London Stereoscopic Company. Peter Jackson Aka the ‘Black Prince'; December 2, 1889; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Born on the Danish island colony of Saint Croix with two generations of slaves behind him, the champion heavyweight boxer Peter Jackson cuts a lean and noble figure in his 1889 photographic portrait, his top hat perched level upon his head, his elegant Victorian garments pressed, his stylish accoutrements placed as evidence of his social persona as a gentleman–dandy. The portrait was taken just a year after his defeat of George “Old Chocolate” Godfrey, which gained him the “World Colored Heavyweight Championship” title, and the commanding confidence of his gaze and body language tells us that this is not a man easily bested. However, Jackson’s popularity in Great Britain (his nickname in the British press was “The Prince”) and powerful self-presentation in the photograph do not wipe away the historical context of the image, namely an era of tremendous institutional racism and oppression of Black subjects in 19th-century Britain, and the nation’s merciless colonial expansions on the continent of Africa and in the Middle East. As empowering as it is ambiguous, Jackson’s portrait belies the complicated admixture of cultural codes and fantasies imposed upon the Black subject in visual representation, and points to the unsettled struggle between the subject’s own agency, their mediation through the eye of the camera, and the conditions of Black cultural politics.

Jackson’s image is just one of the many striking photographic portraits included in Black Chronicles II at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia, that activate an important dialogue about the history and record of Black faces and bodies within Western culture. Organized in its original formation by the British photographic institute Autograph ABP in 2014, and curated by two of its most prominent staff members, Renée Massai and Mark Sealy, Black Chronicles II embodies Autograph’s commitment to mining public and private archives of images for the absent Black subject—a mission that “renders visible” the gaps, omissions, and absences within historical annals. In its move to Atlanta, the exhibition opens up a new strand of conversation around the history of the Black subject in the United States and asks viewers to make connections between the British and American formations of empire, racism, and colonialism.

Photographer/Studio: Alex Ayton Junior. Unidentified Sitter, Edinburgh; c. 1900. Carte-de-visite; 64 x 100 mm. Courtesy of Val Wilmer Collection.

Following the logic of the chronicle as a temporal record that orders (and often visualizes) historical events, this exhibition also enables viewers to discover new ways of seeing Black subjects within traditional histories of photography, and demands an awareness of the ways in which the historiography of the still image remains un-diverse and exclusionary. The photographs on display capture an array of stories and figures, from Jackson and Queen Victoria’s West African goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonetta to unidentified sitters whose portraits function as sacred testimony to the collective formation and development of 19th-century British history and representational politics. Wearing fashionable dress and posed within the artificial theater of the photographic studio, these faces describe the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the Black subject and emphasize the ways in which Black subjectivity has been cast out or left unidentified within (visual) culture. The galleries at Spelman reverberate with Frantz Fanon’s description of “the passionate research” that is necessary to make space for these lost voices.[1]

London Stereoscopic Company. Member of the African Choir, 1891; framed & unglazed; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The dedication of this exhibition to the British cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall (who died in 2014) links the legacies of Hall’s intellectual project to Autograph’s institutional mission, and forms the academic and political foundations of this body of photographs.[2] As the spokesperson for the British cultural-studies movement of the 1980s, Hall was an integral part of a generation that brought Black and ethnic minority artists into visibility in a time of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, the New Left, Jesse Helms, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Hall’s contribution to the field of cultural and minority studies is vast; it remains vital today, as new struggles for civil and race rights continue to challenge and mine the unequal fields of representation within American political life. It is clear to me that the curatorial premise of this exhibition is inextricably linked to the call of #BlackLivesMatter, which places the lives and bodies of African Americans at the forefront of an ongoing national dialogue on racial violence and oppression. In our current climate of protests, demonstrations, and riots, funneled through the channels of mainstream and social media, the representation of the Black subject “continues to become and transform within culture, history, and power.”[3][4]

Black Chronicles II was on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through May 16, 2016.

[1] See Frantz Fanon’s text Black Skin/White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, NY: Grove Press, 2008, pg. 22.

[2] Audio excerpts from Hall’s 2008 keynote address, “The Missing Chapter: Cultural Identity and the Photographic Archive,” given at Rivington Place in London, echo throughout the galleries.

[3] See Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation” in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, pg. 57–58.

[4] The exhibition was organized by Autograph ABP, London; curated by Renée Massai and Mark Sealy; and produced in collaboration with the Hulton Archive, London, a division of Getty Images.

