Hello, everyone, 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 Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration,
understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for both national and international audiences.
In collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College,
the foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art.
This year, the terror visiting professor is Emily C. Burns.
My name is Jeff Bachem, and I am the head of the history of art department at the University of Oxford.
Our thanks go to the Terra Foundation and to torch the hosting the series as part of their online events in the Humanities Cultural Programme.
One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Throughout this evening's lecture, if you have any questions, please feel free to type them in the YouTube chat box below,
and we will do our best to answer as many of them as part of the session.
We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and moderated by Professor James Small's.
Dr. James Smalls is professor and chair of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Smalls holds degrees from UCLA in ethnic arts and in art history, is taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Paris.
His work as an art historian focuses on the intersections of race,
gender and queer sexuality in the arts and visual culture of the 19th century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora.
He's the author of Homosexuality and Art from 2003 and the Homo Erotic Photography of Carl went back to public face private thoughts from 2006.
He's also published essays in journals like American Art, the text art journal Criticism and Freeze magazine.
Particularly foundational for the theme of this lecture, Smalls essays racial antics in late 19th century French art and popular culture,
which appeared in the anthology Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century.
Published in 2014 and Race a spectacle in late 19th century French art and popular culture, which was published in French Historical Studies in 2003.
Smalls is currently completing a book entitled For Benga.
African News of Modernism. It's my absolute pleasure to welcome James this evening, and now James will hand over to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for that wonderful introduction.
It is great to be here today. And a virtual welcome to those who are watching.
It is my pleasure to introduce Emily Burns.
Emily is an Associate Professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar of transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 2018, she published Transnational Frontiers the American West in France with the University of Oklahoma Press,
and has a forthcoming anthology co-edited with Alice M. Rudy Price,
titled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts to be published with Rutledge Rutledge Press.
During her tenure as the Tara Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the
Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow at worst,
her college professor Burns is completing her book manuscript from which today's talk comes.
And that manuscript is entitled Performing Innocence, Cultural Belated Ness and US Art.
In fact, the Seek the Paris. So, Emily, please take it away.
In case so much, James. And thank you, Jeff, as well for the introductions.
Thank you to everyone for joining us today. I also want to thank the archivists who have very generously scanned primary source
material for me during the COVID era and that have really enabled this project to grow,
especially from the Anacostia Community Museum, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Butler Library at Columbia,
the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library, the Ohio History Connexion and the University of Illinois Archives.
All of this effort has supported this research in a time of so many closures.
Competing constructions of black USA identities were performed in front of Sierra Club Paris, one paradigm was framed by blackface minstrel shows,
which circulated caricatures of blackness that when they were regularly held by one of the U.S. artists clubs in Paris as photographed at left.
The other, curated by black intellectuals for the Palace of the Social Economy in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 9500
countered primitive rising stereotypes with narratives of African American progress seen in the display at right,
as this talk will argue in spite of these polarised narratives.
These two performances of black US identities in Paris both participated in and bolstered the larger,
ongoing transnational discourse that imagined and constructed ideas of U.S. naivety,
cultural innocence and relatedness that I'm framing in this lecture series.
Both of these displays centred on immaturity, but in distinct terms and with different goals.
Both affirm theories of social evolution, though in different ways between relatedness and progress.
Race operated as a fulcrum for performances of U.S. cultural innocence in Paris and these opposing frames of blackness
as primitive on the one hand and as incipient on the other operated as what I think of as an innocence entanglements.
This talk will proceed in four parts.
I will share new research about minstrelsy in the U.S. artist colony in Paris and contextualise the practise against the backdrop
of French colonialism with its own mass culture images that we're simultaneously imagining Black Africans as primitives.
The material from these first two sections is highly offensive and racist,
and I share it in this public setting to critique it as I analyse how it operated in the US colony in Paris to
forward ideas of a US primitive identity and also think through how it linked with French visual culture itself,
using race to build a structure of difference. As James Smalls, Robin Mitchell, Tyler Stovall, Marcus Bruce and others have argued,
I will briefly consider how African American artists intersected with these discourses in Paris and then turn
to the exhibit of American Negroes in nineteen hundred with its revising tropes of youth and emergent culture.
Ending with a discussion of two black US women in Paris who took up these conversations about primitivism and progress.
Newspaper reports, documents, minstrel shows at the American Art Association of Paris annually from 1894 to 1899 and by
annually from 19 one to 19 07 arising in the 1830s and circulating throughout the century.
The fraught caricature of African-Americans presented in blackface minstrel shows entailed
white performers darkening their flesh with burnt cork or polish paired with white,
wide, bright red lips drawn around their mouths while singing and dancing to minstrel songs.
