Good evening and thank you for joining us. For the third in a series of four terror lectures in American art,
this series is sponsored by the Terror Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration,
understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international
audiences in collaboration with the Department of the History of also Oxford and Wooster College.
Foundation grants and annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art.
Amy Mooney is the Tara visiting professor for 2019 to 20.
My name is Victoria McGinnis and I am head of cultural programming and Partnerships in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.
We are delighted to be able to host this lecture series, particularly on this incredibly important topic.
The series has been included as part of the live on line event series in the humanities cultural programme.
One of the founding Stones of the future, Steve Nash, Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities.
Throughout this evening's lecture, please feel free to pop any questions you have into the YouTube chat.
Your questions will be taken at the end of this session by our two speakers today.
We are thrilled that this lecture will be introduced and chaired by Dr. Melanie Changeless,
assistant professor in the Humanities, History and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College, Chicago.
In progress manuscript saving the Race, Black Archives,
Black Liberation and the Remaking of Modernity explores the founding and impact of early 20th century Blackhall archives.
Melanie has a forthcoming essay in the edited collection, The Unfinished Book about the early years of Mallen Foundation Library in Washington, D.C.
Melanie's research has been supported by the Ford Foundation,
the by Nickey Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Melanie this evening and without further delay, Melanie, I hand over to you.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Victoria, for that introduction.
Very excited to be able to moderate today's lecture.
As Victoria just said, I think that this will be a very timely conversation about the role of art representation and social issues.
So I'm very delighted to introduce Amy Mooney, who is an associate professor at Columbia College,
Chicago, where she teaches courses on African-American art and visual culture.
Her publications include a monograph on Chicago painter Archibald Jay Mottley Junior,
which was part of the David C. Driscoll series on African-American art and was published in 2004.
Amy has also contributed to a number of anthologies and catalogues, including Beyond Face, New Perspectives and Portraiture.
Black is Black Ain't Mayor Bearden and the Modernist tradition for her work.
Amy has received fellowships from the American Council of Learnt Society as
the Black Metropolis Research Consortium with the Andrew Mellon Foundation,
the Joyce Foundation, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Terror Foundation for American Art.
Most recently, Amy has been working with photography historian Dr Deborah Willis and the Museum
of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College to launch a digital humanities
project entitled Say It With Pictures Then and Now that recovers and critically
examines the work of Chicago's African-American photographers from the 80s,
90s into the 1930s. During our tenure as the Terra Foundation visiting professor of American Art this year, Amy will complete her second book,
Portraits of Noteworthy Character Negotiating a Collective American Identity, a project that investigates the social function of portraiture.
So welcoming. Thank you so much, Melanie. It is definitely a pleasure to be in conversation with you today.
I look forward to sharing my work to that end.
I go ahead and put up the set of slides that we are going to examine today.
And I want to send greetings to everyone from the proposed lodgings.
This is where I've been speaking here at Wooster College and also again to express.
Thanks for joining us.
My thanks also to an appreciation for the Department of History of Art here at Oxford and Wooster College who have so warmly welcomed me.
And they must also offer profound gratitude to the Terra Foundation and to Columbia College, Chicago, for supporting such opportunities.
And also, I would like to thank the students here at Oxford who might have been so privileged to work with.
Finally, I'd like to express my sincere appreciation to our colleagues at the Oxford Research
Centre for the Humanities for providing the platform for this evening's Lifestream.
So this is the third of the fourth part lecture.
As Melanie said, and it does, in fact, draw from my forthcoming book, Portraits of Noteworthy Character.
And here, what I'm interested in doing is exploring the central role that portraiture in all of its forms played in fostering social change in
the United States as progressive individuals and institutions relied on its cultural capital to further their political ideologies.
At the turn of the century, the national identity of the United States was challenged by both migration and immigration.
Anglo American progressives such as Jean Adams sought to improve the conditions of
newly arrived immigrants and drew upon us from the strategies of racial uplift,
adapting them to encourage both assimilation and cultural pluralism.
Looking at images generated by Joseph Stella, Noel Hamilton and Louise HINH,
I will consider how portraits of individuals were used to visualise and construct types of racial and ethnic identities,
and then how those identities impact Americans collective national consciousness.
As with the earlier lectures. I'd like to begin with the portraits of the Obamas in regards to their representation of our collective
body politic collectivity is a central part of building and negotiating a national identity.
It presumes shared values and purpose, as well as establishing symbols that communicate one's allegiance to set principles.
In this way, these portraits serve as icons representing all who identify as Americans.
A visual translation of the United States motto E Pluribus Unum out of many one.
Up to this point think considering portraits generated by African-Americans for African-Americans.
Yet, as evidenced in the diversity of the millions of people who've come to experience them,
the appeal of these portraits is intersectional and necessitates a broader
consideration of how we come to regard one another across the constraints of race,
ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.
Many heralded the Obama presidency as socially progressive from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Marriage Equality Act.
There was a momentum toward legislation that ensured human rights despite differences in its citizenry.
Some went even so far as to call this a post-racial era.
However, the hate crimes that occurred during the Obama presidency,
including the horrific murder of Trayvon Martin and the tragic Charleston church massacre, unequivocally prove otherwise.
Central to the work of being anti-racist is the necessity of examining the historic constructs that enable and perpetuate bias,
prejudice and xenophobia.
Like the Obama era, the progressive era brought forth substantive legislative reform aimed at improving the working living conditions of the poor.
But it also saw the enactment of a series of laws that reify prejudice and discrimination along the lines of race and ethnicity,
as evidenced in this caricature published in the satirical magazine.
The Judge in 1983. For this lecture,
I want to consider the complicated relationship between the static's and reform ideologies to the formation of
racial and ethnic identities within the emerging practises of progressive social work in the United States.
As noted by scholars such as Jacqueline Francis, Matthew Frei Jacobson, David Rohde, Ature Warner Sollers,
amongst many others at the turn of the 20th century and well into the 1930s, the distinction between race and ethnicity was more fluid.
Both were a means of discerning in designating non-white identities,
and we're interchangeable in the works of sociologists and social workers in the eyes of the late 19th century commentators.
Race was a fluid concept that entailed divisions amongst European groups regarded just
as salient or pernicious as the distinctions that were being made between Asians,
Africans, European and Latin next peoples. When immigration restrictionists warned of the danger America faced from the Irish,
the Italians and Slavic races, they were not just newly being rhetorical or misusing the term,
but imposing a moral classification schema that they were convinced has much scientific
liberty as the more enduring construct of the so-called races of human kind.
The pivoting point here is not just to simply consider the visual politics of other non-white identities,
but to open up the discussion of how make the making of these identities not only short the construction of whiteness,
but also give white progressives the privilege of purpose.