Christopher Paul Jordan and Jaleesa Trapp. Art Hack Seattle project, 2016; installation view, Velocity:V2, Seattle, WA. Courtesy of the Artists.

In the past month, I have witnessed the erasure of Black and Brown bodies in acceleration, actively vanishing within the walls of art institutions and in the streets of our cities—at times, because of misguided good intentions, and at others, with a terrifying disregard. Whose body matters is a painful and exhausting question. On a basic level, all human life matters, but as a society, we demonstrate over and over that some lives matter more than others. When I consider the art world of the past three weeks, I see the world in which it is made mirrored back. And I am afraid.

In Seattle, the collaborative work of Christopher Paul Jordan and Jaleesa Trapp was de-installed and ultimately removed without the artists’ consent, guidance, or warning. The administrative chaos surrounding Art Hack Day: Erasure was its inevitable undoing. In an exhibition on the theme of erasure, Jordan and Trapp were the only two Black artists out of forty, and ironically, their work—a vigil that included images of loved ones contributed from a cross-section of their community—was literally erased.

At the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, artist Kelley Walker and curator Jeffrey Uslip—both white men—dismissed a frustrated audience when questioned about Walker’s use of the Black body in his work or the role of CAM in creating more problems. The resulting public outcry, calling for a boycott and the dismissal of museum staff, should not be of surprise when considering that only two years ago, Michael Brown was killed nearby in Ferguson, or that St. Louis has been the battleground of the fight for Black lives and the struggle against police brutality. Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents Walker, issued a statement, noting, “The role of the artist, it has been said, is to ask questions, not answer them.” Perhaps this is true, but shouldn’t artists be expected to pose questions with a responsible criticality and a basic care for the lives they have borrowed for their work? Images became weapons, and the institution’s (I include Walker, here) flagrant disregard for the community’s grief reinforced neoliberal and institutional racism, even if this was not the intention.

In San Francisco, at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, David Hammons’s voice spoke from an audio recording of a talk he did in 1994. Physically absent, Hammons’s body was replaced by French curator Philippe Vergne, who facilitated the night in his stead. An event that was intended to honor Hammons and affectionately acknowledge his disinterest in public talks effectively erased him. Considered within the context of today’s sociopolitical climate, Vergne became a startling indexical gesture toward the current practice of erasing the Black body.

Earlier this year, in the largely Latino working-class neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, the nonprofit, artist-run organization PSSST came under significant public scrutiny despite, and in spite, of an inclusive mission and early programming. Good intentions aside, PSSST placed its newly remodeled 5,000-square-foot space directly in the middle of a long-running complex struggle around Los Angeles’s ongoing gentrification, displacement of communities of color, and histories of socioeconomic violence. In this case, PSSST and similar galleries are agents of gentrification, even if they are also an emerging artist-run or nonprofit arts organization with a scrappy budget and legitimately inclusive programming. Similar to Walker, PSSST failed to consider earlier on that their actions would not be read within the isolation of their own intentions, practice, or even the art world, but against an ongoing history of state-sanctioned violence, discrimination, and disenfranchisement—because these are the stakes.

And in this lies the challenge. The situations I have discussed occurred within nonprofits, fiscally sponsored, or artist-run spaces, organizations, and entities, likely fueled by a staff and volunteer labor force that works to the bone for far less money than they should earn or deserve, if they are paid at all—fighting for pennies with earnestness and a belief that one day, the struggle will be operationalized. Art. Change. These describe Daily Serving and Art Practical, and so many other arts organizations that struggle to survive in the face of engorged capitalism. This is the lived experience of being in the arts. It is our burden to bear. The stakes are greater than the next artwork or exhibition. Just because we are scraping by or believe we are doing the right work doesn’t mean we are exempt or off the hook from daring to recognize the art world is intimately tied to the world from which it is made. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

I know this because in the past weeks, I have also seen the tears of my students, soaking with the disbelief that in fifty-four years, only 18 percent of Artforum covers have ever featured a woman, let alone artists of color. Or that the majority of major museum exhibitions, gallery representation, awards, executive directorships, and tenured teaching jobs are still reserved for white men, and then white women, unless they are designated for culturally specific individuals and largely at culturally specific institutions. People of color are constantly asked to make impossible decisions in support of a society that systemically disregards their safety, care, and advancement.

I fear this world. I choke for air when thinking—knowing—that my work happens in the very spaces where a young artist might come to class feeling that the safety of their work—and therefore their body—is not valued in this art world. Or that their body—and therefore, their work—is not valued in our everyday world. I have learned, heartbreakingly from my students, that to be an artist of color is to be a maker at risk. How do I teach this safety?

