy a sophisticated, detailed analysis of how well an application has crafted a funding narrative that fits the organization and budget, the process slants in favor of organizations submitting applications written by the most polished, practiced grant writers. Additionally, the ability to participate in the grant reviewing process as a reviewer slanted in favor of organizations that were not too understaffed to “lose” an employee for several days to devote to the grant reading and reviewing process.
Grant application reviewers also embodied and enacted state power in the process of evaluating applications for arts funding. In my interactions with other reviewers, several spoke about reviewing grant applications for many other application-based arts funding organizations. In the local funding cases, state and city employees reiterated the importance of reading applications carefully and thoughtfully because we were impacting how government funding was distributed.
This imbued the application reading process with a kind of political power, in addition to its civic duty. The evaluation processes play out in ways that are compatible with the ways anthropologists research and analyze the state and modern statecraft. Approaches to political economy and late capitalism have engaged the ways that designed processes and bureaucracy create the state and simultaneously obscure political power. James Scott has examined the proliferation 141
of bureaucratic systems, with Scott observing that “large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is….” (Scott 1998: 8). Foucault also theorized techniques of state-making and population administration as happening through bureaucracies, while Philip
Abrams described the state as a process or idea rather than something tangible
(Abrams 1998, Foucault 1995). For Abrams “the state is the unified symbol of an actual disunity…. What is constituted out of their collective practice is a series of ephemerally unified postures in relation to transient issues with no sustained consistency of purpose” (Abrams 1988: 79). Abrams contends that the state is “the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is” (Abrams 1988: 82). And in evaluating applications for state funding, discussions about applications from organizations that seemed to have shorter staff rosters and a greater need for state funding, evaluators tended to cede the reading authority and personal politics to the process. Since the criteria for applications is aggressively need blind, evaluators commonly expressed sympathy for applicants with less sophisticated narratives or budget abnormalities in smaller organizations and occasional resentment at feeling constrained by the process itself. The training and evaluation rubrics were often positioned as containing authoritative power that we, the readers just happened to be carrying out, en route to distributing state funding to the best organizations and projects in the most responsible ways possible. Despite regular news coverage of city and state budgetary processes positioning the taxpayers or politicians as key players in arts funding, volunteer evaluators actually emerged as the mechanism by 142
which arts and culture are funded by taxpayer money. In these contexts where state and city employees recruit and train volunteers but do not participate in evaluating processes, evaluators are effectively the state’s funders.
“Come See About Me” And The Production Of Giving Thanks
On a Thursday afternoon before the VIP reception for “Come See About Me,”
AAMP staff members could be found tending to the urgent matters of their respective departments. The details about the care and handling of board members, politicians, press and corporate funders (“partners”) were being fretted over in one area of the building while curatorial staff ensured that there were no unfinished elements of the exhibition that would be visible to visitors during the curatorial tour for insiders. I walked through the exhibition with scholar Mark Anthony Neal, who would be leading the tour, discussing last minute changes to the exhibition before disappearing to change into formal wear. All the staff members were moving with a purpose: directing catering set up, detailing media protocols and finalizing name tags to ensure that all of the most important attendees were identifiable to Museum staff, consultants and volunteers. After getting dressed up I found the rest of the curatorial team making themselves inconspicuous: three other graduate researchers, exhibitions, collections and conservation staff and assistants and various consultants all aware that while we were crucial to the exhibition itself, we were not who the VIP attendees came to engage. As institutional supporters, the attendees were there to get an exhibition tour from a nationally recognized scholar,
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shake hands with the Museum’s president and, if lucky, take a picture with a
Supreme.
I joked with my colleagues about us “plebs” (short for plebian) staying out of the way of the various funders and stars. At the time I was making light of our
“common” social and institutional status as compared to the attendees with more social, political, or financial importance than those of us who put the event and the exhibition together. One could make a strong case that everyone in the building was a crucial component of the construction of the evening: the paid staff and consultants doing the physical and professional labor of pulling the event together,
Mary Wilson, whose collection of costumes were the core of the exhibition and related programming, the members whose membership dues provided ongoing support to the organization, the corporate and philanthropic funders whose large contributions were often the make or break element in a project or exhibition getting the green light, the politicians who consistently advocated for arts and culture importance and funding (and budgetary support) in the city, and the media attendees who covered it all so that the public would know that an interesting exhibition was happening. But the donors and corporate sponsors who represented the social and economic capital that produced the exhibition took top priority.
AAMP had received financial support from PNC Bank and Macy’s department store for the exhibition and associated educational programming, and representatives from both organizations were treated as the patrons of the patron-client relations with the Museum. This was reflected in protocols that ensured that when corporate 144
representatives arrived, senior staff would be notified to intercept them graciously and make sure they did not get stuck mingling with regular reception attendees.
The primacy of PNC and Macy’s as corporate funders was also reflected in the physical and digital promotional materials for the exhibition and programs. Just as exhibition labels trace the power shifts that lead to the presentation of an item, posters, brochures and other marketing materials also are a useful lens into the political economy of material culture. Even the invitation is a map of financial circuits of power. (See Figure 4.)
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Figure 4: Electronic invitation to VIP opening reception for “Come See About Me,” January 2013
The assortment of logos on the invitation appeared as conditions of agreements between the company and the museum that they be publicly credited in exchange for contributing money, donating consumable products or providing complimentary use of a service like hotel stays or travel vouchers. Being named first, or with a “presented by” reference signals a company or individual as one of 146
the major contributors. And a first sponsor credit is meticulously negotiated and managed, from ensuring that the most important corporations and foundations are mentioned in proper order, to the use and placement of logos and trademarks on marketing materials, press, digital communications and social media.
The outsized presence of PNC Arts Alive on the collateral material for the exhibition reflects the outsized position that the city’s largest banks and corporations have as financial supporters of arts and culture organizations in
Philadelphia. Corporate financial support to arts organizations are positioned discursively as “giving back” to the public, under the label of “corporate responsibility” or “corporate philanthropy” programs. But this discursive positioning should not be interpreted as a kind of no-strings-attached giving. The process of securing these funds are often labor intensive and highly structured, from application-based systems of attempting to receive corporate grants to more informal paths of repeated soliciting. The professionals who perform this labor in cultural institutions tend to be housed in Development or Institutional
Advancement departments, where their responsibilities might include prospect research (on potential individual or corporate donors), grant application writing, managing the relationships with individual and corporate funders, planning and running events (lunches, receptions, excursions) for past or potential donors and
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any number of other activities associated with finding, cultivating and securing resources for the organization.71
When successful, these funds come with literal terms and conditions for using and reporting the funds, as well as constant crediting of the funders that amounts to free advertising, making the practices and the evidence of corporate giving public and highly visible. Further, there are typically institutional perks provided to corporations that support arts institutions that often look like companies simply purchased the right to special access to organizations despite being able to perform generosity for a public that pays for said generosity with the offset tax burden.
Securing PNC funding for the exhibition was tied to the work that this exhibition would do in the city of Philadelphia, at the AAMP that it had not done at previous venues like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the Victoria & Albert
Museum, a decorative arts and design museum in the United Kingdom. As the arts granting arm of PNC Foundation, PNC Arts Alive “challenges visual and performing arts organizations to put forth their best, most original thinking in expanding
71 Many analyses of the neoliberal or late capitalist economy have observed that the decrease in state support for social goods like education and the arts have increased the burden of support to civil society. (See: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005.) This has contributed to the formalizing and professionalizing of previously casual aspects of arts support. For example, the Association of Fundraising Professionals is a national professional organization for fundraisers and development staff that has conferences and releases publications; the Greater Philadelphia Area Docent Alliance is a professional organization for the unpaid volunteer guides to area museums, libraries, zoos and other cultural organizations that give tours. An array of professional philanthropy organizations such as the Center for Effective Philanthropy, the Council on Foundations and the Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia generate reports, host conferences and otherwise support givers. 148
audience participation and engagement” to advance “community development.”72
In “Come See About Me,” the core of the exhibition consisted of the collection of gowns worn by The Supremes that had been exhibited previously in museums, presented primarily as an archival costume collection or emphasizing the history of music, popular culture or fashion. To secure funding by demonstrating “original thinking” about a traveling exhibition AAMP had to discursively and visually present the objects in the context of a story that was different than previous exhibiting institutions. Emphasizing the unique perspective that an African American museum could bring to a story that other museums and galleries (and their publics) thought they already knew about The Supremes and Motown music, AAMP’s exhibition placed the costume collection at the center of a narrative about the use of feminine beauty as part of the racial uplift image work that Black performers and intellectuals engaged during the Civil Rights Movement.
Making that case relied on a particular narration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black history as triumph over racism and stereotyping using glamour as a vehicle. Prior to seeing any images of The Supremes in the exhibition, visitors passed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of
Black performers and everyday people, reproductions of broadsides advertising performances and archival magazines and yearbooks. A display case was installed in a section of the exhibition that contained early twentieth century negative
72 PNC Arts Alive overview, https://www.pnc.com/en/about-pnc/corporate- responsibility/philanthropy/pnc-foundation/arts-alive.html 149
stererotypic depictions of Black Americans in postcards, media and household objects, meant to illustrate the kind of images of Black people that The Supremes and other glamorous entertainers were working against. They served as both a popular culture backdrop to understand the visual intervention into the national cultural imaginary made by The Supremes, and the racist counterpoint that the beautiful, polished girl group pushed spectacularly against as they were beamed into American households by television appearances on prime time programs like
The Ed Sullivan Show. This history component of the exhibition appealed to the generation of museum visitors who had lived through the Civil Rights Movement, especially Black visitors concerned that younger viewers would not otherwise appreciate the racial cultural significance of The Supremes and would engage the exhibition as “merely” a beautiful costume display. It appealed to K-12 educators who were attracted to the ways the exhibition’s treatment of Black American history augmented school curricula. And while this was one of many appropriate lenses on the costume collection the exhibition could have taken, it also represented an adept take on the objects that was partly affected by the funding parameters. Considering the funding parameters provides a lens into understanding how the path to the material culture that features sequins and organza leads through a Colored Waiting
Room and racist memorabilia.
Arts Funding, Power Brokers & the New Philadelphia
Prior to any tours or exhibit installation, public relations consultants mounted a major media campaign for “Come See About Me” at AAMP. Before a 150
single exhibition element had been designed or a panel had been written, the marketing imaging for brochures and banners were produced, and media events and interviews promoting the exhibition, the museum, PNC Bank and the city of
Philadelphia were underway. There was a concerted effort among museum board members and executive staff to be assertive and intentional about managing the press, so as to avoid the public perception problems of the past (see Chapter 4).
Coverage from radio, print and TV news positioned the exhibition and the museum as an exciting “blockbuster” exhibition and a tourism draw to the city. At one event hosted at a PNC Bank event space in downtown Philadelphia, a stage was set up where the bank president, museum president, the mayor and Mary Wilson took turns speaking at a podium flanked by two of the gowns that would be displayed in the exhibition. Executing the event involved the work of museum staff, bank staff, city officials and countless other media outlets.
Speakers at the event talked about the significance of The Supremes to popular culture and the impact the music of Motown had on their lives and popular culture, and about the exhibition as one that would draw visitors to the region from all over the country. As a media event, it successfully brought AAMP news coverage in neighboring states, including a mention in the New York Times.73 Multiple news stories about the exhibition featured Wilson with a combination of local stakeholders from the museum, the city and a funding organization. Their repeated
73 Eric Wilson, “She’ll Bring the Sequins: Reliving the Glamour of The Supremes,” The New York Times October 14, 2012. 151
appearances and speeches provided a lens into the contours of the complex web of politicians, corporations and institutions in Philadelphia’s arts and culture landscape. The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater
Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation featured the exhibition in the press and marketing materials it used to sell the city as a tourism destination. While
AAMP’s narration of the exhibition framed it as a way to further its institutional mission and corporate funders framed it as evidence of the great community work they were doing through corporate giving, city officials positioned the exhibition and AAMP as evidence of the greatness of Philadelphia as a global city and a destination for cosmopolitan, culture consuming travelers.