Drawing from photography historian Alan Trachtenberg. I argue that portraits such as these by Lewis Hine served as a site of imagined empathy,
by which I mean that the makers and viewers imagined themselves connecting with
immigrant subjects and believing that seeing was equivalent to knowing the other,
and that this knowledge with thereby result in a more just and equitable society.
As observed by Trachtenberg Hinds,
portraits invite and demand a particular kind of participatory viewing not only because of their aesthetic composition,
but also because of their publication within progressive tax.
Yet I would argue that the participatory nature of this view positioned one to look at not with.
Despite the best intentions, white progressives failed to acknowledge the systemic discrimination in inequality across economic,
social and political structures that prevented the possibility of knowing the other as an equal.
The Skopec regimes that presented and circulated portraits of immigrants not only circumscribed ones field of vision,
but also one's imagination to the point of limiting citizenship rather than extending it.
At the time of these portraits were generated, there was no mutual relationship between the portraitist, the subject or the subsequent viewer.
And too often, when literally facing the other.
The portrait was employed to reduce a full and complex distinct being to an idea, a diminished person subdued under the subject's control,
becoming representative of a problem rather than a person positioning portraits of immigrants as a social documents in journals,
annual reports and solicitations for funding allowed for their study and negotiation,
if not cultivation of racial antipathies rarely generated for the communities represented.
It is critical to consider how and where such portraits were encountered.
Even when artists and view their subjects with the aesthetics associated with fine art or in this case literally quoting from art history,
the portraits of immigrants were seldom experienced as an honorific likeness that ensured an individual's recognition.
Instead, we see their shift from evocative archetypes to a centralised ethno racial types.
Amongst many aspects to consider within this chapter is the choice of medium and its relationship to temporality,
as it affords an opportunity to January a historic narrative that aims to remove immigrants from the specifics of their contemporary circumstances.
Promoting a sense of distance, as I will argue the portraits, evidence and incongruous perspective that relies on aesthetics,
nostalgia and the politics of labour to generate a way of looking at immigrants that is contingent upon the codification of racial hierarchies.
As representations of the exploited or dispossessed portraits of immigrants allowed audiences to imagine their circumstances and connect
with their own inner humanity and believe that they were advocating on the behalf of immigrants schooled in specific visual codes,
white progressives believe that their own moral intelligence and their values should be imparted to literally inform a more perfect union.
Collectively, however, the portraits are part of a larger system of comparative taxonomies of difference that,
as demonstrated by historian Ian Haney Lopez, reveal that, quote, Race does not exist as defined entities,
but only as amalgamations of people standing in complex relationships with other such groups.
And quote, For white, Progressive's race proved to be relational and a shifting, culturally defined category of difference.
That is only manifest.
That only manifests not only ideas, but in power over institutions and access to material resources through portraits of immigrants.
They crafted visual evidence that justified the creation of spaces, programmes, publications and, most importantly, their own sense of purpose.
For immigrants entering the United States on the East Coast, Ellis Island served as an attorney for ethnographic portraiture,
is here within the processes of inspection and policing of entry,
that the reading of race is inextricably linked to citizenship,
cited as the best school for acquisition of knowledge of racial characteristics and physique, costume and behaviour.
Photographers and artists were assigned to generate portraits of Ellis Island
immigrants for journals such as The Outlook Everybody's magazine or Charities,
and comments that such train readers on how to identify and associate the exterior signs of ethnicity
with interior aspects of character in alignment with either their pro or anti-immigration ideologies.
Commissioned by the Christian progressive journal The Outlook,
the artist Joseph Steller rendered character studies at Ellis Island for publication in a series called Americans in the Rough,
as suggested by the editor.
The title indicates an unfinished process, as if the subject's nationalisation was unrealised and potentially may never be completed.
Although the portraits constitute their own feature that stands alone,
they are prefaced with an editorial by Lynn Abbott that little left little ambiguity as to how he believe the portrait should be interpreted.
Published in 1985, during a massive influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Abbott questioned their viability to become true citizens.
According to Abbott, quote, The nation is morally bound to see to it that only those aliens are admitted who are potential Americans,
who are Americans in the rough. He proposes that the potential of an immigrant can be determined by examining their moral character.
With this mandate, Stellas portrayals become a means by which viewers could, quote, exercise their discrimination.
Learning to read out the vicious and the degenerate, end quote.
To that end, each portrait is labelled by the subject's ethnicity.
Irish types, Italians and Russian, Jew, as well as indications that they were all drawn by life.
The designation of the artist process that Stella had first hand observation of the subjects extends the artist's
acuity to the viewer so that they too can look closely to determine if the subjects were what Abbott called,
quote, incurably aliens in temper. In these portraits are of particular note because of the artistic language that Stella used to convey.
Interior states of character for each claiming that, quote, The eyes of the soul of the person should be seised at once in quotes.
He relies on the subjects directed gaze to give insight to the morality by regarding how the immigrants performed.
Looking as well as what they looked at,
readers learnt in evaluative method that allowed them to shift individuals into ethnic types in the selection of the subjects.
Stella stated that, quote, His preference was going to curious types,
revealing the unrestrained eloquence of their mask, the crude story of their lives and what.
In the portrait, Irish types Stellar rendered three figures looking in different directions.
The matronly woman on the left gazes out through her spectacles with a slight smile on her face.
She's rendered to the graphite in a very light handed manner to the effect that
she has a sort of spectral light presence seemingly fading into the background,
whereas the other two male figures have a heavier presence that pushes them toward the viewer.
The man at the centre is positioned so that he is partially obscured,
and yet his profile is incisively detailed from his wispy moustache whose raised eyebrow.
The man on the right dominates the portrayal as Stella more fairly rendered his presence
on his hat and suit and concentrated on carefully delineating his facial features.
His hooded gaze does not meet the viewer's as he is directed to the side.
And there's something slightly incongruous about the group, as if we are to understand the artist's encounter of them in line at Ellis Island.
And despite the artist's careful rendering, there's a sort of ambiguity about their presence that suggests that the Irish types may not be,
in fact, capable of becoming fully fleshed Americans in the rough.
In comparison to contemporary character chairs,
the carefully rendered features to these individuals seem to counter the widely held racist stereotypes.
The position of the Irish as ignorant, uncouth drunkards who,
like African-Americans at this time, were deemed inferior and unworthy of American citizenship,
as implied in the Thomas Nast and G.C. tale illustrations for Harper's and Park Magazines capturers
like this drew from the widely held subscription to Pseudosciences of Phrenology and Physiognomy
that attempted to use physical characteristics to define interior character and the Aluna anxieties
about the perceived threat to the Haeju Monic security and well-being of the American body politic.
