At Princeton University, two exhibitions delve into the life and work of Toni Morrison, a professor from 1989 until she became emeritus in 2006. Upon Morrison’s death in 2019, the school acquired her vast trove of archival materials: typed drafts, maps, letters, notes and research fragments that speak to Morrison’s process as a writer and the relationships she cultivated throughout her career. Today, the Firestone Library in Princeton exhibits about a hundred of these documents.
Across the street, in a small exhibition space at Princeton University’s art museum called Art@Bainbridge, curator Mitra Abbaspour takes a different approach to Morrison’s archive, bringing it into dialogue with the paintings, prints and sculptures of Alison Saar. Cycle of creativity: Alison Saar and the papers of Toni Morrison is visible until July 9.
Both Morrison and Saar center the experiences of black women in their work, but Abbaspour has analyzed Morrison’s articles to make more specific thematic connections – laying out Morrison’s thoughts on music alongside Saar’s portrayals of musicians, for example. , and combining the author’s research on slavery with the artist’s depictions of enslaved people.
As Morrison and Saar simultaneously reflect on the same subject, the show uses one art form to expand on the other. This idea highlights an essential element of Morrison’s work – the interrogation of storytelling itself. In the first room of the exhibition, a draft of Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech questions the meaning of language and what it means to be a writer.
“The vitality of language lies in its ability to trace the real, imagined, and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers,” writes Morrison. “Although his aplomb sometimes consists in displacing the experience, he does not replace it. It goes to where meaning can reside. The text accompanies a model of Harriet Tubman’s Harlem de Saar sculpture, the first public monument to a black American woman in New York City. ‘Swing Low’ (2007) questions what it means to tell Tubman’s story. How have centuries of lore changed Tubman as a historical figure, and how have stories passed down from generation to generation spoke of something bigger than the singular life of Harriet Tubman?
Abbaspour said Hyperallergic that she hopes visitors will leave the exhibition with an understanding of Morrison’s archive “not as a study like a past” but as a source of new creative expressions, a concept which she says is about how Saar and Morrison engage with historical subjects.
Although Saar largely depicts figures from the past, she has created most of the sculptures, prints and paintings in the exhibition over the past five years. Morrison’s work also looks surprisingly contemporary. Her 40-year-old reflections don’t seem dated and the ideas she formulates are still relevant today.
Morrison’s manuscripts and drafts are displayed in raised glass cases. Near the front of the exhibit, Sarre’s “Torch Song” (2020) stands in the center of a small room by an old-fashioned fireplace. The sculpted depiction of a jazz singer is wrapped in a decorated box, creating the appearance of cloth. Saar found the metal, which covered the ceilings of Harlem homes, in the 1980s, when apartments in the neighborhood were being renovated and old materials were taken to the streets. As well as reflecting on the process of gentrification, the box evokes the lives – and stories – that unfolded below.
The Art @ Bainbridge building, a former colonial house built in 1766, is a small outpost of Princeton’s general art museum that has seen multiple iterations over the past three centuries. Slaves once worked in the house and lived on its property. The building is carefully renovated but retains sloping pine floors, fireplaces, antique woodwork and a colonial exterior, constant reminders of its past. The work exhibited inside does not shirk this story.
At the rear, a gallery displays the research material used by Morrison to develop Beloved (1987), his most famous novel and the one that deals directly with the legacy of slavery. In this room, three Saarland works all feature black women and girls with cotton tied in their hair. In “White Guise” (2019), the artist designed a thin support for his print. Its floral decals, which are actually cotton plants, give the material a wallpaper look. The life-size depiction of the enslaved woman working in a domestic space, holding an iron, is shocking in the colonial room, which may have once been wallpapered.
In another space, Saar curated a soundtrack of black female singers that plays over the gallery’s speakers, joined by works featuring musicians and dancers. Morrison’s accompanying articles explore the power of music and include his own lyrics. The showcase includes a 1993 letter to composer André Previn and poems Morrison wrote for his musical collaboration with Previn, honey and rue (1992).
“I’ll try love first,” Morrison wrote in a poem“Although I have never heard the word referred to, even whispered to me.”
A 1974 copy of Morrison New York Times Review history “Rediscovering Black History: It’s Like Growing Up Black Once Againappears above the poems. Morrison questions how black history is discussed and questions the ways in which it can be remembered.
“Finally, in this long journey through 300 years of black life, there was joy, that’s what I remember most,” she wrote, going on to comment on the importance of music – dance , friendliness, tunes and lyrics – in this story. On the gallery walls, Saar’s collection of vibrant prints depict communal spaces in Harlem, all involving music in one form or another and evoking Morrison’s written ideas of memory. Much like the room featuring depictions of enslaved women, it seems Morrison and Saar’s work was made for each other, bridging the gaps between writing and visual art.