Figure 5: Photo of William Mills, PNC Bank regional president, Ramona Riscoe Benson, President & CEO of The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Jerry Blavat, radio disc jockey, Mary Wilson, of The Supremes, and Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia at media event for “Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes Collection.” (October 10, 2012, WENN Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo).
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More than just an image for news outlets and institutional reports to board members, the photograph of Mary Wilson with the heads of organizations responsible for the exhibition (See Figure 5) is a social capital snapshot that serves as one kind of map of the set of the relations that produce exhibitions at AAMP through public and private financial entanglements.
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CHAPTER 6: EXHIBITING SLAVERY
In 2014, several museums in Philadelphia presented exhibitions on slavery.
The African American Museum in Philadelphia mounted “Cash Crop” at the same time that the National Constitution Center (in collaboration with the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation at Monticello and the National Museum of African American
History and Culture) exhibited “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of
Liberty”. In terms their materiality and discursive framing, these exhibitions differently positioned slavery and race, as influenced by their respective institutional resources, missions, cultural fields and imagined audiences. ““Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” presented American chattel slavery as a contradiction to be reconciled within a heroic narrative of nationalism and the founding fathers, while “Cash Crop” treated slavery as a racial logic that structured capitalism and Black heritage. In accounting for the ways these curatorial perspectives appeared in the gallery space, I attend to the ways both institutions’ ideological positions and imaginations of who their exhibition audiences were structured the works on the walls and their place in the local field of museums. By looking at these two exhibitions we can see the ways that institutional histories, intellectual fields and the arrangements of social, financial and cultural capital that produce the museums influence what shows up visually in the building.
“Cash Crop” and “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” both consisted of art works and historic artifacts servicing a particular narrative about slavery. As with most exhibits, the narratives depended on the specificity of the material objects and 154
their known histories, the physical and thematic arrangement of those objects and the textual, audio and video information presented about the objects. But exhibitions are more than just objects, and in terms of constructing a narrative, there are myriad possibilities with object-based storytelling. For the curators, artists, historians, archivists, researchers, collections managers, exhibition designers, technicians and architects who work on exhibits, the stories told depend as much on how objects are positioned and discussed as their very presence or absence, and exhibit narratives often succeed or fail based things like thematic framing and spatial layout. These important details are often workshopped and contested during exhibit production and installation, and the finished product is usually the result of compromises on details from the choice of wall paint to the uses of technology or even the exhibition goals. In the best-case scenarios, the clarity and linearity of press materials and exhibition wall panels can contribute to a cohesion that masks the extent to which an exhibit is a many-authored text.
I consider the exhibits keeping in mind these aspects of production, and importantly that the multimedia storytelling in exhibits does not favor all forms equally. Exhibits are a visual form of communication and the images and objects can sometimes exist in harmony with the text, or they can undermine it. In “Cash Crop” and in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello”, various aspects of the narrative were not supported by the spatial experience of the exhibits. Production teams on both exhibitions intended to engage in a nuanced framing of slavery that recognized the humanity of the enslaved and connected American chattel slavery to economic and 155
philosophical themes. In examining the exhibition layout, objects and conceptual framing of these exhibitions, I highlight the ways that these visual, physical presentations of slavery illustrate the gap between these institutional standpoint and assumptions about audiences. Most museums are interested in attracting audiences that are diverse, in terms of race, age, and geographic and socioeconomic background. But the expectation that AAMP will do so as a Black heritage institution affects how exhibitions, education and administrative staff position the desired audiences relative to its exhibitions and programs.
The African American Museum in Philadelphia and the National Constitution
Center (NCC) enjoy some institutional closeness. There are only 1 ½ blocks between the two buildings on Arch Street, and they are both within a few blocks of several of
Old City’s historic monuments and museums, including Independence Hall, the
Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent and the Liberty Bell. In the past, staff members have collaborated in various advisory and programmatic capacities, and they often share audiences by cross promoting one another’s events and suggesting one another as venues to visitors by pointing out the short walk. But despite being less than two blocks away, the institutions are worlds apart in the larger field of
Philadelphia cultural institutions. NCC’s immediate neighbors are popular attractions like the United States Mint and Christ Church Burial Ground (where visitors find Benjamin Franklin’s grave site) while AAMP shares an intersection with the Internal Revenue Service and a Federal Detention Center (which is occasionally commented on by visitors to the frontline staff and on social media). At the time of 156
these exhibits, AAMP had fewer than fifteen full time staff members (only two of whom were in the Exhibitions department) and a $1.8 million annual operating budget. NCC boasted $20.8 million in annual expenses supporting almost 80 full time staff members and counted among its Board of Trustees a former Supreme
Court justice and two former United States Presidents. The effects of these different resources impacted the institutions in a number of ways. Several senior staff members at AAMP only supervised part time employees or (occasionally) interns and volunteers. If collaboration between AAMP and NCC for an event required one person from each of the respective Education departments to contribute a full week of working hours to the project, AAMP’s Education and Public Programming department was staffed by one full time and one part time employee, and AAMP would go without the lion’s share of that departmental productivity for that time.
Simply having fewer staff resources required AAMP to navigate these kinds of institutional collaborations carefully, because there were fewer resources to devote to its own operations.
“Cash Crop”: Works by Stephen Hayes at The African American Museum in
Philadelphia
“Cash Crop” opened on September 12, 2014 at AAMP. As commentary on the
Atlantic slave trade and other modern forms of racialized unfree labor, the exhibit centered on a collection of art works made by a young Black artist, Stephen Hayes.
The collection contained wood carvings, prints, woodcuts, large scale sculptures and
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a cast iron molding, all inspired by a historic image of a diagram of the slave ship
Brooks.
Genealogy of an Image: Brooks Diagram as Propaganda and Contemporary Icon
Figure 6: Broadside collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (Portfolio 282-43 [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-44000]; http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98504459/
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Figure 7: “Remarks on the slave trade,” extracted from the American museum, for May, 1789. and published by order of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia: http://www.lcpimages.org/afro-americana/F32.htm
Created in 1788 for abolitionist posters and broadsides, the diagram was based on measurements for the slave ship Brooks74 and depicts the best number and positioning of slaves on the various areas of the ship for the most efficient method of transportation(See Figures 6 and 7). In The Slave Ship: A Human History, historian Marcus Rediker provides an overview of the creation and circulation of the image in various forms. It originated in a physical ship built in 1781 in Liverpool,
England that appeared in the notes of Captain Parrey of the British Royal Navy who was sent to Liverpool to inspect and measure several slave ships in the area. Rediker noted that of the nine ships that Captain Parrey measured, “When the square
74 The slave ship is referenced as the “Brooks” and “Brookes” in the literature discussing the ship and its images in academic and collections literature in other documents. I use the “Brooks” spelling here.
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footage of each vessel was divided by the number of slaves carried on the last voyage, the Brooks had the second-smallest allocation of space per slave. In all other respects it seemed more or less typical.”75 Abolitionist societies in Plymouth and
London accessed Parrey’s notes and, deciding the Brooks measurements were fairly representative of slave ships in use, created an image based on Parrey’s specifications. The broadside, created by William Elford and the Plymouth chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, depicted the lower deck of the Brooks ship “with 294 Africans tightly packed and arranged in orderly fashion in four apartments, labeled from left (the stern of the vessel) ‘Girls Room,’ ‘Womens
Room,’ ‘Boys Room,’ and ‘Mens Room.’ Each person was distinctly and individually drawn and wore only a loincloth. The men were chained at the ankles.”76 On the
Plymouth broadside, the diagram was accompanied by two columns of text that took up three quarters of the surface area and explained what the image represented in terms of the space of the ship, the social conditions on board for the captured
Africans, a description of the campaign for the end of the slave trade (but not slavery itself) and a call to activism. The original Plymouth image actually under counted the typical number of slaves transported on the Brooks in the six years it sailed, before the 1788 Dolben Act limited the number of slaves that ships could transport according to their tonnage. Rediker cites a 1786-87 Brooks voyage that carried 609 and a 1785-86 voyage that carried 740.
75 Rediker 2008, pg. 310.
76 Rediker 2008, pg. 311
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Rediker’s discussion of the Brooks image focused on its role in making slave ships real to a public that did not regularly encounter them. Abolitionists used speeches, lectures and various other written materials to convince people of the evils of the trade, but the visual images had the most powerful impact. The Brooks was not the first slave ship ever represented visually for abolitionist purposes, but it became the most well known. Its fame was partly due to its many varied reproductions. Rediker notes the ways the image differed in each geographic location. The Philadelphia version, published by Mathew Carey in 1789, enlarged the image to take up more of the surface area space. Both the Philadelphia and New
York versions decreased the amount of text, and removed the paragraph from the
Plymouth broadside attacking slave trade, and instead, attacked slavery and used more evocative language designed to make the reader identify with the “unhappy
Africans.”77 The 1808 London version, included side views of the ship and specified that it depicted 482 individuals, in accordance with the Dolben Act, but emphasized for viewers that adults had too little space to even sit up and that it featured “only
482 slaves rather than the 609 the Brooks actually carried,” serving as “a graphic understatement.”78
The broadsides and fliers with the Brooks diagram were an effective tool in abolitionists’ arsenal, and Rediker detailed how the image made the conditions of the slave trade real and relevant to politicians and regular people in Great Britain. In considering why the diagram was so effective he observed,
77 Rediker 2008: 314
78 Rediker 2008: 318
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…as the text itself and even the headings were reduced and eventually removed, many people who viewed the Brooks would not have known that they were looking at abolitionist propaganda. They would have assumed that it was the work of a naval architect in the pay of a slave- trade merchant. The ambiguity was most useful to the abolitionist movement, for it allowed them to demonize their enemies. Who was the barbarian after all? It certainly was not the Africans, nor was it the sailors, who despite their technical know-how appeared as secondary victims of the slave trade. (Rediker 2008: 337-338)
It is it useful to note that while the Brooks diagram was circulating, the slave trade and slavery more generally were both being debated publicly and in hearings in the
House of Commons. In the process, the many collected accounts of conditions on board the ships engendered sympathy for the Africans, the sailors and (to a lesser extent) the ship captains. This public sentiment helped make slave merchants the villains, and helped the Brooks image function as an example of the barbarity of efficient capitalist management:
The merchant’s violence was twofold, practical and conceptual. Both were essential to how the slave ship worked as a machine to produce the commodity ‘slave’ for a global labor market. A violence of enslavement and a violence of abstraction developed together and reinforce each other….The genius of the image of the Brooks was to illustrate—and critique—both kinds of violence, imbuing both with a sinister industrial quality. The image had what a Scottish abolitionist described as a ‘rigorous economy’ in which ‘no place capable of holding a single person, from one end of the vessel to the other, is left unoccupied.’ It suggests the carefully designed mass production of bodies and a deliberate, systemic annihilation of individual identity. It depicted the violence and terror of the ship and at the same time it captured the brutal logic and cold, rational mentality of the merchant’s business—the process by which human beings were reduced to property by which labor was made into a thing, a commodity, shorn of all ethical considerations. In a troubled era of transition from a moral to a political conception of economy, the Brooks represented a nightmarish outcome of the process. Here was the new, modern economic system in all its horrifying nakedness, capitalism without a loincloth, as Walter Rodney noted. (Rediker 2008: 338-339)
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The visual impact of the Brooks image has long outlasted the abolitionist movements that spawned it. Versions of the diagram are in the collections of museums, historic societies, research libraries and national archives all over the world. Scholars, curators and artists have written about the ways the Brooks diagram has been used by artists as a representative of slave ships generally, as a symbol linking human suffering to global capitalism, and as a powerful racial signifier in the Atlantic world. In the past century alone, the list of artists who have used the Brooks image in their art (and the analytical writings that has inspired) is extensive enough to warrant its own art history subfield.