Though Stella does not evoke this simian like features for his Irish types,
his rendering of their features corresponds with those listed by contemporary anthropologists who characterise the Irish as having,
quote, smaller, rather upturned noses, smaller eyes and lower four heads.
And further, the unfinished spectre like nature of his types implodes and uncertainty about their suitability for citizenship.
In the portrait titled Italians, Stellas shifts to a rectangular format position is two subjects in profile.
Again, the portrait is defined ethnicity with a male and female representative.
Unlike the liminal space occupied by the Irish types,
the Italians are grounded in the context of Ellis Island with a depiction of water and industrial ships in the distance.
Their clothing suggests the picturesque old world.
The man wears a sludge felt hat while the woman is wrapped in a shawl with a kerchief covering her head.
The Convention of Portraiture in profile evokes a renaissance artistic tradition,
and at the same time it allows for careful study of the subject's physiognomy placed in front of the man.
The woman seems to overwhelm the composition, potentially suggesting a subversively dominant nature.
The man behind her leans forward, keeping his gaze to himself while the woman casts her eye over the shoulder to confront the viewer.
Her singular eye project's sepsis,
countering the expectation for immigrants compliance as they endured the humiliating medical inspections that were required,
especially for populations suspected of contagious diseases such as trachoma on its own.
The portrait does not seem to condemn but to categorise, emphasising the experience of being closely regarded.
Yet following the pseudo anthropological split second is the anomic characterisations of Italian stellar scribes prominent noses,
long skulls, dark eyes and dark hair.
Stew's figures and shadows the man's face with the so called seaworthiness typically associated with this ethnic type.
When combined with the edict to examine the immigrants in order to ascertain their, quote, fitness for membership in the American household and quote,
stuff as portrait's suggests some ambivalence as to the Italians admissibility to America.
The last portrait in the series titled A Russian Jew is the Darcus, both in medium and in mood using charcoal.
The artist rendered the likeness of the bearded man at the centre of the composition behind him.
Two other figures are visible, but to a lesser degree. Dressed in a dark, heavy overcoat, these expansive shoulders occupy the entire picture plain.
An exterior light falls on the man's face, highlighting his four head nose as well as the tips of his large ears.
He does not make eye contact with the viewer. Rather, his eyes are downcast, as if he was introspectively engaged, combined with a furrowed brow.
His expression simultaneously conveys the weariness and the wariness of his experience.
As noted by art historian IRA Jaffe, quote In this series,
Stellas Skilful Delineation is like the performances of an actor who is transforming himself by subtle combination of gesture and facial expressions,
portrays a variety of characters instantaneously recognisable as types.
And Jarvi suggestion of the performative nature of these portraits emphasises viewers negotiation and understanding
these portraits as individuals versus their representation of ethno racial constructs in the popular imagination,
which is seen in this race as capture by Frank Beard, associating the Russian Jew type with poverty, disease and anarchy.
The seeing large ears, Convex Newill Bridge and the beard,
maybe reference is part of this type's racial taxonomy, but still refrains from this character trait.
Without the directive of title or editorial said, types Occupy Alemanno space precariously like the status of immigrants,
their futures not entirely self-determined, whether they're subject to the judgement of others.
Although some scholars read these workers sympathetic, perhaps informed by Stellas own experience as a recent immigrant,
the imposition of the racialized captions and directive to determine whether or not these types are,
quote, a menace to the maintenance of the American idea, unquote, prevents such an interpretation.
I'd also like to contend that Stellas emphasis on the immigrant's vulnerability and apprehension, as expressed through their eyes,
allowed progressive white viewers to learn the power of their own discerning gaze in their illustrative role subject to xenophobia text.
The portraits contextualise the subsequent passage of anti-immigrant legislation,
as reminded by Edward Sayeed, the psychology and politics behind the Western gaze.
Even in its most benevolent manifestations,
tends to be self-serving and tends to constrain the portrait of racial otherness to that of a mere image of the Western self.
Within this framework, Stellas portraits reflect the fear and anxiety and suspicion of white viewers back to themselves.
Stellas portraits of immigrants were also employed in support of assimilation of immigrants and can be evidenced in their illustrative role.
But Ruiz pulls influential article, a mixing bowl for the Nations, published in 1910.
The author directed readers to compare types disparate differences and how to recognise, quote, within the tremendous drama of mixing of nations.
Which of the races will be the most successful.
And the article deals details the author's tour of ethnic neighbourhood restaurants and gathering places in Chicago,
where he observes and interacts with the patrons. Paul vividly describes his experiences of eating, drinking,
conversing and watching immigrants seeking to authentically experience the other at what he calls real Guiney hangouts and Bohemian cafes.
With the exception of the title page, the articles illustrated with portraits of Italian and Slavic men rendered in charcoal
and graphite in the style of old Masters drawings heralded by the author as,
quote, the pictorial recorder of this new America. And quote, Stella's portrait,
her emphasises the individuality of his sideris with a sharp realism characteristic of artists of the 15th century, Germany and Flounders.
Art historian Barbara Haskell has written that in that Stellas quote, My new recording of every facial detail and texture is technically breathtaking,
while also evoking a psychological empathy and respect for the sitter.
Perhaps if these portraits are seen on a gallery wall or illustrated in an art journal, this would be the case.
But within the pages of everybody's magazine, the incongruous captions and narrative prevent full consideration of the subject's humanity.
Instead, the viewer is presented with elderly, seemingly exhausted male labourers who both emerge from and recede into the mental space.
Each is identified by ethnicity, along with the justification of their worth to America.
A portrait of an Italian for Rome depicts an elderly man, bald, with a full beard with deeply wrinkled, closed eyes.
As in most of Selous portraits, the figure emerges from an atmospheric background with no anchoring details, generating a sense of timelessness.
There was a central component of old master drawings.
Another quarter of an Italian directs the viewer to contrast this Italian Mombasa cotta with the Roman type.
And in this likeness, the SIDOR looks out directly, including the viewer.
He wears a heart open neck shirt and holds a pipe in his mouth,
as in the previous portrait of a Roman still carefully renders his facial features recording every wrinkle and hollow of his countenance.
The commanded comparison reflects the author's distinction made between northern and southern
Italians the position northerners as superior and more desirable contributors to American society.
Yet in East Portrait sells emphasis on individuality, resists such a centralisation.
Instead, it's challenging to imagine a stayed elderly men participating in the author's narration of,
quote, the tremendous drama of mixing of nations and evoking popular ethnic stereotype.
Your other proclaims that the Italians will bring, quote, romance and singing that deep bread, love of beauty,
childlike simplicity and hot blood of the South to be fused at last into the main stock of Chicago's future people.
And yet Steller's portrait of classical calm, seemingly self realised, carefully delineated,
needed individuals do not evidence a childlike simplicity when certainly not the hot blood of the South.