Here at Daily Serving and Art Practical, we have spent much time reflecting on what world we are making. We are pleased with what we have built, but nevertheless, we are gravely reflexive about how we, reluctantly, serve as agents for the institution and how we can do better. The heightened visibility around the lives of queer, Black, and Brown bodies has real-world effects (since I began writing this essay, Uslip resigned his position at CAM because of the public backlash), but this does not mean that power has effectively shifted. That is the long, grueling work of real social justice: building access to power, or redefining it with the knowledge that you might have to give up yours. We know we have a responsibility to continue this endless fight to work harder at creating an art world that reflects the world we want to live in—a space where no one fears that their safety or their work is at risk. Privilege regarding identities, institutional mobility, and access to funding need to be constantly interrogated. We should be held at a higher standard, even if we feel as though we are playing for the right team, doing “the work,” fighting for the same tiny pool of funding, and living the grueling life of nonprofit cultural workers within a for-profit world. Instead of asking questions, perhaps it’s time for the art world to start showing up with some answers. We can do better. So can you.

The deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture had a problem. At the April 25 symposium “History, Rebellion, and Reconciliation,” her panel was a no-show. A law professor and two writers were late and had yet to appear.

So to fill the gap, Kinshasha Holman Conwill called upon “Brother Ellis” and with some heavy coaxing, she convinced Rex Ellis, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, to sing a duet—a rendition of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Ella’s Song.”

“We, who believe in freedom, cannot rest until it comes,” they sang. “Until the killing of a black man, a black woman’s son, is as important as the killing of a white man, a white woman’s son.”

That move, in many ways, defined the spirit of the day-long symposium. The event featured speakers that ranged from the award-winning director Ava DuVernay (Selma) to the Pittsburgh-based emcee and community activist Jasiri X, and pastor Osagyefo Sekou to Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi.

Read the full article here.

London Stereoscopic Company. Peter Jackson Aka the ‘Black Prince'; December 2, 1889; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Jackson’s image is just one of the many striking photographic portraits included in Black Chronicles II at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia, that activate an important dialogue about the history and record of Black faces and bodies within Western culture. Organized in its original formation by the British photographic institute Autograph ABP in 2014, and curated by two of its most prominent staff members, Renée Massai and Mark Sealy, Black Chronicles II embodies Autograph’s commitment to mining public and private archives of images for the absent Black subject—a mission that “renders visible” the gaps, omissions, and absences within historical annals. In its move to Atlanta, the exhibition opens up a new strand of conversation around the history of the Black subject in the United States and asks viewers to make connections between the British and American formations of empire, racism, and colonialism.

Photographer/Studio: Alex Ayton Junior. Unidentified Sitter, Edinburgh; c. 1900. Carte-de-visite; 64 x 100 mm. Courtesy of Val Wilmer Collection.

Following the logic of the chronicle as a temporal record that orders (and often visualizes) historical events, this exhibition also enables viewers to discover new ways of seeing Black subjects within traditional histories of photography, and demands an awareness of the ways in which the historiography of the still image remains un-diverse and exclusionary. The photographs on display capture an array of stories and figures, from Jackson and Queen Victoria’s West African goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonetta to unidentified sitters whose portraits function as sacred testimony to the collective formation and development of 19th-century British history and representational politics. Wearing fashionable dress and posed within the artificial theater of the photographic studio, these faces describe the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the Black subject and emphasize the ways in which Black subjectivity has been cast out or left unidentified within (visual) culture. The galleries at Spelman reverberate with Frantz Fanon’s description of “the passionate research” that is necessary to make space for these lost voices.[1]

London Stereoscopic Company. Member of the African Choir, 1891; framed & unglazed; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The dedication of this exhibition to the British cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall (who died in 2014) links the legacies of Hall’s intellectual project to Autograph’s institutional mission, and forms the academic and political foundations of this body of photographs.[2] As the spokesperson for the British cultural-studies movement of the 1980s, Hall was an integral part of a generation that brought Black and ethnic minority artists into visibility in a time of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, the New Left, Jesse Helms, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Hall’s contribution to the field of cultural and minority studies is vast; it remains vital today, as new struggles for civil and race rights continue to challenge and mine the unequal fields of representation within American political life. It is clear to me that the curatorial premise of this exhibition is inextricably linked to the call of #BlackLivesMatter, which places the lives and bodies of African Americans at the forefront of an ongoing national dialogue on racial violence and oppression. In our current climate of protests, demonstrations, and riots, funneled through the channels of mainstream and social media, the representation of the Black subject “continues to become and transform within culture, history, and power.”[3][4]

Black Chronicles II is on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through May 16, 2016.