African American Studies scholar Celeste Marie Bernier has written about artist Betye Saar’s apprehending the diagram as an imprint, and considers Saar’s use of the Brooks image among a long list of artists throughout the African diaspora, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Radcliffe Bailey, Hank Willis
Thomas and Willie Cole (among others) in her analysis of the work the image does, as well as the work that artists have done with it. Considering its staying power, she observes that
as an image with a powerful afterlife and even afterdeath—as its social, political, and above all artistic legacies endure undiminished into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the proliferation of multiple ‘plans’ and ‘descriptions’ of the Brooks retain a tenacious hold within a contemporary African American and Black diasporic art imagination more generally. (Bernier 2014: 992)
English scholar Marcus Wood reads the abstracted silhouettes as a way to highlight the Africans’ victimhood and see the description of slave ships as floating coffins (inspired partly by the shape of the Brooks) configured those captive as if they were already dead. Reading the images against the work by Rediker, Wood
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(and others, including a number of Black artists), Bernier contends that the broadsides’ use of iconography encourages viewers to imagine the Africans as
“…objects defined solely by their incarceration on board a slave ship whose physical dimensions alone were considered sufficient to offer visual confirmation of the atrocities of the trade in general and of white inhumane practices of ‘tight packing’ in particular” (Bernier 2014: 998). In this way, the image is simultaneously horrifying and sanitizing. Bernier considers the possibility that, initially intended for a white abolitionist and philanthropic audience, the diagram may have been effective propaganda because it presented the Africans as passive rather than full agentive humans.
While the cold, technical quality of the Brooks diagram effectively depicted a horror of the slave ship, Bernier and others are careful not to write as if the broadsides illustrated many of the more detailed, specific horrors that we know today from hundreds of years of literature, slave narratives and historical research.
She credits the afterlife of the Brooks diagram rather than the diagram itself, stating,
“…it is only as a result of contemporary Black artists’ practices that the “gruesome, concrete detail” of the ‘slaver’ as ‘a place of barbarity, indeed a huge, complex, technologically sophisticated instrument of torture’ have come to uncensored and unsanitized light” (Bernier 2014: 1005).
In her work on the Brooks image, art historian Cheryl Finley details its creation from a diagram to an icon. She notes the specificity with which the original committees edited and circulated the broadsides and pamphlets such that the assorted versions addressed “the regulation of the slave trade, the abolition of the
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slave trade, African colonization, the suppression of the slave trade, and the abolition of chattel slavery” (Finley 2002: 35). By engaging in a close reading of that history, she reveals that the visual of the “sanitized” silhouettes can be read as a spotlight on the horror of treating the Africans as commodities for others’ benefit.
Finley argues that the Brooks “stands as the most prominent visual metaphor for historical memory of the Middle Passage” for artists across the African diaspora, and that rather than being a personal, individual sense of memory, this memory is
“emanating from oral, visual, and written sources, as well as artifacts. Although the memory is not one that artists have experienced themselves, often the works they create are inherently autobiographical; they use pieces of their own experience to imagine the memory—to make the memory their own—in order to link themselves with the common group that shares the common memory” (Finley 1999: 13). This connection is an explicitly racial one. As part of Black Atlantic artistic practice,
Over and over again, artists have placed aesthetic stress on the death and dying, terror and brutality, pain and suffering, strength and resistance, or survival and liberation in their works that recall the Middle Passage. The regularity with which artists have chosen the Middle Passage as a necessary aesthetic and political theme reflects their need to reclaim that memory—to return to it—to take responsibility for it as a means of maintaining a level of control over their social destiny. (Finley 1999: 14)
In Finley’s analyses of the multi-century uses of the Brooks image, it is not just a visual signifier for slavery but the iconic signifier for artists across the African diaspora. The pointed working and re-working of the image is a reflection of the artists’ claims to Middle Passage as a historical point of reference for their practices of both art-making and racial self-making, in addition to a reminder of the continued salience of Middle Passage and New World slavery for the present day.
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Regarding other artistic uses of the Brooks diagram, art historian Jacqueline
Francis has written about the way the image has urged visual artists in North
America and Europe, such as “Malcolm Bailey, Charles Campbell, Godfried Donkor,
Sue Flowers, Skowmon Hastanan, Romauald Hazoume and Howardena Pindell,” to examine the way their uses of the image reconceptualize “and explore its potential to be a symbol for universal humanism” (Francis 2009: 328). By looking at the engagement of both Black and non-Black artists with the Brooks, Francis reveals the ways that, despite the specificity of the slave ship, the Brooks image has been used by artists as a symbol of “exploitation, oppression and injustice” more broadly.
Stephen Hayes’ entry into a visual conversation with the Brooks image bears similarities to many of the aforementioned artists who have engaged the Brooks diagram in their work. Much of the artwork that made up “Cash Crop” came out of
Hayes’ MFA thesis project for the Savannah College of Art and Design, and his first encounter with the Brooks image was in a book in a graduate course. In interviews and in the press kit for the collection of work, the North Carolina native described his initial surprise at the image itself, and at never having encountered it previously in his education:
I came across the image of the Brookes [sic] slave ship plan — that image that depicts how many people they can pack into one area at once — and thought about how I didn’t learn much about the transporting of people, like, from Africa to America. We just learned about slavery, the Civil War and all this other history, but we didn’t learn about how the people got here and the transporting of people from one place to another. (Booker 2014)
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In addition to its inhumane depiction of efficiency, he noted a resemblance to contemporary images of sweatshops, and the artworks are Hayes’ way of putting the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary brutal labor practices in conversation.
Figure 8: “Passage” (2009) by Stephen Hayes on view at AAMP, photo by author.
In one 3 ft by 9 ft piece, “Passage” the image of the Brooks diagram and an image of a textbook page describing the slave trade were among several opaque images layered on top of a map of the world, with the Brooks image intentionally covering parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and the Atlantic Ocean (see figure 8). The image sat inside a large wooden frame that has a portion of a scene depicting slaves working in a field carved into it in such a way that it appears as an abstract carving pattern until the viewer looks closer. In another sculpture, “Made
In”, an 11 foot wide wooden ship had canvas sails with a grid of labels in the style of manufactured products printed on them: “Made in Vietnam”, “Made in Bangladesh”,
“Made in China” (see figures 9 through 11).
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Figure 9: “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author.
Figure 10: Detail of “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author.
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Figure 11: Detail of sail on “Made In” (2012) by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author.
Hayes connected the old and new forms of exploitation in terms of scale:
Sweatshops are designed to pack in as many workers as possible, producing as much as possible in inadequate and inhumane conditions. The sweatshops of third world countries are today’s slave ships…. The exhibition “Cash Crop” asks the question; what or who is the next “Cash Crop”? (Hayes 2014: 6)
The key connections between the era of American chattel slavery and contemporary industrial sweatshops hinged on both the visual image of individuals in a tightly packed space and the exploitation of the labor of many to enrich a few.
Curatorial staff at AAMP became aware of Hayes’ work nearly two years before mounting the exhibit, through marketing materials and post cards from an exhibition of the works in “Cash Crop” at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African
American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina. By the time the Director of
Curatorial Services was making arrangements to show Hayes’ work at AAMP, there
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had already been conversations among the staff more generally about how to better manage the (occasionally competing) board and public desires that some had for
AAMP to be more of an art museum and that others had for AAMP to be more of a history museum. In exhibitions, the strategy became committing to having more exhibits address historical subjects through art. This resulted in a number of recurring conversations about exhibits and programming where staff members tended to express an opinion on a program or exhibit in terms of how it related to their preferred aspect of African American cultural programming, often with art and history discursively positioned in opposition. In this way, Hayes’ art was almost deceptively perfect to satisfy seemingly competing interests. The core of the collection of artworks included fifteen life-sized human statutes (thirteen adults and two children) made of cement, each with metal chains around their hands, feet and necks, affixed to a wooden base that was shaped like the bottom of a ship and had the Brooks diagram carved into the back of it (See figures 12 and 13).
Figure 12: “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author.
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Figure 13: “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author.
Each of the statues was connected by metal railroad ties to a piece called “E.
Pluribus Unum,” a wooden shipping pallet (6 ft by 6 ft) with the obverse of the Great
Seal of the United States79 carved into it (See figure 14).
79 Adopted by the Continental Congress in 1782, the Great Seal contains the United States official motto, E Pluriubs Unum (meaning “Out of many, one”). As a seal, it is assigned to the U.S. Secretary of State and is used as a seal 2,000-3,000 a year on treaties and international agreements, as well as other documents (like appointments of civil officers consular officers) signed by the U.S. President and Secretary of State. It also appears on coins, paper currency, passports, stamps, flags, military uniforms, monuments, publications, public buildings “and other items the U.S. Government has issued, owns or uses.” “The Great Seal of the United States,” U.S. Department of State Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington, D.C., July 2003.
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Figure 14: “E Pluribus Unum” (2010) by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author.
This collection of fine arts objects was more than just a sculptural history lesson. Visually, Hayes’ use of the iconic Brooks diagram as a great signifier of
Middle Passage allowed museum staff and viewers to frame the exhibition as one about a particular history of racial chattel slavery in the Americas that is important to contemporary framing of Black American heritage, but significant to a number of other thematic considerations. Hayes’ work was also about slavery as a node in the long history of labor exploitation in service of capital, as foundational to American state formation and power, human rights, a critique of late capitalism, the history of the Brooks diagram and the role of images in political movements, and an array of other intellectually rich thematic considerations. There was a conceptual and visual consistency to the artwork in “Cash Crop”. The exhibition included a metal sculpture of the Brooks, an oversized printed Brooks diagram and an installation entitled
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“Gluttony,” consisting of 190 stacked wooden boxes that were 22 by 9 ½ inches each with the Brooks diagram in cement mounted inside (See Figure 15). The repetition of the diagram across multiple pieces and various media in the exhibit bore conceptual similarity to the repetition of the original Brooks diagram across abolitionist movements (history). It also allowed for potential conversations about repetition and patternmaking as a mode of visual art production (art), providing a range of topics for the Education and Public Programming department to consider for audience engagement.80
Figure 15: “Gluttony” (2010) by Stephen Hayes, installation view at AAMP, photo by author.
80Robert Farris Thompson argues that it is the repeating of an image that gives it a kind of visual power: “the intensification of iconic resonance by simplification of expressive means” African Art in Motion: Icon and Act, 1974, University of California Press.
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AAMP staff hoped that fine art aficionados would appreciate the large-scale sculptures, and that intelligent museum visitors (and potential grant funders) would note the intellectual depth of the exhibit’s themes. It was imagined Hayes’ approach to Middle Passage could both satisfy non-Black audiences in its framing of slavery as a larger story of exploitation that isn’t necessarily about race and the Black history aficionados who consistently expressed a desire for AAMP to offer more exhibits on classic Black subjects like ancient Africa and American slavery. Still, there was some concern that, without providing the artwork with some historical information about the Atlantic slave trade, some visitors would visit the exhibit as an attempt to learn about the history of slavery and leave frustrated at the absence of “real history,” or leave skeptical about the severity of Middle Passage itself. And written elements of the press kit Hayes’ supplied concerned some staff members, including the elision of labor, geopolitical, economic and thematic differences across space and time in statements like:
Out sourcing goods to America is another form of slavery; everywhere you look today there is little of nothing in America that says Made in America. Instead of going to Africa and taking slaves to America to work the land, there are poor countries that are producing the slaves in their own backyards. Providing dreams that this factory lifestyle is a means to better their life, however it is an ongoing cycle. Many American businesses have out sourced work to other countries, because it is cheaper to ship it out to have it done, there are not many regulations and there are not many rules for workers such as worker compensation, or benefits. In these countries workers are housed in poor conditions, paid little, and have few breaks. The factory lifestyle is all the workers know, or can do to support their families. Therefore they work and produce goods that are shipped to America. These items are sold at a high price and made for little of nothing. Crowding the factories with workers to produce a larger product output. The slave ships have mutated to factories. (Hayes 2014: 11)
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The conflation of sweatshop factory labor and racial chattel slavery was disconcerting to Education staff, who are most often tasked with providing real answers to such concrete questions from visitors, and who anticipated questions like, “How many people were enslaved in total?” and “Where were there slaves outside of the South?” The institutional plan to underscore that Hayes’ was an artistic take on a history that was very real framed a series of meetings about how best to incorporate well-selected excerpts from Hayes’ artist statements with staff research, local experts or additional artifacts in or beyond the exhibition. Numeric facts emerged as one of the more important to pin down: Hayes’ fifteen statues were supposed to represent the estimated fifteen million people transported from Africa over the course of the slave trade, so staff spent research time and engaged several scholars to verify that number. Research by Marcus Rediker, the historian and expert on maritime history who wrote so extensively about slave ships (cited above) was relied on so heavily that Education and Curatorial staff attempted to design a public program during the exhibition that would feature him at the museum.81
Imagining that ways accuracy would affect audience reception of the themes, the Exhibitions team supplemented Hayes’ art works with other objects and expanded the exhibit’s narrative framework. AAMP borrowed artifacts to connect the artwork to the ways slavery was local, and real. Historic documents on display included a nineteenth century estate record listing the monetary value of slaves and a late eighteenth-century book from the Delaware County Bar Association that was
81 This program did not come to fruition due to an inability to resolve scheduling issues and budgetary constraints, which was not an uncommon occurrence in planning museum programming at AAMP.