In another example, commissioned for a mixing bowl for all nations.
The profile portrait of one man is captioned the Slavic peoples after furnishing to Chicago.
Huge, healthy peasants that are the best of raw material. With this portrait,
the dialectical tension between text and image disrupts the viewing of the subject
as an individual and instead positions him and a commodity to be put to use.
Set within an oval frame and positioned against a plain background background with no surroundings.
The subject is depicted in profile from the chest up with little detail focussed on his clothing.
Rather, the artist concentrated on rendering the minutes wrinkled face some kind cheeks in closely shorn hair.
The physical designations are huge and healthy, are at odds with the city's aged features.
Instead, these verbal characterisations were more in keeping with the stereotypical portrayal of people of
Slavic descent via the derogatory epitaph of hunky denoting their role as unskilled labourers,
especially employed in steel industries. This trope characterised the Slavich as, quote, illiterate and ignorant,
with proclivities toward excessive alcoholism and brutality and reckless fecundity.
In contrast, the author asserts that these immigrants, quote,
get ahead faster than the more recent races because they are raw material imbued with the capacity of change and their willingness to work hard.
Thus, they are going to be our kindred are becoming Americans and quote,
Stellas classically rendering read classical rendering does not seem to support the potential that the author sees.
Instead, the solidity of figures suggests Stacie's rather than change a fixed and timeless presence rather than a raw and malleable material.
Despite contradictions between the text and image, they do work together in attempt to salvage the reader's anti-immigrant anxieties,
encouraging the imagining of immigrants as kindred as well as what they themselves might gain from mixing.
Paul described it as, quote, an irresistible process by which all should be fused as a new race of men upon Earth, unquote.
Not only does the author assert that immigrants want this, he also portends a future in which needed most.
American readers will also participate in this amalgamation.
The fear of miscegenation and whether immigrants were willing or capable of assimilation form the crux of Antine immigration policy and debate.
By using studied classical technique in visualising those who were different Steller's portraits distance the viewer,
casting the immigrant into the past that will fade away. In contrast to the contemporary threat posed by pools mixing up nations,
Stella's portrayal counters the narrative of change and future of miscegenation, assuring viewers that the difference will become the past.
That the incongruities between text and image are part of the politics of nation building that sought to foster a collective identity.
At the same time that it sought to redefine racial hierarchies. Joseph Stello was not alone in his study of immigrants on Ellis Island.
He was joined by myriad photographers who were commissioned to create portraits that could be used to illustrate magazine articles.
Annual reports and other modes of propaganda that shaped ideas about immigrants and immigration policy.
Of all the various photographers who worked on Ellis Island, Lewis Hines portraits of immigrants became the most iconic,
appearing regularly on the covers and illustrated articles in progressive weeklies
such as the survey extensively published and circulated during immigration debate.
These portraits were used as social documents to justify a variety of positions and personal perspective,
where she plays study with progressive such as John Dewey at the University of Chicago.
Dewey's perspective on the lived experience as central to learning had a lasting influence on hind's approach to photography as pedagogy.
Hind's first engagement with Ellis Island immigrants was through an outreach programme of the Ethical Culture School in New York in 1984.
And as noted by scholar and Pegler Gordon Hinds, portraits from this period can be considered respectful,
evoking bourgeois family or artistic portraiture and their posing.
Yet they engage in racial taiping through their attention to ethnographic cultural details and casually as racial types.
High interest in the immigrant portraiture led him to Holehouse Progressive Settlement
Organisation that was established in Chicago in 1889 by Jean Adams and Ellen Stockades.
Photographs were commissioned from Hine to illustrate Adams article autobiographical notes upon 20 years that Holehouse that chronicled the social,
cultural and political reform work carried out by white elite women who lived and worked at Holehouse, publishes six instalments in American magazine.
In 1910, Hind's portraits of immigrants are artfully arranged in columns of blocks,
illustrating those who participated in Holehouse programmes or in the neighbourhood who benefited from the Progressive's largesse on these pages.
We see a variety of people who, according to the captions, can be seen on the street outside a house in her text.
Adams identifies these individuals as being from the Russian Jewish colony and details their anxiety
when in nineteen eighty eight they were threatened with the possibility of an extradition treaty,
which Adams successfully organised against. I'd like to focus our attention on the bottom portrait at the right of a young shoeshine boy.
As one of the official unofficial photographers of Holehouse Height took hundreds
of photographs that were then published in the organisation's annual reports,
yearbooks and philanthropic solicitations for decades.
The uncropped photograph, titled Boy Outside at the bulletin board Holehouse,
appears in the May 1910 Hall has yearbook for this portrait of a shoeshine who
is at first glance seems to be reading a bulletin board outside of Hillhouse
high position the camera for a wide angle of the front of the building in City Street that provides a sense of scale denoting this subjects young age,
a potential vulnerability facing the building with a shoeshine box slung over his back.
He's staged as a representative of the boys club that was detailed in the
accompanying text as featuring numerous programmes to augment public education.
Yet with a closer look at the subjects, presumed literacy can be questioned as the young boy does not look up at the bulletins posted above him.
Rather, he stares directly at the wall. His purpose seems simple work as if he's charged with performing the interest in the goings on a whole house,
but not really a participant of the programming. In their study of child labour practises in Chicago.
Holehouse residents reported that, quote,
There is no body of self supporting children more in need with effective care than these newsboys and bootblack.
They are ill fed, ill housed, ill clothed, illiterate and wholly untrained in unfitted for any occupation.
And given the arduous work of the hours of the Shiner's, who also served as newsis rising before dawn to sell and distribute newspapers.
It's unlikely that he could have attended any of the whole house programmes or clubs.
Hind's photograph of the young boy outside on the street emphasises the necessity of the activities within that will save and reform him.
His portrait reassures readers that they can solve this problem if they commit their energies to child labour reform.
Adams had the opportunity to republish her Syria article as a book.
It chose not to include Hine's photographs. Instead, she requested artist Nora Hamilton to translate symbol of Hine's photographs into line etchings
and to contribute some of her own original illustrations of the people and places of Holehouse.
The reason for this shift in media may have been as simple as accommodating.
The already extent means illustration used by the publisher,
thus saving costs prior to the development of half term printing photographs were frequently converted.
To achieve that, would engravings that allowed for a greater reproducibility.
Yet by 1910, this was no longer the typical case and seems to suggest Ann's choice was purposeful.
The translation of one medium to another allows the artist to imbue the photographic portraits with different qualities.
Certainly the debate around photography is an art form comes into play and given the hind's work was already identified as a form of photo journalism.
Adams may have felt that that etching, a medium accepted as fine art, would appeal to the arts and crafts aesthetic of her audience.
