What happens when you put colonialism and whiteness on critical display in the colonial exhibition space? Thinking with Aimé Césaire Discourse on Colonialism, this question guides my curatorial approach to permanent collections in encyclopedic art museums. Although my attempts to fully realize this project as Associate Curator of American Art at Newfields hurt me a lot, I have always envisioned it as a relocation framework that any encyclopedic institution could apply to its collections. Over the past three years I have analyzed several museum collections and here are the questions I ask and some objects I have chosen as answers.
I usually start by asking: Is there a vital work in the collection that can anchor a reinstallation on colonialism? In Newfields, it was Tim Hawkinson’s “Möbius Ship”. His reference to the mathematical properties of the Möbius strip – a continuous loop that has only one surface – is a perfect metaphor for colonialism. A Möbius strip is not a surface of one exact size and shape; it shrinks and expands, but as it compresses, it forms an infinite loop. In essence, a Möbius strip exists forever. Similarly, colonialism is an ever-changing continuous loop that has governed global society since the 15th century. I feel like that’s the story museums should tell, and only permanent collections can. It’s not just about the stories of objects and artists, but the story of the loop itself – the institutions of the loop materialize and sustain.
Then I look for portraits of real colonizers and name them as such. Most encyclopedic art museums have hordes of colonial and antebellum portraits of wealthy white models. Because the world economy in both eras was fueled by the slave market and all the goods produced by slave labor, the majority of these subjects were either colonizers themselves or people who derived their wealth from the activities of colonization.
Newfields owned “The Prince of Nassau” and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Vice Admiral Edward Hughes. Well known as one of LeBrun’s early successes in French portraiture, Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen was a French-born colonizer whom Catherine II described as “a madman.” From 1766 to 1769, he traveled with Louis Antoine de Bougainville (another French colonizer) to escape his creditors. Vice Admiral Edward Hughes was celebrated as the most successful British officer to defeat the Spanish for their colonies in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. For European sitters with a military background, be an active participant in the colonization of BIPOC nations was the criterion which made them worthy of a portrait.
Moreover, the global economy was guarded by European and American navies who constantly reconfigured the lines of colonialism along the waterways. Thus, scenes like “The Battle of Trafalgar” by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, maritime paintings often overlooked by artists like Thomas Whitcomb or Robert Salmon, and ship model collections like that of MFA Boston can be used to further illustrate this history.
Thinking with WEB DuBois essay The souls of the white people, I love unpacking the work of William Wetmore Story to reveal how he participated in how whiteness was visually constructed on black women’s bodies. “Libyan Sibyl” is particularly suited to this because her conceptualization of sculpture grew out of her relationship with famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe and their shared racialized misconceptions about black women, particularly Sojourner Truth.
Using Du Bois’s quote, “But what is whiteness that we desire it so?”, I created an installation that places Libyan Sibyl in direct conversation with Stowe’s 1863 Atlantic article “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl”, as well as Truth’s self-depictions, Story’s own comments on sculpture, and other contemporary images of black women. Despite Truth’s self-expression as an empowered woman and her international popularity as an abolitionist and feminist leader, Stowe’s essay explains how her (racist) literary portrayal of Truth directly influenced Story’s sculpture. and what he perceived as Africa inherent disappearance. Story also emphasized this belief in a letter to his friend Charles Eliot Norton. But the “terrible fate” of Africa was far from a natural event. Literally, the ruin of the continent was orchestrated through a series of highly strategic colonialist campaigns that began as early as the 16th century, specifically to augment various European empires, as well as the American empire.
Contrary to the racist imaginations of Stowe and Story, black women did not see their own demise on the eve of the Civil War; instead, they saw the truth of who they were as people and the truth of white supremacist narratives like those of Story and Stowe. How can I know? Because there are thousands of images of not identified Black women in archives across the United States that demonstrate how much black women thought of themselves and their families throughout the 1860s and 1870s. So I encourage Americanists and the general public to look again.
Installations like this work better digitally because they take away shipping issues (eg neoclassical works are very heavy) and light exposure issues. But could you imagine engaging that through an app or digital interactive when you go to the Smithsonian, Met, or High museums to see Story’s Libyan Sibyl? Can you imagine a gallery of American neoclassical sculpture that has truly committed to this history through the scholarship of Jennifer Morgan, Deb Willis, Barbara Krauthamer, Nell Painter, Kirsten Buick, Charmaine Nelson and Lisa Farrington? How much more nuanced and relevant would the narrative of neoclassical American sculpture be if told from the position of black women? Edmonia Lewis may have been the only black female neoclassical sculptor, but she was not the only black woman concerned with American neoclassical sculpture.
Finally, this installation would require art museums to establish inter-institutional relationships with local archives and libraries to borrow the material culture necessary to properly locate an artist among more than his contemporaries in the visual arts; this would allow for a more interesting and responsible contextualization of historical works of art that we know to be problematic. History claims that the Libyan Sibyl was his “anti-slavery sermon in stone” does not rule out the fact that he was also unequivocally anti-black.
Dr. Morgan will further expand on this exhibit and its curatorial process in a virtual conversation with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian on Wednesday, March 15 at 6 p.m. (EDT). register here.