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used to record both the registration of slaves in the county and the legal proceedings for trials involving slaves. A coffle chain and branding iron were displayed in a case, on loan from The Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of
Slavery in north Philadelphia (see figure 16). The panels describing the artifacts and describing the Atlantic slave trade were some of the first things visitors encountered in the exhibition, setting the historical stage for the works of art that would come later.
Figure 16: Coffle chain and branding iron, on view at AAMP (loan from the Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery), photo by author
On the wall across from Hayes’ life sized sculptures was a silent video projection of the Moore Dance Project performing “Sacred Slave Stories,” a dance production inspired by recordings of slave narratives from the Federal Writers
Project. Mounted in the window of the museum that faces Philadelphia’s Federal
Detention Center was a site-specific installation by another artist entitled The View
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From Here, linking slave- and sweatshop-labor to prison-industrial labor, using an image of incarcerated Black men at sewing machines sewing military uniforms, taken from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ own marketing materials.82
There were overlapping expectations for how audiences might receive “Cash
Crop”. Hayes wanted viewers to connect slavery with current exploitive labor practices while curatorial staff at AAMP wanted to both historicize the slave trade as a traumatic racial event and make connections to the carceral state. Overall, staff hoped Black visitors would connect with the specificity of race in these themes enough to take the exhibition in as Black heritage, and that other visitors would understand slavery, labor exploitation and the prison industrial complex as disproportionately, but not exclusively Black . Still, there was reason to expect that some visitors might have an emotional response to the exhibit’s major installation of fifteen life-sized statues chained to the wooden pallet (See figure 17). While installing the exhibition, after the statues were placed in the gallery, a handful of staff members passing through the gallery en route to something else stopped to stare at the statues, sometimes in solemn reflection, other times with facial expressions that looked like grief. One staff member, circling the sculptures slowly, put her hand on her chest and cried. Four new benches and a set of chairs were added to the galleries in anticipation of visitors to the exhibition that might respond
82 The installation piece, pulling on the long history of the U.S. appetite for free or cheap Black labor was not just a comment on the kinds of historical forces discussed in research like Douglas A. Black mon’s Slavery By Another Name, about convict leasing, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Its link between the exhibition and the Federal Detention Center across the street was meant to highlight and, in some ways, indict public complicity in the prison industrial complex.
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to the sculptures affectively in the ways that staff members did and want to sit down.
Figure 17: “Cash Crop” and “E Pluribus Unum” by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author.
Mindful of AAMP’s long history of negative journalistic coverage, the exhibitions and administrative staff were making concerted efforts to proactively manage the relationship to journalists and bloggers. In addition to employing a public relations company to manage press and media, staff members made personal invitations to the exhibition’s opening reception to writers for local newspapers and bloggers who wrote about exhibitions in Philadelphia. In anticipating a multiracial readership of these outlets, AAMP staff emphasized to journalists that ““Cash Crop”” wasn’t “just” about slavery as racial history, hoping to draw the widest possible
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audience to the exhibition. Meanwhile, press write-ups, blog posts and visitor feedback suggests that the fact that AAMP is a Black heritage museum may have overdetermined the consumption of the exhibit and drowned out that explicit discourse. On chalkboards installed to solicit viewer feedback to the exhibition, visitors wrote that they were in “awe” and “grateful” to their “ancestors.” Writer
Brian Bingaman noted the chalkboard feedback in his November review of the exhibit: “One recent visitor wrote: ‘Is it all behind us?’ ‘Hopefully,’ another wrote in response. ‘Not in Ferguson,’ replied another.’”83 Viewers of color were especially moved by the exhibit. During training for the exhibition, AAMP’s docents, most of whom were of African descent, oscillated between quiet sadness and passionate anger during the training for touring groups through the exhibition. One Black blog reviewer wrote:
It was intense. Seeing some of the sculptures the same size as my children made my heart ache. Also attempting to explain to them, Black CHILDREN, what the exhibit meant was insanely difficult… As we walked through I stopped in front of this woman sculpture and just stared, flooded with emotion. That was when my husband said exactly my thoughts ‘she’s…she looks like…that could be like…like you.’ I think the most difficult part of the whole exhibit was when my children were walking through and I could hearing them tripping over the chains. Hearing the sound just….blows your mind. (Shante 2015)
83 Brian Bingaman, tickettoentertainment.com, November 6, 2014
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Figure 18: Detail view of “Cash Crop” by Stephen Hayes, on view at AAMP, photo by author.
Consistently throughout the exhibit, most people commented that the body casted statues were the major source of intensity. More than the artifacts, confronting the life-sized—and especially child-sized—representations of people in bondage made the themes of labor, power, racial chattel slavery and the commoditization of humans more moving and real than any of the real historical objects.
“Slavery at Monticello: A Paradox of Liberty” at the National Constitution Center
A block from AAMP, the National Constitution Center (NCC) is the only institution in America established by Congress to “disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a non-partisan basis in order to increase the
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awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.84”
NCC was created by the Constitution Heritage Act in 1988 but didn’t break ground for over a decade and opened in July 2003.
““Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” was a traveling exhibit organized by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello and the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture
(NMAAHC). It was housed in NCC’s temporary gallery space on the ground floor of the building. The exhibit “follows the powerful stories of six enslaved families who lived and worked at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and their descendants who helped bring to light their ancestors’ lives and values, through personal artifacts and oral history.85” It contained over 280 objects in 3500 square feet of space.
Visitors entered the exhibit through glass doors and arrived in an entrance vestibule with two walls separated by a doorway into the rest of the exhibit. On one wall a portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale looked out while on the other, a picture Isaac (Granger) Jefferson by an unknown photographer (See figures
19 and 20).
84 National Constitution Center website, http://constitutioncenter.org/about.
85 Press release for “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty,” National Constitution Center.
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Figure 19: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
Figure 20, Chapter 6: Portrait of Isaac Granger, courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
A ceiling mounted projector displayed digital images of scrolling documents on both sides of the room: the Declaration of Independence near Jefferson’s portrait, and the page from Jefferson’s Farm Book listing slaves in his possession near Granger’s photograph. The juxtaposition made the narrative paradox spatial, if you stood still
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in the middle of the room the Declaration of Independence scrolled in slow unison with the list of slaves at Monticello projected on the opposite wall: freedom and slavery on opposing walls in the same room (see figures 21 and 22).
Figure 21: Thomas Jefferson portrait and digital projection of the Declaration of Independence in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the National Constitution Center, December 2014, photo by author
Figure 22: Isaac Granger portrait and digital projection of “The Farm Book” in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the National Constitution Center, December 2014, photo by author
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The text panel introducing Jefferson touted his political and intellectual accomplishments, noting, “He believed human freedom was the surest path to human progress and consistently opposed slavery, calling it a ‘moral depravity.’ Yet, over the course of his life, Jefferson owned 600 people at Monticello and his other
Virginia plantations. Their names appear on the wall behind the statute. Jefferson’s way of life always depended on the labor of people he held in slavery” (see figure
23).
Figure 23: Text panel on view in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” at the National Constitution Center, photo by author.
Another panel described the Transatlantic slave trade, displaying the iconic plan of the Slave Ship Brooks, and then a section of the exhibit lays out Thomas Jefferson’s early life. He was born on Shadwell plantation, where his parents owned 60 slaves, and viewers were told his intellectually rich childhood depended on this livelihood:
“Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew.” A display case showed items
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excavated from his family home at Shadwell, while the next section of the exhibit narrated Jefferson’s educational development and another display case showed off some of Jefferson’s personal items (see figures 24 and 25).
Figure 24: Thomas Jefferson’s personal items, on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
Figure 25: Thomas Jefferson’s personal items, on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
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Text panels described Jefferson designing and building Monticello on inherited land near cases that display more of Jefferson’s personal items from his adult life at Monticello. A waist high three dimensional topographic map of
Monticello (see figure 26) gave viewers a sense of its 5000 acres near cases of fragments of objects excavated from both Shadwell and Monticello’s slave quarters.
Figure 26: Topographic map of Monticello on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
In the middle of the exhibition a replica of the desk upon which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence was showcased, in front of a life-sized statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of a wall of names of various people he owned over the course of his life (see figure 27).
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Figure 27: Statue of Thomas Jefferson on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
The rest of the exhibit focused on six families who worked at Monticello, each with a graphic of the family tree, items they made if they were skilled craftspeople, or excavated items they might have used (see figure 28). Viewers were asked “If you were enslaved at Monticello would you run away?” and, after a description of how the Hubbard brothers worked in a nailery on the plantation, invited to pick up a 10 pound bucket of nails. A section on the Hemings family gingerly described their relationship to Jefferson: “Most historians now believe that Jefferson, long after his wife’s death, was the father of Sally Hemings’ six children. The 10 people freed by
Jefferson were all members of the Hemings family.”
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Figure 28: Section of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” on the Gillette Family, on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
Near the end of the exhibit a panel informed viewers that Jefferson left over
$107,000 in debt upon his death and that Monticello and its contents (both the objects and the people) were sold to settle the debt, with the exception of seven people (five of whom were freed in his will). A final section on Monticello’s Black and white descendants and the ongoing oral history project about them included video and stories of what happened to the enslaved families after Jefferson’s death
(see figure 29).
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Figure 29: Section of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” on “After Monticello” on view at the National Constitution Center courtesy of the National Constitution Center, “Slavery at Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty” Press Kit
The exhibit was billed as the story of six enslaved families at Monticello, but
Thomas Jefferson takes up the lion’s share of the exhibition space and narrative.
This makes sense for a number of reasons. Thomas Jefferson is an important historical figure—as a former president, there is a body of research on him with breadth and depth that far exceeds any family at Monticello. Further, the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation’s charge is to preserve Monticello, and NCC’s mission is focused on the U.S. Constitution. It makes sense institutionally for “Slavery at
Monticello” to be heavy on Thomas Jefferson and early U.S. history. But viewers were encouraged by words and objects to empathize with Jefferson in ways that undercut the narrative of the exhibit as a story about the Monticello families. He is simultaneously presented as a man of his time who didn’t know a world without slavery, and as a man who was great because of his transcendent intellect on the
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issues of his time. There were objects representing both his childhood and adult homes, and while I wasn’t convinced Jefferson’s letters to others about slavery reflect a “grappling” with his own slaveholding (particularly when considering the racial writings in his Notes on the State of Virginia86 which is not addressed in the exhibit itself, but is written about extensively on Monticello’s website), the representation of and tributes to his intellect give him the benefit of interiority, which is not extended to the enslaved people at Shadwell or Monticello. In an exhibition review (discussing a Washington, D.C. venue showing) entitled “The New
And Improved Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened Slave Owner,” writer Leah Caldwell quipped, “However laudable the goals of ‘Paradox of Liberty,’ it doesn’t bode well that if you entered the Jefferson exhibit not knowing what slavery was, you might come out thinking it was an intensive training program for highly-skilled craftsmen.”87 While visiting the exhibition I noted viewers could pick up a bucket of nails and imagine the Hubbard brothers’ experience of Monticello, or trace the contours of the map of Monticello and imagine Jefferson’s experience of Monticello.