The whole has emphasis on the moral value of arts and craft,
as well as the fact that Hamilton taught art classes there could have also influenced Adams request.
In her preface, Adam notes, quote,
It's a matter of great gratification to me that the book is illustrated from drawings made by Miss Nora Hamilton of Holehouse and quote,
Perhaps Hamilton's translations better represented Adam's perspective than Hine's photographs.
The expressive line quality of Hamilton's drawings seems more in keeping with the author's nostalgic.
Remember says that explain the influences were and objectives in founding Holehouse.
Whatever the circumstances, it's important to note that the interpretive shifts that are interpretive shifts afforded by each
medium in the illustration index HIND'S credited as the source of four of Hamilton's drawings.
Although it's clear that throughout the text she refers to many more of hind's
photographic portraits in her version of consulting the Holehouse bulletin board.
Hamilton eliminates the specifics of the story, keeping a mere outline of the building and the bulletin within the layout of the page of 20 years.
The effect is such that the young boy loses the independence of his stance and purpose, unmoored from his environment.
There's no caption that sets the image apart from the page whether its placement is integrated into the surrounding text,
the accompanying narrative positions.
Holehouse is a resource through which young boys could be empowered to follow a pathway to self-improvement period in this way.
The boy becomes a generalised street urchin type in need of aid to ensure his future potential.
This reading is supported on the following page, where Hamilton's portrait of the face of the presumably seen boy, also drawn from a hired photograph,
illustrates the possibility that the immigrants aren't shifting to future citizen,
as was inspired by Adams description of the whole House activities that were devoted to, quote, arousing a higher imagination, unquote.
You'll have to forgive me for the blurriness of these images, I had intended to get higher resolution.
Unfortunately, it was limited in my ability to travel back to the U.S., but they do serve a purpose here in this close up.
The young man looks directly out of the viewer, smiling as if Adam's charge had imminent impact.
Hamilton stands cross hatchings in the eyes of the facial features contrasts
with her minimal outline of the boy's cap and the surrounding white space.
She is not true attempt to translate the stares that can be seen in the background of Hind's photograph.
Overall, the effect is a generalising timelessness. It becomes picturesquely evocative.
But Dickinsonia and like character addressing the universal need to follow Adam's prescriptions to eradicate child labour.
Notably know that the photographer nor the illustrator titled their images by subjects names.
Rather, they both employ generic descriptors or ethnic designations that impose a typology upon their subjects.
Yet Hind's photographs bear the index of a particular time place in interaction with the subject.
In contrast, Hamilton's translations of his photographs remove the interaction from its passivity
and allow it to represent a more general interpretation of character in appearance,
shifting its two Poile registration into that of past Yelton.
Also translated, Hine's photographs of the women who worked at the Labour Museum is spinners and allows us
to consider Adam strategic employment of nostalgia as a means of fostering assimilation.
Additionally, the shift in ethnic identities moving,
as you can see in the captions from Italian to Scandinavian from one source, the other signals move signals.
It reveals the performative nature of ethnicity at the whole house.
But first, some context is history.
In 1987, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported changes that raised concerns regarding the future of the United States.
According to the report, unlike earlier immigrants who, quote,
pushed westward expansion through their agrarian labour and who assimilated so quickly
that the racial identity of their children was almost entirely boss and forgotten,
new immigrants retained their cultural traditions, different languages,
and settled in the urban ghettos, thus increasing poverty in the United States.
In further, the report concluded that, quote, The old immigrant immigration came to be a part of the country,
whereas the new comes with the intention of property.
The two year way then returning to the old country and quote, thus reflecting the anxiety not only about immigrants place in the United States,
but also about the United States itself, as noted by a particular Gaute Gordon.
This nostalgia about past immigration was partially nostalgia for the pastoral well.
The suspicion of new immigration was partially suspicion of urbanisation and industrialisation with which immigration had become closely associated.
The National Centre for Past Immigration served at least two political purposes.
Restrictions argued that restrictionists argued that new immigrants would never fully assimilate and therefore should be excluded.
While many progress has maintained, assimilation was difficult but required an aggressive programme of Americanisation.
According to the founding objectives of Holehouse,
a national collective identity had to be just that collected and shared amongst its ever shifting constituents.
Adams and her co-workers struggled to develop strategies that simultaneously embrace the past,
with the present supporting the sharing of different traditions. Yet working towards the Malaysian establishment,
the Labour Museum in 1981 sought to ensure an intergenerational validation of labour
and craft that contributed to the collective national identity of immigrant.
As worker in 20 years a whole house, Adam describes the purpose of the museum as a means to connect intergenerational immigrants,
validating each through the mutual respect of Labour and its historic representation.
She specifically speaks to the difficulty of establishing genuine relations with the Italian women,
whom she reads as homesick and experiencing alienation with their assimilated children.
Adams believed that a dramatic representation could build a bridge between American and
European experiences in such a wise as to give them more meaning and a sense of relation in,
quote, conceiving a historic sequence. Adam selected participants from Syria, Greece, Italy, Russian and Irish cultures whose efforts, quote,
enabled that even the most casual observer to see that there was no break in orderly evolution.
The industry developed similarly and peacefully, heedless of differences in language, religion and political experiences.
And her positioning of industry as a common denominator and cultural equaliser reflects the ideology
of a labour movement that fused work with morality and advocacy for humane working conditions.
Adams imagined that understanding and that industry with emerged from these ancient crafts,
spinning and weaving would validate the contemporary experience of sweatshop
workers and by informing the mind of the finished product and its history.
Adams imagined that the workers quote, daily life is lifted from drudgery to one of self-conscious activity,
and her pleasure in the intelligence is registered in her product. Yet the voice and experience of those who talk demonstrated and represented these
crafts was not incorporated into the contemporary discourse about the museum.
Instead, the privilege social work, social workers of Holehouse, quote, often spoke about and for and of their immigrant neighbours.
In doing so, flattened the specificity of their neighbours national identity in favour of emphasising diversity.
The Labour Museum served as pedagogy not only teaching generation relations,
but also artisan skills that were rendered obsolete by the industrial economy in Chicago.
In her study of the gendered and racialized rhetoric of the Labour Museum,
scholar Leon Malinovsky observes that quote, At the same time the museum performed this teaching function.
It also objectified immigrant artisans and their cultural artefacts by rescrubbing older neighbourhood artisans as
outside the contemporary moment by placing them and their labour prior to the present present industrial conditions,
neighbourhood women were figured as objects of display through photographs caption to suggest that they are
representations of different kinds of foreign womanhood situating of where and how these portraits were experienced.
Further reveals Adams intentions for this endeavour. Because the American Labour Museum was truly a unique approach.