These shows were presented first in the club headquarters in Montparnasse and then in several theatres nearby and across Paris,
including the Negro Theatre, the Theatre Montparnasse and the theatre.
Marry Me Here photographed, noting the accent is not the full length performances of what Smalls has productively labelled.
Quote racial antics included multiple acts, pairing songs and comic skits.
In keeping with typical minstrel show structure, a minstrel show in 19 of three centred around plantation melodies,
a frequent theme that problematically presented plantation life as though idyllic.
These spectacles were organised to earn money for the club's activities and facilities,
which included a clubhouse featuring frequent exhibitions and social events for Anglo artists in Paris.
On December 10th, 1898, the ape minstrel show was performed at the Nouveau Theatre on the block in the 9th arrondissement,
which had a capacity of about 1000 viewers.
This was also the day the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain on the key d'orsay,
which ended the war of 1898 and established the United States first overseas colonial possessions.
The Paris edition of the New York Herald reported that Senator Cushman Kellogg Davis from Minnesota participated in both events,
although the paper also reported that the negotiations went late into that evening.
So perhaps Davis did not make the show by eight 8:45 as intended.
Yet this concurrence between the minstrel shows projections of black evolutionary delay and belated ness and
rising imperialist discourse that privileged white governments in building the US empire is suggestive.
While inscribing a race hierarchy that justified U.S. expansion,
minstrelsy as antics also deflected attention away from that power grab, which was largely unpopular in France.
Reports about the minstrel show offered details about the show's length of five hours
and the numbers of participants 50 to 60 young men as performers on this occasion.
U.S. architecture students dominated the show, joined by dozens of students working in painting, drawing and sculpture.
Not all were from the United States.
Performers included two Australian painters a British illustrator and immigrants long resident in the United States,
although originally from Italy and Germany.
The show featured newly published minstrel songs from printed sheet music with both caricature photographs of blackface performers,
which you can see at left, and exaggerated drawn caricatures of black figures that you can see right.
The show featured. Sorry, I went back alone, French born U.S. architect Eduard Freres Co.,
then training at the Accordé Bazaar under Viktor Lallu, performed the song I Don't Like No Cheap Man.
While the song has a male narrator, the frequent quoting of a Mr. Simpson invited company as a performer to adopt gender bending to other architecture
students who knew each other at Columbia before moving to Paris were at the centre of this performance.
Kenneth McKenzie Murchison from New York played Mr. Tambo and William G toshow from Kentucky played Mr. Bones.
Tasha presented the warmest baby in the bunch, the Ethiopian ditty that you see the sheet music for on the right by George Cohen.
While Murchison performed to keep away from Emmeline by John Stromberg and Harry B. sent the sheet,
music reinforces the racist caricatures exported into the club's headquarters and Paris theatres through lyrics and music.
The music plays on exaggeration. The songs have dramatic narrative lyrics, often recited or sung with imagined and caricatured dialect.
Upbeat tones that linger in the ear and they are speedily paced.
And right now on the chat screen, my torch colleagues will offer a link to a modern recording of I don't like no cheap man.
If you're interested to listen later to hear one of the racist soundscapes that I'm working to analyse in my larger chapter,
musicologist Matthew Morrison has used the term black sound, which he defines as the quotes,
legacy's sounds and movements of African-American bodies both real and imagined, which blackface performance and popular entertainments were based,
thinking of such displays as scripts and what he calls an embodied production of sound.
Morrison notes that the characteristic quote simplicity,
decisiveness and catchiness of minstrel songs became mapped onto an ontology of blackness as simple and thereby not equal to its white counterparts.
Historian Saadia Hartman concurs that minstrelsy falsely quotes constituted the African as childish and primitive.
This translation between simple jingle and simple culture shaped these US projections in Paris, while blackface prevailed in these performances.
It was occasionally mingled with red face.
In April 1895, one number featured a quote Wild Red Indian dance by an art student who assumed the name man afraid of soap.
Students sometimes donned such costumes and make up for the famous Wildcats catch in the Latin Quarter.
In 1955, the minstrel show coincided with Buffalo Bills Wild West on the Qamdo Mars.
In April, advertisements appeared in the newspaper side by side,
as you see here in dialogue with theories of evolution lead late 19th century anthropological discourse declared both black and indigenous cultures,
as at an earlier state in development than white cultures.
By foregrounding associations with these quote unquote stereotypically primitive races,
the U.S. colony in Paris manipulated French perceptions of U.S. character and culture.