86 The significance of Jefferson as an important Enlightenment figure who wrote about Black inferiority as a foregone conclusion in Notes on the State of Virginia has been treated by Thomas Biolsi in Race Technologies as a technique of racial construction and a project of racial subject formation: “The civilized, modern white self is not only rational, but also democratic, humane, and moral. Therein lies an historical and perennial challenge to white subject formation: how to explain the glaring ‘anomaly’ of how Black s experience their presence in the US, in comparison to whites, how Black s have fared under ‘modernity.’ During slavery, that anomaly was the disturbing presence of slaves in a democratic republic founded on the premise that all men (sic) are created equal and endowed with the inalienable right of liberty. The exoneration for whites was the claim, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that ‘Black s are inferior to whites.’ Jefferson’s negative appraisal of Black s makes perfect sense as his self-constituting struggle to make sense of himself, and those like him, as a radical defender of the natural rights of Man, but also as a slave-owner. Jefferson the slave-owner deployed the negrophobic statements in Notes as a slave-owner who was also an Enlightenment subject in the making.” (Biolsi 2007: 402)
87 Leah Caldwell, “The New And Improved Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened Slave Owner,” The Awl, March 19, 2012. http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/the-new-and-improved-thomas-jefferson- enlightened-slave-owner
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The larger, visually enticing objects are associated with Jefferson and his ornate life.
I found the life-sized Jefferson statue to be an odd curatorial choice, especially since it allows for the conversational exchanged that piqued my initial interest in the exhibit, where a friend in the field insisted I had to go see the “Jefferson exhibit” because “they put the slavemaster on the pedestal,” and when I began to talk about why an organization presenting the state’s view of history would revere Thomas
Jefferson I was cut off and corrected—not a conceptual pedestal, but an actual, physical one.88 This exchange and viewer responses to both exhibits highlight the ways that multimedia storytelling in exhibits does not favor all forms equally. As a highly visual form of communication the objects can sometimes exist in harmony with the text, but are just as likely to drown it out. Further, they suggest that the individual and institutional producers of the exhibits have an important impact on how subjects are physically and thematically presented: which individuals are framed sympathetically, who visitors are likely to be and what sensibilities audiences will bring to the exhibits.
In writing about the impossibility of fully representing slavery in the New
World, Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson draw on Saidiya Hartman’s observation that so much scholarly work on slavery is “structured by a visual absence,” relying on Hartman’s argument in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America that “even when sympathizers create representations of slavery, they often displace the personhood of the enslaved in the
88 I wasn’t the only one who found the statue to be odd. When I asked a member of the exhibition team at the National Constitution Center about the statue of Thomas Jefferson, I was told that they also found it problematic and that this was one of the reasons it was further back in the exhibition rather than prominently displayed as one of the first objects visitors encounter.
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process…” (Copeland and Thompson 2011: 3). Hartman’s assertion that attempting to sympathize with the enslaved risks obstructing their subjectivity and hints at the ways that, on some level, all representations of slavery—whether structured by presence or absence—can be deeply unsatisfying. While visual representations risk putting viewers in the position of slouching toward empathy by imagining the pain of slavery, as witnesses or voyeuristic spectators, absence is equally fraught. In Lose
Your Mother Hartman writes about the frustration of visiting the (former slave fort, now museum) Elmina Castle in Ghana:
Even in the museum, the slaves were still missing. None of their belongings were arranged nicely in well-lit glass cases. None of the waste found in the dungeon was placed neatly on trays with small flags. None of their sayings were quoted on placards throughout the hall. Nor was their family life and social organization described. How they farmed or fished or appealed to their gods or buried their dead goes unmentioned. The museum was as bereft as the underground. (Hartman 2007: 116)
But even the inclusive exhibitionary displays where speculative belongings are arranged in glass cases and family life is described may simply reveal the ways these displays may just be as unsatisfying as history is. Copeland and Thompson use this dilemma to ask,
What are the means through which modern slavery becomes visible and meaningful at different historical moments? How do material remains—and the institutions that house them—shape and give visual form to the memory of the enslaved, providing both limits on and seemingly endless sources for the reimagining of the past? How do we approach and interpret such materials when visual objects were often crafted precisely to undermine the slave’s subjectivity, personhood, and life? What are the implications of unrepresentability, of the disappearance of the enslaved in the archive, for those invested in interpreting that which does remain in the realm of visuality? (Copeland and Thompson 2011: 3)
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“Cash Crop” and “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” provide one way to see the practical salience of these questions at the fraught intersections of history, memory, art, subjectivity and race. The choice to seek out and display archaeological artifacts or punishing iron works in an exhibit about slavery is as much a function of object availability as it is institutional mission and history. In crafting “Cash Crop” as an exhibition that wasn’t “just” about a display of race as a structuring feature of modern capitalism and Middle Passage but is very much about race, the exhibition planning imagined that some of the audience would consist of people who would have emotional reactions to the art and artifacts, likely (but not necessarily!) because they would have a racial connection to the display that may make it function as a kind of heritage. While AAMP’s location in downtown Philadelphia makes it unlikely that this would be a majority of visitors, the gallery layout accounted for empathy for that possible visitor response. And this layout was driven by the objects themselves, and their power to shape the ways viewers reimagine the past, and what/who they empathize with. Choosing to make the enslaved or the enslavers into life-sized renderings not only reflect different assumptions about who audiences might be, but also different investments in “interpreting that which does remain in the realm of visuality.”
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CHAPTER 7: BLACK WORK, WHITE GAZE: BLACK CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN BLACK SPACE
At the Spring 2017 Review Panel Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), moderator and art critic David Cohen facilitated a conversation between visual cultural experts including himself, art historian and curator Karen E. Jones, Sid Sachs, the Director of Exhibitions at the University of the
Arts, and Didier William, professor and chair of the MFA program at PAFA. The
Review Panel Philadelphia is an offshoot of Cohen’s New York-based Review Panel, which regularly convenes a public conversation among arts experts about a set of four to five exhibitions in the city. As a public art criticism panel, they discussed four exhibitions: “Andre Bradley and Paul Anthony Smith: Interference” at the
Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, “Dave Carrow: DC 3D” at Marginal Utility, “Jessica
Doyle: We Fearless Ones” at Inliquid Art & Design, and “Shawn Theodore: Church of
Broken Pieces” at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
In the portion of the discussion about “Shawn Theodore: Church of Broken
Pieces” at AAMP, the panelists became mired in differing conceptions of the ways that sociology and aesthetics influence institutions, particularly when Sachs and
Cohen framed the African American Museum in Philadelphia as a sociological political museum that was thus unconcerned with aesthetics. While the conversation about a few exhibits veered into their press and marketing materials, none of the other shows were discussed in relationship to the history, mission or focus of the exhibiting institutions. Subsequent audience tension was met with
194 suggestions that the attendees might be foolishly invested in political correctness. A post-panel interview with the moderator quoted him:
With Theodore….I think the work appealed in a very different way and I think the work is bigger than the ‘intentions’ that I think were written after the fact. I think because the African American Museum is not an art venue, it’s a museum of history, it’s a museum of a community and a phenomenon that is involved with crucial issues of sociology, their curators and PR department are all set up to understand everything they do through the filter of the museum’s mission, which is not aesthetic. I think they (the intentions) were more politically and sociologically revved up.” (Kessler 2017, emphasis mine)
Cohen’s commentary lays bare the structures of power that enable some of the panelists’ presumptions and their misapprehension of the histories that create arts institutions to be sustained as authoritative, and as art criticism. These are the very same structures of power that made a museum like AAMP necessary in the first place, that impact the nature of engagement between audience and staff, and affect general public and shape the perceptions of the institutions in the eyes of funders and the broader arts public.
How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?
One of the temperature-raising elements of Cohen’s move to isolate aesthetics from politics and culture in a conversation about museums was the extent to which that move is deeply ahistorical. In this dissertation, I have argued that twentieth century history of major American museums is a largely racialist and exclusionary, especially when it comes to art made by Black Americans. Fath Davis
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Ruffins (1992, 2007) and Michele Gates Moresi (2003) have written about the various forms of exclusion and racist inclusion in major museums that have spawned activism, audience pushback and movements for entirely new institutions over a century of American museum practice. For the bulk of the 19th and 20th centuries the collecting and archiving of Black art and material culture was done by private collectors and historically Black colleges and universities, and both Moresi and Ruffins note that based on institutional records, the Smithsonian scholars either didn’t think Black Americans had culture, or didn’t have any material culture worthy of collection or study (Moresi 2003, Ruffins 1992). When the national museums aren’t institutionally producing research collections—two of the major forces that make up exhibitions—on Black life or artistic output, it makes for very limited possibilities for exhibitions.
Bridget Cooks and Susan Cahan have written about how many of the largest, most prestigious arts institutions in the nation have long histories of exclusionary exhibition practices, often positioning the idea of exhibiting work by Black artists as a gimmick to fulfill a social-liberal obligation, a gimmick they only occasionally engaged in--as if there were few other reasons to exhibit work by a Black artist.
Black artists formed collectives, started arts workshops and organized alternative arts spaces in major U.S. cities in response to their systematic exclusion from white museums and galleries in the early 20th century, ensuring that the work of continued artistic training, exhibiting and community formation would happen despite their exclusion from white art spaces where that work took place. (See 196
Chapter 3). It took activism to change this professional landscape. In the 1960s and
1970s, while artists, scholars, collectors and politicians engaged in institutional activism, starting new museums, pushing for different exhibiting and collecting practices in existing museums, artists protested them from the outside. When Black artists in New York openly and angrily challenged the city’s major institutions, they challenged their exhibition practices and their hiring practices, eliding the position between the museum as an institution that produces aesthetic standards and as a workplace. They protested the biggest museums—the Whitney Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art—using their artistic training and aesthetic knowledge as the place from which they spoke authoritatively on their exclusion. Theirs was a philosophical challenge to museum practice: if these institutional presentations of the history of the nation or of the history of American art are overwhelmingly white and male it isn’t just a narrow conception of history, it’s a refusal to reflect reality.
AAMP’s regular engagement with artists, writers, performers, audiences and docents includes people who know this history of exclusion from American museums—in many cases because they lived through and remember it. Working with artists and writers of that generation means being occasionally reminded of how much of our contemporary visual engagements with Black creativity are a direct result of political, institutional and educational activism. The exhibitions staff academic backgrounds include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Aarts and
Spelman art history. In deciding on the spring exhibitions for the rotating galleries, 197 we thought putting photographer Dawoud Bey’s “Harlem, USA” photographs in one gallery with Shawn Theodore’s “Church of Broken Pieces” in another would allow us to do some interesting visual and programmatic work institutionally around Black photography as a mechanism for capturing, crafting and archiving Black people. In working with Shawn Theodore I was intrigued by how important the spatial histories of place were to his shooting locations, how biography occasionally shows up in the work and by the citation politics in a piece like “Black Quasar in
Capricorn,” (see figure 30) which engages the kinds of juxtapositions between a visually saturated black and glittering reflective light that Kerry James Marshall does with paint and glitter or that Toyin Ojih Odutola does with charcoal, pastel and ink. As practitioners at the always political AAMP, we were indeed deeply invested in thinking about Black aesthetic work.
Figure 30: “Black Quasar in Capricorn”, 2016, photograph by Shawn Theodore. Courtesy of Shawn Theodore. 198
Thus when Sachs and Cohen were declaring that the museum was “not an art venue” despite having visited specifically for the purpose of viewing art, and deploying that statement as art criticism, it set off an interdisciplinary bomb in my head. Genre multiplicity meets racialized subtexts: does the fact that that the institution is not exclusively an art venue undercut the artwork when it appears?
Was this about a particular philosophy of the spaces in which art must appear to be seen as art? The museum as an exhibiting institution—as a form—is fundamentally invested in and structured by aesthetic concerns in the broader sense, because the unique form of knowledge production that museum exhibitions perform requires viewers to enter into a physical space to engage in assemblages of objects and text.