It was heralded in the press and frequently featured in Holehouse Reports and publications in American magazines,
Hine's photographs accompany the third instalment of Adam's autobiographical notes
that focussed on the Labour Museum as one of the resources of the immigrant.
Unlike other issues, the decorative impositions frame his photographs, emphasising their openness.
The article includes five portraits of women from the Labour Museum, each modelling a different method of spinning and weaving in.
Each photograph has the marquee of the Labour Museum at the top and at the bottom is titled by the subject's ethnicity.
In two of the photographs, Russian woman spinning in Syrian woman spinning depict young women informally attired in their ethnic costume.
Neither look toward the camera and both seem fully absorbed by their respective talents.
The Russian woman is photographed from the side as she sits in a chair working on an upright spinning frame called
a pre made in the wall Gullah region intensively laborious and the skill passed down from mother to daughter.
The traditional spinners transformed raw and bleach flaks into thread that would then be woven
into linen fabric similar to those that she models her clothing consistent upon their skirt,
paired with the gathered on the string shirt with embroidered sleeves and apron, heavily decorated place and also the plucked off lives.
The headscarf was mandatory for women, married women. Her dress is more appropriate for a celebration than a daily domestic task and connotes her
participation in the creation of the archetype of a Russian past seeking elements of authenticity.
Jane Addams requested that, quote, The living workers in the museum,
dressed in their national historic costume and in the formality of her costume, also follows the correct prescriptive behaviour.
Forgetting one's photograph, taken on the occasion of portraiture, necessitated the wearing of one's best and most proper clothing.
I was amongst the means of fashion. The persona, the staging,
the theatrical space that transforms the viewer into a different time and place were also in keeping with the expected role of photography.
And when combined, these elements created a liminal image, one that was fictive yet real,
one that relied on the specificity of an individual to represent a collective racial identity.
Further, through their publication, Hine's photographs into social discourse,
intent on honing viewers ability to identify and discern ethno racial characteristics within the narrative of a foreign past.
The heightened portrait, titled Syrian Woman Spinning, seems especially oriented to the exotic and picturesque.
In a vote about the spinners sits on a rug on the floor against a densely padded woven textile,
in one hand she pulls thread from the spinning wheel and the other she cracks.
Craig Spindle, as in the portrait of a Russian woman, she's elaborately costumed in a manner more befitting for a wedding than a task at hand.
Although the intent of staging may have been to evoke a better intent in the desert,
the photograph includes incongruous details such as the copper pots,
the anchor, the hanging textile and other right, a carved wooden bench with a flounced chintz pillow.
Importantly, these details count call out the fictional trajectory that sought to celebrate the specifics of his Syrian past,
while at the same time replicating the contemporary reality of living through its discrimination.
Because these portraits circulated so widely. They were more accessible than experiencing the Labour Museum in person.
And the true audience of the Labour Museum was not only those who participated,
but rather those who saw it caught a glimpse of the historic industrial order and whose hearts were thrill,
the new sympathy in the pages of magazines. And further to that end, Holehouse generated postcards from Hind's photographic portraits,
making it possible for viewers to share their experiences and link within the language of cultural tourism as postcards.
These portraits shift further into the realm of social interaction that extended the power dynamics of the Labour Museum to the public sphere.
Since its hosting of the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition, Chicagoans had become enamoured with world.
Scholar Robert Rideout calls the exhibition area complex that included postcard production and demonstrated control of foreign bodies,
putting people and their cultures on display. Built public support for national imperialist policies and stabilised the domestic social order.
Further, such displays served as showcases for educating people about the significance of racial differences,
especially for the term and the means and direction of human progress.
In Adams perspective, the progress of technology resulted in the dehumanising sweatshops where workers
lost their sense of self and humanity and by staging portraits of the past.
She hoped to preserve the Knowledge's from different cultures as a form of validation.
Yet the ensuing objectification and sense of superiority from one culture progressing over the other
redescribe the Darwinist politics of the day given animes goals of validating the skills of the past.
Hamilton's images are far more effective and evocative of nostalgia,
suggesting the problems of immigration are of the past and that through the collective and Ragini experience of labour,
we have arrived at a new world order where immigrants become Americans.
And yet is ever so evident. This is not the trajectory of the history of the United States.
There are other histories to write here from the ways that ethnic minorities resisted classification and saw agency through representation.
But that was not my point in considering the wide array of sources in today's presentation.
I wanted to call out the incongruities of a value to looking that was employed to
construct whiteness in order to wrench the viewer out of customary habits of perception.
To witness the dialectical between the verbal and the visual, the intent and the reception.
And to come into consciousness of how our own negotiations of the body politic, especially the constructs of race and ethnicity.
When we look to the ways that the Obamas lent their individual likenesses in service to the collective body politic,
we must be mindful of the conflicts and contradictions inherent within the histories through which we experience representation.
In fact, the experience of the portrait and its history again will become the themes explored in next week's final lecture.
So thank you so very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions and I would love to know one way.
Dr. Noelani, each of us to join the. Well, thank you for your incredible talk.
Amy. When I think about how tricky the label of either progressive or liberal can be,
I really appreciated how you unpack both the helpful and harmful sides of both images and the context in which they appear.
I was wondering. Towards the end of your talk, if you could actually say a little bit more about how you're thinking about the word in Congress?
A. have as a a framework. Because as empowering as the recent Black Lives Matter protests have been, we're also,
at least within the US in the middle of kind of cancel culture kind of moment that has a much more encompassing,
much more absolute reaction to someone's more problematic tendencies are outright racist behaviour.
And so it's interesting to think of in Congress as a way of thinking about that negotiation when it comes to someone like Jane Addams,
who is progressive and an activist in her own time,
but also could be guilty of some of the more problematic tendencies that you explore problematic outcomes for her work.
Be curious to hear you say more about that. Yes. Thank you so much for giving thought to that, Melanie and I.
Absolutely. We need to be attentive to incongruity as a way of thinking about generating rhetorical consciousness
when viewers react to these portraits and how they use them to support social agendas.
It's amazing to me that one artist's work can be used to go pro and against and then somewhere kind of in that in-between space.
And I'm really curious to give for the thought as to, well, what happens when we have these contradictions within ourselves.
Can we denaturalised some of these stereotypical ways of looking and become conscious that we are in fact,
in very much impacted by them, that we've come to accept them and kind of see them as a status quo?
You know, some thinking about these incongruities as a destructive kind of gesture and to kind of
call them up so that eventually we do kind of get to that kind of level of thoughtfulness.
This perspective comes from a literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, who gives a lot of thought to the power of images to wrenches obey.
And it's really kind of one of his key terms from that kind of dust distance measure
to looking that we have used in especially the history of the United States.
I could say just more globally to create these systems that taxonomies and hierarchies.