[1] See Frantz Fanon’s text Black Skin/White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, NY: Grove Press, 2008, pg. 22.

[2] Audio excerpts from Hall’s 2008 keynote address, “The Missing Chapter: Cultural Identity and the Photographic Archive,” given at Rivington Place in London, echo throughout the galleries.

[3] See Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation” in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, pg. 57–58.

[4] The exhibition was organized by Autograph ABP, London; curated by Renée Massai and Mark Sealy; and produced in collaboration with the Hulton Archive, London, a division of Getty Images.

Sheila Pree Bright. 1960Now, 2015; installation view, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

Neither scattered nor arranged, spontaneous nor precise, oversized black-and-white photographs lie on the floor, inches away from the gallery’s outer perimeters. The powerful presence of voices, faces, and traces of the bodies captured within these images are immediately striking. Brightly lit faces sit square within the repetitive rectangular form—awake, alive, and uncompromising. The installation refuses the normal conditions of visual engagement in two-dimensional art—an engagement that normally demands an equal confrontation and leveling of space between the viewer and the viewed. Through this gesture, Bright demands that we turn our heads down to look at and regard individuals who command and reclaim our gaze. The experience is as profound and poignant as it is uncomfortable. Illuminated in front of a stark white background, Bright’s work collapses the conditions of the studio portrait and the uniformity found within institutional photography (passport photos, mug shots, photo IDs, driver’s licenses) to create images that carry the weight of the shared history and contingent experiences of these individuals. Size and scale play an important role as well in the filmic element of the exhibition that gives voice to the unique experiences and perspectives of these social agitators, thus animating the photographs that lie powerful in their silence around the room.

Sheila Pree Bright. BringIt, 2015; chalkboard; installation view, 1960Now, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

BringIt is an interactive project consisting of blackboards that stretch across the open wall space. Interrupting the floor space of the photographs, the ever-evolving piece is scrawled with chalk-written notes, which electrify the room with a visual language that embodies contemporary activism today. Filled with hashtags, slogans, mantras, and graffiti written by the people for the people, BringIt opens up the static portraits to a world constantly in the process of being written and connects the struggles of bodies across the nation and throughout the world. Undertaken and activated by the community, the project creates paths of inclusiveness within the gallery, turning text into indexical affirmations of the spaces and sites outside of the context of the museum.

Bright’s work refuses all notions of the passive subject—a difficult outcome to achieve, given the rocky historical relationship between the media and social movements across the span of the last century, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 to Ferguson, Missouri. The gap between what is represented as “documentary” evidence by the media and the reality of the experience on the ground is a problem that continues to inform the history of civil dissent, particularly when it involves media coverage of institutionally marginalized and oppressed groups. Bright’s photographs weigh in on the loaded politics of the African American objector in representation by recoding the inherent nostalgia of black-and-white photography and film. By using genres that call up powerful emotions of past struggles that continue to shape our understanding, Bright ambiguously provides the affinities and ruptures between past and present race struggles.

Sheila Pree Bright. 1960Now, 2015; installation view, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

In his groundbreaking text on the photographic documentation of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Maurice Berger highlights the determined efforts of the white press to frame any acts of black resistance as nonthreatening, thereby casting blacks in roles of limited power, and minimizing the bravery and accomplishments of those who were risking their lives on a daily basis.[1] Even within the photographs that captured the physical violence of white supremacists, blacks were cast as passive victims within a black-and-white image world, with the effect of “focusing white attention on acts of violence and away from historically rooted inequalities.”[2] Projected across the upper ridge of the gallery wall, Bright’s films refuse the media’s emptying of meaning and objective in acts of resistance, and reverberate with the experiences of those who witnessed and participated in the trajectory of protests, old and new. The videos allow actors and agents of protest movements to speak for themselves, with testimony and footage unbound by the biases, perspectives, and edits of the 24-hour televised news cycle.

Bright’s careful mediation of and attention to contemporary eruptions of African American action—bodies in the streets, moving forward, united in rage and care for the other—asks us to break our notions of difference between past and present, passivity and progress, in order to see that the cause of Martin, Malcolm, and Rosa is both continuous and discontinuous, aligned while moving forward toward its own unique position.

[1] See Maurice Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

[2] Ibid., pg. 34–35.

Sheila Pree Bright: 1960Now is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta through November 28, 2015.