The idea that history, community and critical sociology are separate from aesthetic or artistic missions and concerns is a strange one, when all of these things are inextricably linked, particularly in the Americas, which has institutionalized Old
World histories of aesthetic theories and practices, foundations, hierarchies and terms of debate, and then masked the consolidation of that history. The ability to see issues of community and sociology in the history of the exclusion of certain peoples and objects from a conversation about aesthetics at AAMP doesn’t make it an institution unconcerned with aesthetics, it is rather a radical contextualization of aesthetics. AAMP staff are as concerned with aesthetics as they are with the terms by which Black artists and arts workers are barred from entering the spaces where aesthetic work is being taken seriously.
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Newly founded museums in the mid-twentieth century were responding to the refusal of the larger existing museums to hold themselves to their supposed aesthetic missions, choosing instead to produce knowledge that suggested that the history of art was significantly more white and more male than it is. If the large, encyclopedic institutions had committed purely and broadly to aesthetic concerns, institutions like AAMP would never have been necessary in the first place. Trying to isolate visual concerns from the material, lived reality of artists, viewers and exhibition spaces as if art is not made out of materials that cost money, in a geographic locale, out of a history that is taught in some institution in some city with a zip code and a tax code is at best, decadent and at worst, violently dishonest.
The Museum is a Ghetto: Arts Criticism as a Site for the Production of Power
I discussed this instance of white art criticism at an academic symposium, suggesting that this kind of elite, authoritative critical white gaze might negatively impact living artists who want to engage the audiences that visit AAMP, but are concerned about their work being “ghettoized.” A senior scholar who taught in the greater Delaware Valley for several decades confided that he used to work for state granting agencies, and that the “real problem” for the museum is how that critical white gaze permeates perceptions of the institution among donors and the larger
“funding community.” He reminisced about past discussions of formal and informal funding proposals and requests from the Museum that were met with skepticism and disdain that were unrelated to whether or not the proposals were good, stating
“Sometimes people were looking for any reason not to fund the Museum.” This 200 underscored what’s at stake in the relationship between how the Museum’s production and presentation of exhibitions impacts the visual and sociopolitical landscape, and how those exhibitions are received in media and by general publics
(or not) structures its need to manage public relations, marketing and fundraising.
Arguing for the larger significance of Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field,
Randal Johnson states that the producers of literature and art “do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorizes, enables, empowers and legitimizes them” and that the socially constituted, contingent ways that these processes happen “must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices” (Bourdieu
1993:10). When elite outside viewers of AAMP do not know or otherwise refuse to engage the complex institutional framework that structures a place like AAMP: the long history of American collecting and exhibiting Black art and artifacts that impacted the public desire for Black museums (see Chapters 2 and 3), and even the local, recent history of AAMP’s exhibitions of art and artifacts (see Chapters 5 and
6), it is almost possible to see the logic in dismissing a museum as not an “art venue” despite viewing art in that venue and being aesthetically impressed with the work.
At PAFA, once being urged by another Review Panel participant to engage the work rather than focus on the institution, the critics discussed how strong they believed
Theodore’s work was visually. Later, in response to the writer’s question of which of the four exhibitions discussed at the Panel resonated with him the most, Cohen answered: 201
Probably Shawn Theodore. The imagery was sumptuous and the focus was noble. The colors are what resonate the most because what was tremendous about the color— and this could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing—was that it’s strange kind of riff on ruin porn. He’s in these ghettos that are on the brink of gentrification. But in fact, he’s helping to gentrify it through his and his sitter’s discovery of pure colored walls, that would be contrived in a studio. To me, that’s not a fault so much as an exciting tension. (Kessler 2017)
If Cohen and Sachs actually enjoyed the artistic output of Shawn Theodore’s photography in the museum, then the commitment to the sense of AAMP as a museum is “not an art venue/institution invested in aesthetics,” reveals art criticism as yet another site for producing prestige, power, and cultural capital. The proscription from art is so strong that for Cohen it is incidental that art that is regularly exhibited there (as is the fact that AAMP is a museum). The framework instantiated in Cohen’s comments structures AAMP, reverberates through potential funding sources, and through the material possibilities of reproducing the institution itself suggests that this histories of these cultural fields are always living in, around and beyond Black museums.
A Material World: Blackness in and as Artifact
Over the course of this dissertation, I have made four interrelated arguments.
First, that the Black scholars, bibliophiles, artists and collectors in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century who collected Black art and artifacts laid the groundwork for later exhibitionary displays devoted to Black history, art and culture. This is true despite the overwhelming trend of the exclusion of these collections from mainstream museums and historical societies. Second, that the 202 nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of exhibitions in American institutions tended to exclude Black history, creative production and material culture, or engage it in ways that were devoid of nuance or openly racist. Black viewers experiences of these major American institutions, and the fact that exhibitions about Black people and material culture were frequently mounted without the input of Black people, contributed to mid-twentieth century artistic, intellectual and institutional activism.
This activism targeted major American museums and also led to the founding of new museums, and is the visual, sociopolitical cultural field in which Black museums like the African American Museum in Philadelphia emerged. Third, media coverage is central to understanding the workings of Black museums because of how it constructs public perception and public memory of the institution even (and especially) for media consumers who never set foot inside. This is illustrated by the extensive journalistic coverage of the founding (and occasional floundering) of the
African American Museum in Philadelphia. Spearheaded by civic activists and built with public funds for the 1976 Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia, AAMP’s four decades of highs and woes played out very publicly in Philadelphia press.
Institutional history and media coverage aren’t incidental at AAMP, they are some of the elements that structure the visual production that happens there, influencing visitors’ expectations of what they hope to see at AAMP, and funders’ senses of what the Museum can and should do. Finally, I attended to the ways these histories play out in the space of the museum, visually and financially. Chronicling how exhibitions are made in the museum, and how the museum is made by contingent political 203 economic forces of the cultural field, I use the spectacular displays like exhibitions and opening receptions as a standpoint to detail with the materiality of Black exhibitions and the institution. How the objects are made, how they enter the museum in exhibitions and the ways that their social and symbolic lives are structured by prestige and political economy can be seen in the press coverage of exhibitions, in the spaces that objects move through, on the object labels and on the objects themselves. This relationship between the museum displays and their financial arrangements are mutually constitutive. Attending to what the material reality of Black exhibition storytelling looks like and how the work is paid for connects these financial and racial logics. Further, by taking seriously the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement, we are able to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city.
Post script
The details of the still-relevant histories of how the field of Black museums came to exist and why it continues to be salient to the visitors, volunteers, donors and staffers who flow in and out of it appeared to be an excellent lens through which to see how Black history and culture is produced in a long-running institution, and how that makes Black art and history consumable to a visiting public in late capitalist urban setting. Then the 2016 Presidential election changed the contours on what it meant to do cultural work in Black institutional space. In the midst of concerns across the arts and culture sector about the impact that reduced funding 204 for major federal agencies like the NEA, NEH, IMLS, National Parks Service, and the withdrawing from UNESCO would have on museums, Foreign Policy Magazine reported on an FBI intelligence assessment that named “Black identity extremists” as a potential domestic terrorist threat. The August 2017 report from the FBI’s
Counterterrorism Division assessed that “it is very likely Black Identity Extremist
(BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.”89 But it defines extremists in a footnote that reads
The FBI defines black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States. This desire for physical or psychological separation is typically based on either a religious or political belief system, which is sometimes formed around or includes a belief in racial superiority or supremacy. The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophic embrace of violent tactics may not constitute extremism, and may be constitutionally protected.90 (FBI Intelligence Assessment Report 2017, my emphasis)
The contradictory grouping of “unlawful acts of force or violence” with advocacy of positions or rhetoric that “may not constitute extremism and may be constitutionally protected” in a definition of extremists that includes those who
89 “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers,” FBI Intelligence Assessment report, Counterterrorism Division. August 3, 2017.
90 Ibid. 205 might only seek “psychological separation” troubled journalists and scholars following the story. The strange combination of the violent and the innocuous helped the story fly across my social media feeds like a shot, where I saw several bemused scholars and culture workers reference the story and jokingly deduce that they must be Black identity extremists. It also suggested that Black cultural production, beyond fulfilling social, cultural and intellectual gaps in the larger arts and culture landscape, could also serve as a mode of resistance to the regressive and repressive political moment.
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APPENDIX: DATA COLLECTION
Participant Observation at AAMP and Philadelphia area institutions: 120 hrs/month
Formal and informal correspondence Museum Professionals: 59 Visual artists: 23 Philanthropists & elite collectors/lenders: 7 Consultants, researchers, docents, volunteers: 18
Recorded interviews/conversations with museum professionals and artists: 17
Exhibitions contributed to (22) StalWART: The Art and Visions of Christopher Carter (October 18, 2012 – Dec 31, 2012) Found objects from the natural and mechanical worlds are transformed into symbols of global politics, current events, and personal reflection in this exhibit of sculptures and assemblages by artist Christopher Carter.
Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes Collection (Jan 25, 2013 – Aug 18, 2013) Come See About Me: The Mary Wilson Supremes Collection is a showcase conceived by Mary Wilson, an original member of the Supremes. Presented in cooperation with Blair-Murrah Exhibitions, “Come See About Me” featured many of the group’s stunning gowns, rarely seen video footage, historic photographs, and magazine and news articles. AAMP presented this exhibit in the context of the history of black performers and popular culture.
Unflinching Eye: Works from the Tiberino Family Circle (Sept 26, 2013 – March 21, 2014) This fine art exhibit focused on the art and artistic legacy of Ellen Powell Tiberino. Covering the Ellen Powell Tiberino Museum in Powelton Village, the artwork of her husband, Joseph, their children, Raphael, Ellen and Gabe, and their artistic community, this exhibit featured paintings, drawings, sculptures, mosaics by the Tiberinos and others including Julius Bloch, Paul Keene, Charles Searles, Walter Edmonds, Bariq Cobbs, Kathleen Spicer and Danny Simmons.
Distant Echoes: Black Farmers in America (Photographs of John Francis Ficara) (April 10 -Aug 17, 2014) “Distant Echoes” featured the work of world-renowned photojournalist John Francis Ficara. This exhibition depicted the lives and working conditions of farmers slowly disappearing from the American landscape. Comprised of nearly 60 images, the exhibition captured signs of adversity and endurance, poverty and self- 218
determination. Ficara’s photographic essay includes African American farmers from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Michigan who battle with economics and discrimination. Crop, cattle, chicken, sugarcane, dairy and tobacco farmers are highlighted as the exhibition follows them through daily struggles and triumphs.
More Places of Our Own: Sculptures of Syd Carpenter (April 25, 2014-Aug 17, 2014) “More Places of Our Own” is a sculpture exhibit featuring the work of Syd Carpenter. A respected Philadelphia artist, Swarthmore art professor and Pew Fellow, Carpenter’s sculptural exploration of African American farms and gardens are in tribute to black farmers and gardeners. Wall mounted sculptures are inspired by landscape architect Richard Westmacott’s study of African American farm ways that mapped a series of black farms in the south. Clay and steel floor sculptures are inspired by Carpenter’s recent travels through Georgia and South Carolina. With each sculpture named for the farm it commemorates, this exhibit was a role call and celebration of the ways that black farmers and gardeners sustain the African American community with their work.
Cash Crop: Works by Stephen Hayes (Sept 12, 2014-Jan 4, 2015) This exhibit by artist Stephen Hayes is primarily inspired by a diagram of The Brooks slave ship Hayes confronted in a printmaking course at Savannah College of Art and Design. Hayes’ artwork was augmented by historical documents on loan from the Delaware County Bar Association, objects from the Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery, and the site-specific window installation, “The View From Here.” The cornerstone of this exhibition is a life sized installation comprised of 15 chained forms to represent the estimated 15 million men, women and children who endured the Middle Passage. . This evocative work of cement, fabric, steel and wood compel the viewers to imagine themselves squeezed into the hull of slave ship.
As We See It: Works from the Petrucci Family Collection of African American Art (Feb 5, 2015- March 21, 2015) This exhibition featured art from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American art, which contains works by master artists such as Henry O. Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, and Edward Bannister. The exhibit also included works by local youths who have participated in art-making workshops where they viewed art from the collection and produced art inspired by it. Organized around the theme of inspiration as a key element of art making, the show put the youth works in conversation with the master works as a kind of intergenerational visual arts dialogue.