I wonder if in your own practise, Melanie,
you have experienced this kind of idea of using a text in the incongruous way to likewise tease out some of these intentions.
And I'm thinking about maybe some of your work that you've done on Vivian Horesh who, like Jane Addams,
is this massive figure that accomplishes so much during her lifetime, establishes libraries and the like.
And I'm wondering, like, likewise,
how do you negotiate someone that we want to appreciate but also have to be really mindful of their actions impacting others?
Well, that definitely reminds me of actually one of the questions that will pivot to but it's about the importance of background as
we're navigating some of the choices that individuals made by giving a harsh as someone who absolutely puts her career forward,
who put their activism bore but tended to be a very private person.
That then contributed to some of her erasure.
So one of the things that was trying to negotiate and thinking about the young incongruous aspects of her work,
who she was as an individual, were the people who were influencing her.
And so for her, she was someone who was coming from an environment where there were many black club women who,
as you had described, I think in your first lecture,
the culture of dissemblers was one of the ways in which they navigated the possible threats or the possible missile and
the possible attacks on their character that they relied on kind of keeping their personal lives somewhat private.
And so that seemed to be a very different thing than what Harsha was doing of putting her activism in the building of
collections and making sure that there are the records and the details that can go to support the changing of ideas,
the changing of stereotypes. But it doesn't necessarily align with her own personal practise.
So I think that kind of incongruous, that incongruity rather excuse me, is similar between harsh, but also the other Lybrand that their generation,
where they really believe that the records were what mattered and not necessarily done personal stories.
And so that's kind of interesting when thinking about the role of representation.
It's really interesting to me to think about the idea that there should be records, but they should not be inclusive of one's own self.
Yeah, it feels like on the one hand, when you were talking about the way in which morality enters into these conversations,
like the expectation of shifting the focus away from oneself. But there's a certain point in which you do have to turn it towards you,
which is what this in this conversation about representation ultimately is about, that you have to take control of your own image at a certain point.
And so the idea was, if we can do it through records, if we can do it through print culture,
then that was particularly important around that time period.
Now, my larger project, I compare some of these portraits of immigrants that were generated through Holehouse with actual portraits of Jane Addams.
And it's a really striking difference in terms of her self representation.
Her narration of her autobiography, her conception of Holehouse versus how she sees others,
you know, so there's the incongruities become even more profound.
I imagine she focussed a little bit more on viewing or having people view her individuality,
which isn't necessarily it sounds like the same opportunity that she gave others in representing their tapes.
So one of the questions that was sent and just as a reminder, the torture team has been sending me questions behind the scenes.
So don't forget, you can plug your questions into the YouTube chat box and add earlier that you can do it.
The more likely we'll be able to answer them.
But one of the earlier questions was about Joseph Stellas on background and how that impacted his characterisation of immigrants in the United States.
And I suppose that could also be extended to Lewis Hine.
And the last person. Last name Hamilton. No.
No. Hamilton.
So we know that Joseph Stiller comes to the United States for the first time in 1896, and he is sponsored by his brother, who is a physician.
He comes here not really quite sure what he's going to wind up doing,
but he finds himself really drawn to art and he winds up taking some classes in New York City and really refines his skills.
He actually will at some point forgetting the day that he goes back to Italy and then back and forth.
He's got definitely this kind of trans-Atlantic consciousness of what it's like to travel.
But he's not travelling in the abject poverty that we see depicted in some of his work.
He is interested in what he referred to as types. You know, again,
thinking about walking the city streets of New York and experiencing the different kinds of cultures that we're mixing emerging at the time,
hearing the different languages. And I think that is we can see in these images he's really drawn to the kind of classical old masters style.
Now, if we look at his larger trajectories career, he becomes this phenomenal modernist,
bringing in the language of abstraction and futurism in his later work.
But there is at this point in his approach and subject this really kind of interest in something I think that was of the past.
And I think that that really started to speak to me as I was thinking about all of these discourses around modernity.
Right. And urbanisation and everything's shifting and changing. Why is it that he chooses this aesthetic to render these specific people?
And so that's kind of the thing, the very beginning part,
where I started to think about this concept of nostalgia and trying to look at people in that lens.
And in that way, it creates a sense of distance and you don't have to feel quite so anxious about it.
You know, you can say, oh, that's not really part of art that's over.
We're now, you know, a mixing bowl of nations and it becomes kind of celebratory in that way for the other artists.
Lewis Hine's born in the United States, as was North Hamilton.
So I don't think that they negotiated in that same way, but they all had interactions around Holehouse, which can do.
It was this phenomenal centre of possibilities for so many people, both in terms of art classes and language classes,
American citizenship, but also, honestly, things like health care and kindergarten.
It really supported a lot of their neighbours and we should obviously appreciate and recognise that.
So one of the other questions from one of the viewers was about your description
of Hamilton's translation of Lewis hind's images from one medium into another.
They found a very fascinating. And so she asked the questioner or the viewer, ask the question,
do we find people translating art into other mediums for progressive purposes in this period or even if the racist,
stereotypical or lazy images recasts for the purpose of revealing the primary works, inherent biases?
That would be a very challenging question to answer.
Overall, overall, because I think I feel like I've got some competing information to work through it.
Definitely we've got technology.
We'll think about in terms of publications and how publications were utilising the advent of photography have tool printing,
but also utilising the still continuing some wood engraving and wood etchings.
Even Jacob Greeces publication of How the other half lives had some of his photographs translated into a wood engraving.
So it's it's it's almost kind of like there's the necessity of having to do it.
But then you also have to think about what those translations have effect and whether or not the individuals who were acting as
translators were trying to be true to the source or if they were trying to embellish and consider a different point of view.
And I think between HINH and Hamilton, we see Hamilton really kind of taking this a bit further.
And in the book, she not only worked with the photographs of Lewis Hine,
I also talk about how she works with the photographs of well as Crooklyn, and in that case in Hamilton was really a master printmaker.
So she really worked through etching, engraving and lithography.
And in this case, she does a whole series of images that while it's Kirkland takes of Gypsy children at Holehouse and she translates them.
And in her translations of the orthography, the children really start to bear these markers of exaggerated physiognomy.
Their countenances become very dark and they emerge from the dark.
They're surrounded by swirling dark lines. They're really quite vivid.
So in this case, you really get a sense that she kind of vilifies these children and further embellishes on the tropes around Roma culture.
So out of curiosity, I was wondering,
as you were describing one of the things that you had separated about this lecture as being different from the others.
Is that one was a focus on accurate community creating images for and by themselves or of themselves.
But for this one, it was really a focus of how other people saw immigrant groups.
So is there a way you could say a little bit more about what what might have been
some of the efforts at self representation within these immigrant groups or how?
Well, for sure that that is absolutely what is happening here.