Badass Art Man: Danny Simmons Collection (April 24, 2015-May 31, 2015) Badass Art Man showcased the original art work of Danny Simmons. In addition to being a fine artist, Simmons is an avid collector whose private collection includes 219
traditional African and Aboriginal works, and work by Wifredo Lam, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Derrick Adams, Sol Sax, and historic art and artifacts, including works by James Van Der Zee and the first Negro comic book.
Legendary: Works by Gerard Gaskin (June 12 – Aug 23, 2015) Showcasing the photographs of the CDS/Honickman Book Prize winner Gerard H. Gaskin, Legendary featured over a decade of photographs of house ballroom culture. The work celebrates the exuberant world of artistry and self-fashioning, carefully capturing the role balls serve for young African American and Latino LGBTQ communities as spaces where they can find recognition and visibility in the context of marginalization.
Plan-ta-shun: An Installation by artist Colin Quashie (June 19 – Aug 23, 2015) Plan-ta-shun was an installation by contemporary artist Colin Quashie that uses the language and imagery of marketing and mass media to lampoon racist historical norms and challenge contemporary racial and social constructs. Quashie compels the viewer to become the participant in the difficult conversations regarding race, power and identity.
Africans in India: From Slaves to Generals and Rulers (Sept 10, 2015 – Jan 3, 2016) Africans in India: From Slaves to Generals and Rulers highlights the accomplishments of some of the Sidis of yesterday. This exhibition describes their fascinating story in the richly diverse history of the global African Diaspora. Over the course of nearly 20 centuries, millions of East Africans crossed the Indian Ocean along with its several seas and adjoining bodies of water in their journey to distant eastern lands. Called Kaffir, Siddi, Habshi, or Zanji, these men, women and children from Sudan in the north to Mozambique in the south Africanized the Indian Ocean world and helped shape the societies they entered and made their own. This exhibition was organized by The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Soulful Stitching (Patchwork Quilts by Siddis in India) (Sept 10, 2015 – Jan 3, 2016) The Siddis of Karnataka, India are the descendants of both early African immigrants to South Asia and enslaved Africans brought to Goa on India’s west coast by the Portuguese beginning in the 16th century. Gradually, they escaped slavery and moved southward into the remote Western Ghatt mountains of Northern Karnataka in order to create free, independent African diaspora communities. While they have adopted, adapted, and integrated many aspects of Indian cultures, Siddis have also retained and transformed certain African traditions. In the visual arts, one tradition stands out: the patchwork quilts known as kawandi. All of the quilts in the exhibition are by members of the nonprofit Siddi Womens’ Quilting Cooperative that is keeping this tradition alive and vibrant.
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Outcry! (Nov 10-15, 2015 at Christ Church Neighborhood House) This weeklong pop-up exhibit was located at Christ Church Neighborhood Meeting House in Old City for the 14th Annual First Person Arts Festival presented by PNC Arts Alive. It featured local artists' thoughtful and provocative responses to police brutality and state violence against African American men women and children.
Drapetomania: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba (Jan 30, 2016 - March 20, 2016) Drapetomanía is a tribute to Grupo Antillano (1978-•1983), a forgotten visual arts and cultural movement that privileged the importance of African and Afro- Caribbean influences in the formation of the Cuban nation. Grupo Antillano valiantly proclaimed the centrality of African practices in national culture. They viewed Africa and the surrounding Caribbean as a vibrant, ongoing and vital influence that continued to define what it means to be Cuban. This exhibit seeks to recover the history of this group and their important contributions to the art of Cuba, the Caribbean and the African Diaspora.
Arresting Patterns: Perspectives on Race, Criminal Justice, Artistic Expression, and Community (April 30, 2016 - September 11, 2016) The exhibition includes multi-media, installation, photography, paintings and prints bringing together some of America’s leading contemporary artists, including Jamal Cyrus, Mary DeWitt, Maria Gaspar, Theodore Harris, Avtomat Kalashnikova, Titus Kaphar, Iyaba Ibo, Mandingo, Adrian Piper, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Chris M. Taylor, Felandus Thames, Christine Wang and Andy Warhol. Their work gives voice to the impact of pervasive patterns of racial bias in our judicial system, giving visual form to the notion that the sentencing policies over the past 40 years have transformed the nation’s prison system into a “modern equivalent of Jim Crow.”
In the aftermath of the Ferguson verdict, the Baltimore riots, and other highly publicized acts of violence against people of color we examine intentional and unintentional discrimination in our legal system more closely. These recent events, along with growing international dialogue around U.S. policies that have resulted in the mass incarceration of African Americans, have led to a call for a more transparent dialogue between citizens, law enforcement, and policy makers. i found god in myself: The 40th Anniversary of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls… (October 6, 2016 – January 8, 2017) i found god in myself: The 40th Anniversary of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls…is a two gallery art exhibit celebrating the 40th anniversary of the genre-bending, award-winning choreopoem/play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, curated by Souleo. Through 20 commissioned artworks by artists including Renee Cox (in collaboration with Rafia Santana), 221
Kimberly Mayhorn, Dianne Smith, Margaret Rose Vendryes and Danny Simmons the exhibition is a tribute to the Broadway play. Each work honors the individual poems and underscores their enduring significance in highlighting issues impacting the lives of women of color. The exhibition also features additional works by nationally acclaimed artists including Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems and Saya Woolfalk that further expand upon related themes of sexuality, race, sisterhood, violence and self-love depicted in and inspired by Shange’s work, and archival materials highlighting the creation and evolution of the original text from its 1974 California debut to its Broadway run from the Barnard Archives and Special Collections at Barnard College and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.
Dawoud Bey: Harlem, USA (January 26, 2017 – April 2, 2017) In Dawoud Bey’s Harlem, USA, the artist takes viewers on a journey through this historic neighborhood. As a young man growing up in Queens, Bey (b. 1953) was intrigued by his family’s history in Harlem. His parents met at church there and it was home to many family and friends he visited as a child. Bey began making photographs at sixteen, after viewing the work of James Van DerZee (1886–1983). VanDerZee chronicled the Harlem community for almost sixty years, and his photographs were part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contentious 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind. The combination of viewing Harlem on My Mind and his family’s relationship to the area led Bey, years later, to begin his “Harlem, USA” series (1975-1979). In 1979 the Studio Museum in Harlem mounted Bey’s first solo museum exhibition, showing a suite of the 25 photographs that make up Dawoud Bey: Harlem, U.S.A.
Shawn Theodore: Church of Broken Pieces (February 2, 2017 – April 2, 2017) Shawn Theodore’s Church of Broken Pieces is a photographic exploration of the psychic, physical and technological translocation of black America. Theodore’s photos document the success of the movements toward plural black identities, and free, safe black digital spaces (such as Black Twitter) and futures - even as displacement/gentrification, socioeconomic disparity, and violence threaten to impinge progress.
Tone Poems & Light Stories: The Great Migration In Collaboration with Scribe Video Center (April 13 - June 4, 2017) Tone Poems & Light Stories: The Great Migration explores the historic tide of African Americans moving North that changed Philadelphia, America and the world. This project, created by Scribe Video Center, consists of five commissioned media arts works that reveal the ties between the agricultural world the migrants left behind and the new industrial world that they helped create. Taking inspiration from Mother Bethel AME Church, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Tindley 222
Temple, The Wissahickon Boys Club an the Philadelphia Tribune, the artists commemorate how these five institutions played a critical role in the first wave of Great Migration to Philadelphia, from 1916 – 1930.
Philaesthetic: 40 Years of Collecting African American Art (June 15, 2017 – September 17, 2017) Philaesthetic: 40 Years of Collecting African American Art is a two-gallery exhibition showcasing four decades of collecting works by some of the country’s top Black visual artists. From gifts from artists, to acquisitions from a 1998 gift from the Ford Foundation, PhilAesthetic: 40 years of Collecting African American Art was curated from the permanent collection and was part of the city-wide PhilAesthetic: The Black Arts Movement in Philadelphia celebration. The exhibition features work in an array of media and styles, many of which were created before and just after the height of the Black Arts Movement, an artistic revolution spawned by the Black Power Movement in the mid-1960s into the 1970s. AAMP’s collection is distinguished by a number of extraordinary artists who were influential within and beyond the Philadelphia art scene during that time, and this exhibition illuminates the creative and technical brilliance that is foundational to their artistic practice. The collection is a visual microcosm of the genius that sparked the Black Arts Movement as well as an examination of its lingering effects on a generation of artists who were active both during and after the Civil Rights movement.
Since the founding of the museum in 1976, reverb from the Black Art Movement in the Philadelphia region can be traced throughout the collection. Black artists continued to dig in and create a cultural space of their own, moving in many different stylistic and conceptual directions. The work—whether representational or abstraction—is syncretic, and rife with symbolism, by artists trained at venerable art institutions, who traveled across the globe to Africa, Europe and Asia to hone their artistic process. These works represent the foundation of AAMP’s collective vison.
Gardens of the Mind: Echoes of the Feminine View (October 6, 2017 - January 16, 2018) Guest curated by A.M. Weaver, Gardens of the Mind: Echoes of the Feminine View, features five black women artists whose work explores spiritual cultivation and memory through their artistic practice. By using large scale installation, sculpture, painting, photography and printmaking, artists Barbara Bullock, Martha Jackson Jarvis, E.J. Montgomery, Joiri Minaya and Glynnis Reed examine links between history, memory, and the natural environment. The artists consider our relationship with nature and how the mind itself is a field, which is developed and nurtured to promote creative, spiritual and intellectual growth.
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Went Looking For Beauty: Refashioning Self Photographs by Deborah Willis (September 22, 2017 – December 31, 2017 at the August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh, PA) The August Wilson Center presents Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self, a fine art photography exhibition by Deborah Willis, Ph.D. Through the exploration of two main themes, My Friends’ Closets and Street Views, Willis’ photos reconstruct an imagined past through images depicting its beauty, identity, and cultural memory. This project is a new way of looking at fashion, art, and women and men as consumers through the private space of the closet and the public space of city streets and boxing rings.
Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation, contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Professor Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book Envisioning Emancipation.