And there's such a wide array of scholars who have addressed this and thinking, again, as I cited and I Pilger Gordon's work to Jennifer,
to the Ormeau, my our colleague, Dominic Pacyga, there's also a really exciting new work by sheep who waying researching photographer Frank.
That's her art. There's lots of room to expand here. But for this project,
I wanted to pivot here because I wanted to think about how the white gaze was building itself
in opposition to the development of black subjectivity through the discourse of othering,
using differences in ethnicity to buffer and to redescribe their own position of superiority.
And it's not just enough to say that there is a counter, but rather in order to dismantle.
I think that we have to consider the disjunctions and contradictions that have informed our way of looking in thinking.
And when I'm hoping that this does within the book itself is that it sets up
then for us to think about experiencing the portraiture in an interracial way.
And we're going to be looking at next week a series of portrait painted portraits that were honorific,
that tour the United States for more than 10 years and that were intended to be seen by everybody together.
And we'll see images of people looking together, posing for photographs, showing themselves to be interracial and progressive.
There will be some critique of that, too, don't worry.
But one of the questions from the audience was about the conflation of race and ethnicity playing out in politics in this period.
And so it's interesting to hear you think about the creation of that merged
collective national identity at a moment when you see that Tenjin or that hierarchy,
like, really coming in to re or really coming in to play in this moment.
So the question is. So the question is, how are.
How might. How might you describe a little bit more or that might be the topic of the next lecture?
What that conflation is doing of race and ethnicity when it comes to shaping the politics or to what extent?
At the beginning, you were talking about immigration history as being part of that debate.
Well, for sure. So doing this time period, we see quite a shift in immigration legislation.
Again, initial bands to moving toward absolute quotas.
And we also see the kind of militarisation of Ellis Island, both in terms of deportation and policing of immigrant bodies there.
So I think that that's one of the things that certainly comes to mind in terms of an ethnic racial experience.
And then imagine, again, kind of coming into the country and trying to make one's own with the Cirilli, having support systems and accessibility.
I think that those are some of the elements that we can see, both in terms of United States history and in terms of personal experiences,
diaries and the like in letters home chronicling what were those personal narratives experienced.
And then again, to think about those experiences happening and overlaying African-Americans,
I think especially about that horrific racist cartoon that Thompson listed,
where you see, again, both African-Americans and Irish Americans being denied the right to vote.
They know that they are not fit to be citizens. They think that this thing just reflects a lot of the very early Republican.
And they don't mean party. I mean, the idea the republic values when we have a naturalisation act passed in 1790 that says,
you know, the only people who are fit to be U.S. citizens have to be, you know, free white people.
That is the fact that that's named in the very beginning. It never ships really, you know.
And again, the question is, how did you become free? Who is the person who freed you?
Likewise. What is their racial designation? It's so embedded in how our country has been formed and how we think of ourselves
and even the tactics and the ways in which people are fighting similar battles.
In this sense, by going back to the earlier question about how different stereotypes are, how different images have been recast,
like you absolutely say the same thing with an African-American history where there is an awareness that people are taking on certain stereotypes.
And one of the first things that came to mind is something like colourants Dunbar as we wear the mask, which is a wee earlier.
But the poem acknowledges that there are all of these blackface images with the giant smile,
but it doesn't necessarily align with the reality of the black experience.
So that kind of how do we manoeuvre some of these changes that are solidifying
these racial categories is very much apparent within within black history.
Melanie, how about with your own experience in research,
do you have a point of overlap between European immigrants and African-Americans during that really 20th century?
I only tangentially somewhat touch upon it, but because it's within the progressive era so late 19th to early 20th century,
librarians were very much within the same group as social workers who are trying to figure out how their work can be best used,
especially to marginalised communities.
And so with librarians, they were also trying to find ways to politicise their work or to make sure that their voices are represented within politics.
So when I look at the creation of special Negro collections,
they're very similar to the special collections that were created at branches in predominately immigrant communities.
And so what you were saying before about settlement houses and the ways in which they needed to be everything for a particular community,
it's very similar to how libraries operate. So I think that awareness of how you best serve the community,
how you document one's history as evidence of all the things that would contradict the stereotypes,
the misinformation about a group is very much shared within within my work to the
extent that I've looked into immigrant branches that served immigrant communities.
So there's one other question. We're very close to the end, but I at least wanted to be able to touch upon, which is about the role of public art.
And so there have been a number of questions.
That's anything from whether or not there has been the same reaction when it comes to visual art, as we see with sculpture,
when it comes to either the rejection or the removal of certain pieces of art or what you think that we should do about the recent statue.
I think it's the Colston's statue that was taken down.
So how you're thinking about the role of image right now in this moment, especially when it comes to public art?
Well, this is definitely a weighty question, and I would refer everybody to money.
One of my favourite scholars, Renee Aitor, who's done substantive work on this.
And again, she is the expert. But I think one of the things that comes to mind immediately, especially since you mentioned the Coulston,
which was pulled down in Bristol just the other day as part of a support district for Black Lives Matter,
is that it reminds us how powerful images and representations are and that where we have
these bodies represented in our public sphere that are not representative of our values,
of our character, of how we want to see ourselves,
then they need to be removed or they need to be replaced and they need to have an evolving possibility.
One of the things I know in Chicago we both share is the question of representation of events.
You know, where is the honorific sculpture where we give tribute to her.
Now, we do have a monument to Gwendolyn Brooks. Excellent.
Let's keep going.
You know, I mean, there are so many people that we should honour and recognise within our civic spaces that unfortunately have not been memorialised.
And it goes, again, kind of back to your work of what's in the archive and what's not.
You know, where do we see it? Where do we don't?
I think the removal of statues here in Oxford also has a very significant history in the activist student movement.
Rhodes must fall. In fact, actually,
tomorrow there will be a protest in front of the Rhodes Scholar sculpture that sits atop one of the buildings here named in his honour.
And as you know, that he supported apartheid and imperialism.
Those are values that students at the university do not want to be associated with anymore.
And so you can understand that with good cause. So it seems like an ongoing conversation that will hopefully have some very productive outcomes to it.
So it looks like we are just about out of time. So thank you so much for sending in your wonderful questions for Amy.
We're sorry that we were unable to answer them all. We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Amy for her very engaging and thought provoking
lecture this evening and to the torch team for hosting tonight and making this series possible.
Thank you also to all the viewers at home for watching as well. Please join us for next week's event,
the fourth and final instalment of the terror lecture series with Amy Mooney on Monday, June 15th at five p.m. U.K. time.
Next time, Amy will be joined by Jeffrey Batching,
who holds the professorship of the History of Art in the Department of History of Art and the Faculty of History at Oxford University.
We hope you'll be able to join us again at that time. Thank you again for watching.