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Exhibitions visited (142) Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges at the National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia PA (February 20, 2013)
Wangechi Mutu at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University, (March 15, 2013
Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster, University of Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, (May 20, 2013)
Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair, Chicago History Museum, (Nov 20, 2013)
Carlos Basualdo curatorial tour of Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Ilium at Philadelphia Museum of Art (April 2, 2014)
Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love at Philadelphia Museum of Art, (May 30, 2014)
Question Bridge: Black Males in America at California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (June 10, 2014)
The Getty Villa Permanent Collections, Los Angeles, CA (June 11, 2014)
A Subtlety… by Kara Walker at Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn, NY, (July 6, 2014)
Ruffneck Constructivists at Institute of Contemporary Art at UPenn, (August 16, 2014)
Nick Cave: Made by Whites for Whites at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (September 25, 2014)
Fred Wilson: Sculptures, Paintings, and Installations: 2004-2014 at Pace Gallery, New York (Sept 25, 2014)
Question Bridge: Black Males, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (October 1, 2014)
Museo de la Revolucion, Havana, Cuba (November 17, 2014)
Centro de arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba, (November 25, 2014)
Casa de Africa, Havana, Cuba, (November 25, 2014)
Casa Osvaldo Guayasamin, Havana, Cuba, (November 25, 2014) 225
Taller Experimental de Grafica , Havana, Cuba, (November 25, 2014)
Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. (December 6, 2014)
Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, PA (Dec 2014/Jan 2015)
Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art (March 25, 2015)
Herb Ritts, Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott; Contemporary American Art exhibits, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (April 19, 2015)
The Genius of Freedom: Northern Black Activism and Uplift after the Civil War at The Library Company of Philadelphia, (May 8, 2015)
Do/Tell: Erin Bernard, Heather Hart, Rachelle Mozman, and Akosua Adoma Owusu at ICA at U Penn, (August 2, 2015)
The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, MCA Chicago, (August 14, 2015)
Back to School at Gravy Studio & Gallery, (September 23, 2015)
Marilyn Minter: Dirty Pretty Things at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (November 21, 2015)
Shawn Theodore: The Avenues at Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia (December 4, 2015)
Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (December 6, 2015, March 12, 2016; March 14, 2016; April 3, 2016)
Immortal Beauty: Highlights from the Robert & Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery @ Drexel, Philadelphia (December 9, 2015)
Toyin Odutola: Of Context and Without at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC (December 15, 2015)
Odili Donald Odita: The Velocity of Change at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC (December 15, 2015) 226
Gordon Parks: A Segregation Story (December 18, 2015 Salon 94 Freemans, NYC)
Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men (December 18, 2015, The Drawing Room, NYC)
Back to School, Reform (Tyler School of Art, January 28, 2016)
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere; Rodney McMillan The Black Show—talk with curator Kate Kraczon (ICA at Penn, March 4, 2016)
International Pop – tour w/ curator Erica Battle (Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 11, 2016)
David Hammons: Five Decades (Mnuchin Gallery, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Norman Lewis: A Selection of Paintings and Drawings (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Malick Sidibe (Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Barkley L. Hendricks (Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Glenn Ligon: What We Said Last Time (Luhring Augustine, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Muse: Mickalene Thomas (Aperture, NYC, March 17, 2016)
Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change – talk with curator Martha Lucy (Barnes Foundation, March 18, 2016)
Unorthodox, Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History, Masterpieces & Curiosities: The Fictional Portrait, The Television Project: Some of My Best Friends (The Jewish Museum, NYC March 19, 2016)
The Tenement Museum, (NYC March 19, 2016)
Space 1026 – talk w/ founder Andrew Jeffrey Wright (Space 1026, April 1, 2016)
Jayson Musson: The Truth in the Song opening (Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, April 1, 2016)
Deborah Willis opening reception (Art Sanctuary, May 3, 2016)
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Out of the Vault: Stories of People and Things and Close Readings: American Abstract Art from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery (Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, TN, May 5, 2016)
Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat (Nahmad Contemporary, NY, June 14, 2016)
Andy Warhol: Little Electric Chairs (Venus Over Manhattan, NY, June 14, 2016)
Radcliffe Bailey: Quest (Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, June 14, 2016)
Richard Serra: NJ-1 and Gagosian Gallery, NY, June 14, 2016)
Larry Walker (Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NY, June 14, 2016)
David Hockney: The Yosemite Suite (Pace Gallery, NY, June 14, 2016)
For Freedoms (Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, June 14, 2016) Thornton Dial: We All Live Under the Same Old Flag (Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY, June 14)
James Turrell: 67 68 69 (Pace Gallery, NY, June 14, 2016)
Nari Ward: Sun Splashed (Barnes Foundation, June 24, 2016)
Truth to Power (990 Spring Garden, July 27, 2016)
Unlisted (Crane Arts, Philadelphia, September 10, 2016)
Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music (ICA at U Penn, September 14, 2016)
Darkwater Revival: After Terry Adkins (Arthur Ross Gallery at U Penn, September 28, 2016)
It Takes a Nation: Art for Social Justice (American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, October 8, 2016)
Four exhibitions at the California African American Museum: Hank Willis Thomas: Black Righteous Space; Genevieve Gaignard: Smell the Roses; Politics, Race, and Propaganda: The Nazi Olympics, Berlin 1936; The Ease of Fiction; Taking Place: Selections from the Permanent Collection (CAAM, October 20, 2016)
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Ebony Patterson artist lecture/presentation “And Babies Too” (Temple Contemporary, October 27, 2017) (installation project)
Kelsey Halliday Johnson: Trim Tab (Vox Populi, December 2, 2016)
Paul Keene: Post-War Explorations in Painting (LaSalle University Art Museum, December 2, 2016); + 20th Century & Contemporary Permanent Galleries
My Country: Nona Faustine (Baxter Street Camera Club, NYC, December 10, 2016)
Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC, December 10, 2016)
Sondra Perry: Resident Evil (The Kitchen, NYC, December 10, 2016)
On Such a Night As This (ACA Galleries, NYC, December 10, 2016)
Carrie Mae Weems (Jack Shainman Galleries, NYC, December 10, 2016)
On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits, Mark Seliger (231 Projects, NYC, December 10, 2016)
Black Pulp (International Print Center, NYC, December 10, 2016)
Person, Place or Thing (Fleisher Ollman, Philadelphia, December 13, 2016)
Philadelphia Renaissance (Art Sanctuary, Philadelphia, December 17, 2016)
Paint the Revolution (Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 28, 2016)
Black Fashion Designers (Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC, February 6, 2017)
Katharina Grosse (Gagosian W. 24th St., NYC, February 6, 2017)
Wangechi Mutu: Ndoro Na Miti (Gladstone Gallery, NYC, February 15, 2017)
Deana Lawson, Judy Linn, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, NYC, February 15, 2017)
Robert Kushner: Portraits & Perennials (DC Moore Gallery, NYC, February 15, 2017)
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Paul Sepuya: Figures, Grounds and Studies (Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, February 15, 2017)
Yoan Capote: Palangre (Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC, February 15, 2017)
Anne Minich: The Truth of Being Both/And (PAFA, Philadelphia, February 15, 2017)
Approaching Abstraction: African American Art from the Permanent Collection (LaSalle University Art Museum, April 20, 2017)
Zun Lee: Father Figure (Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
Jordan Casteel: Harlem Notes (Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
The Future is Abstract (Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
Alison Saar: The Nature of Us (Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
Romare Bearden: Odysseus Series (Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
John Biggers: Wheels in Wheels (Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, June 4, 2017)
Willie Cole: On Site (Arthur Ross Gallery @ U Penn, June 30, 2017)
Prestwich Memorial burial permanent panels (Truth Café, Cape Town, July 29, 2017)
Permanent exhibition @ the Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town, South Africa (July 29 – Aug 10, 2017)
Women’s Work: Crafting Stories: Subverting Narratives (South African National Gallery, August 1, 2017) – tour w/ curator Ernestine White
Hello My Name is Februarie (Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town, August 2, 2017)
Singing Freedom: Music and the Struggle Against Apartheid (Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town, August 2, 2017)
Labels: an installation by Siemon Allen (Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town, August 2, 2017)
Gathering Strands: Lionel Davis (South African National Gallery, August 6, 2017) 230
Sending Gestig Museum permanent installation-historic site (August 7, 2017)
Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment: Ayana V. Jackson, City in Transition: Andrew Tshabangu, Diamonds Aren’t Forever: Dillon Marsh (Gallery Momo, Cape Town, South Africa, August 8, 2017)
Lossless (Leonard Pearlstein Gallery @ Drexel University, August 31, 2017) – artists’ walkthrough
Speech/Acts (Institute of Contemporary Art @ U Penn, September 13, 2017)
A Collaborative Language: Selections From the Experimental Printmaking Institute (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Sept 15, 2017)
20/20 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, September 23, 2017)
Sadie Barnette: Dear 1968 (Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, October 8, 2017) – tour/talk with artist Sadie Barnette
Diversity Driven: 1975-2017 (Brandywine Workshop and Archives, October 11, 2017)
The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads (Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel, October 19. 2017)
Force of Nature (Museum @ Fashion Institute of Technology, NY, October 26, 2017)
Barbara Chase-Riboud – Malcolm X: Complete (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, October 26, 2017)
Erica Deeman: Silhouettes (Laurence Miller Gallery, October 26, 2017)
Jordan Casteel: Nights in Harlem (Casey Kaplan Gallery, October 26, 2017)
Sonya Clark, Unraveling (PAFA-Public performance on the occasion of acquisition, November 4, 2017)
McArthur Binion Route One: Box Two (Gallerie Lelong, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Emma Amos: Black Bodies (Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
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Laolu Senbaj: Sacred Art of the Ori & Azikiwe Mohammed: Black Labor (Rush Arts Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
William Villalongo: Keep On Pushing (Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Richard Avedon: Nothing Personal (Pace Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Ruby Rumie: Weaving Streets (Nohra Haime Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Howardena Pindell: Recent Paintings (Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama (Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings (Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC, November 25, 2017)
Behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology and National Anthropological Archives collections (Museum Support Center, Camp Springs, MD, November 29, 2017 at the AAA Meetings)
Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction 1960s to Today (National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., December 2, 2017)
National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington DC, December 3, 2017)
Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined & An Incomplete History of Protest (Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, February 25, 2018)
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Conferences, symposia, panels, arts & culture political events (26) Re-Opening reception for the Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent, Sept 19, 2012
Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery private tour, Port Richmond – Philadelphia, Sept 24, 2012 (tour given by Gwen & J. Justin Ragsdale)
National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Conference, Loews Hotel, Philadelphia, October 18-22, 2012
Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery lecture and book signing, Deborah Willis, Temple Universtiy, Feb 8, 2013
Race & Gender in Contemporary Art panel discussion at PAFA, Feb 10, 2013 (Featured speakers: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, University of Pennsylvania art historian; Joyce Kozloff, artist; Njideka Akunyili, artist; Kimberly Brooks, Huffington Post contributor; Ken Johnson, art critic for the New York Times)
American Alliance of Museums annual conference May 19-May 22, 2013, Baltimore, MD
Hank Willis Thomas artist lecture at Paley Library at Temple, March 11, 2014
Carlos Basualdo curatorial tour of Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Ilium at Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 2, 2014
“How Do Arts & Culture Influence Philadelphia Economy?” Philadelphia Horticultural Society, Oct 28, 2014 (Featured speakers: Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, part of Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s campaign "Roadmap for Growth for the City of Philadelphia: 2015-2020.")
Visit Philadelphia’s “New Americans” press conference launch, National Constitution Center, Nov 14, 2014
Through a Lens Darkly documentary screening & panel discussion w/ Thomas Allen Harris & Deborah Willis, Univ of Penn, February 9, 2015
Okwui Enwezor curatorial lecture “Disrupted and Disarticulated: Body Politics in Contemporary African Art” at Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 18, 2015
Ebony Patterson artist lecture, Temple Contemporary, October 19, 2015
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Art & Activism Panel discussion hosted by WURD, at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Dec 16, 2015 (Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton; Moe Brooker, Moore College of Art & Design; James Claiborne, African American Museum in Philadelphia; Monica Montgomery, Museum Hue) Ask-A-Professional panel (Small Archives Forum) at Historical Society of PA, Jan 11, 2016 (Featured panelists:
Question Bridge panel discussion @ Blockson Collection at Temple University, Feb 18, 2016 (Featured panelists: artists Hank Willis Thomas and Bayeté Ross Smith, art historian and photographer Deborah Willis)
Black Portraitures II: Revisited conference at New York University, February 20, 2016
American Alliance of Museums annual conference, May 26-May 29, 2016, Washington DC
Philadelphia Grantee evening with Theaster Gates reception at the Philadelphia Free Library for Knight Foundation grantees, December 8, 2016
Black Fashion Symposium at the Museum @ Fashion Institute of Technology, Feb 6, 2017
Art History Activism panel @ ICA @ Penn-featured panelist, March 8, 2017
The Review Panel Philadelphia @ Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, March 15, 2017
Barkley L. Hendricks Celebration of Life memorial @ Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, March 28, 2017
Johnetta B. Cole lecture at University of Penn, May 22, 2017
Collections tour of Historical Society of PA, July 12, 2017 (tour given by Lee Arnold, Senior Director of the Library & Collections and Chief Operating Officer)
Artist/curator panel and opening receptions for A Collaborative Language: Selections From the Experimental Printmaking Institute at PAFA, Sept 15, 2017 (Featured speakers: Curlee Raven Holton, Kelli Morgan, curator; Brooke Davis Anderson, PAFA Museum Director)
Re-opening reception for Brandywine Workshop and Archives, October 11, 2017
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Archival news sources: The Philadelphia Inquirer: 95 articles Founded 1829; circulation: Daily: 158,546; Sunday: 312,197 Philadelphia Daily News: 63 articles Founded 1925, current circulation: 97,000 Philadelphia Tribune: 187 articles Founded 1884, current circulation: 625,000 (weekly) Philadelphia Bulletin: 5 articles In operation from 1847-1982
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