A 1987 article about U.S. expatriates in Paris printed this photograph the only one I've found so far related to these clubs.
Labelled far from the old folks at home, the label references another popular minstrel song likely performed at the events,
but takes on added resonance in the literal distance of the U.S. artists from their homes.
The performers sit on the ground at centre, some in blackface with uniform deep black,
creating a singular typology of blackness, a figure to the right of centre and I'll bring my cursor there.
Here wears a mask shaped as a cylinder with thick white outlined eyes and projections
emerging from the mask that make the figure appear other than human tuxedo clad white men.
Either club members in the chorus or attendees build a literal hierarchy as they tower over the blackface figures.
My ongoing research on this organisation has identified about 1000 members between 1890 and 1914,
with membership from across the United States, although mostly from the eastern seaboard, north and south alike.
An article in 1981 numbered AIP membership at 400 that year.
Documents of the minstrel show records I've collected show about 100 individuals performing,
and I offer a list of artists I've been able to identify based on these records.
Although a lot of the names are lost in racist pseudonyms, most of the artists performers were operating as amateurs,
producing an effect that doubles the construct of a projected US primitivism in Paris.
Handbooks targeting these amateur minstrels, published in the 1890s, might have shaped the artist's engagement with the genre.
This implied and ironically trained amateurism extended to projections about
American art as reviewers explicitly linked the shows with American art practise.
In 1895, one paper reported on a piece in the minstrel show called the quote Dark Town Art Academy.
One viewer of the 1898 show also thought that the artists had written the songs that they performed,
interpreting those as an indicator of the quote versatility and ingenuity of these young American students,
as the New York Herald's Paris Edition declared in 1898.
Quote Those who had come prepared to be lenient to the young amateurs went away saying, Oh, these young fellows can do anything.
This tension between amateur and professional and the triumph of amateur frames,
the operations of the minstrel shows and the reception linking NAFTA and its possibilities with U.S. art practise in Paris.
The shows operated as social events.
In 1895, the American Register announced quote The American colony turned out in full force to witness the entertainment.
In 1898, General Horace Porter and Sir Edmund Monson, who were then the U.S. and British ambassadors to France, attended the show.
Other attendees were members of the Paris based art world, such as Jean Charles Kazan and Mary Cezanne and Jean Paul Lawrence,
who taught some of the U.S. painters in Paris, including Henry, also a tenor in the 1890s.
The interwoven relationship between U.S. businessmen in Paris who funded the AP is most
clear in the list of men who acted as the welcoming committee for the 1983 minstrel show,
which was also held at the Nuvo Theatre.
These included Percy Peck Statue of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, Sidney White's hat exporter Charles F. Green of Spalding and Co. Jewellers.
Francis Kimball and George, a US timer of shipping and export companies.
And Herman and John Hargis, who were both U.S. bankers bankrolling the activities of the club.
In 1983, the American register touted quote The house was crowded with elegantly dressed Americans and others,
and there was an impressive display of jewels. This event reverberated back to the United States, making news in Philadelphia and Chicago.
So Black Face participated not only in the construction of a U.S. artist's colony,
but also shaped the identity of the wider colony in Paris and also back at home.
These events were not singular aberrations. Rather, they were a sustained and repeated part of the organisation's programme.
The collective acts reaffirmed an exclusive white collective U.S. culture by
establishing their own authority to undertake such race performance as cultural studies.
Scholar Eric Lott argues minstrelsy reveals as much about dialectic definitions of whiteness as it does
about blackness in what he defines as a quote simultaneous drying up and crossing of racial boundaries.
Lott sees minstrelsy as quote dipping into Bohemia,
which parallels how many U.S. artists navigated Parisian culture, which we were talking about next week.
And indeed, by playing primitive in blackface. U.S. artists shared the Puritan gravity that we were talking about last week,
using race performance to transgress that identity while capitalising on ideas of U.S. cultural innocence of a different sort in Paris.
Likewise, the gender bending I noted earlier enabled white male U.S. art students to acceptably and
temporarily break out of social norms as performing in blackface redefined whiteness,
playing as female or as an effeminate dandy, reinvigorated masculinity as some minstrels characters especially,
said Coon, parody the black dandy to denigrate black communities desires for social mobility.
The performance of these figures in France echoes U.S. artists cultural anxieties about their own hopes for upward mobility in the French art world.
When presented in Paris, as one newspaper declared quote such as Only Americans can produce blackface,
exported men and women constructions of U.S. culture. As exotic and for foreign audiences.
But these were not the first minstrel shows in Paris,
as Smalls has traced minstrelsy arrived in France first by the United Kingdom in the 1840s, with U.S. performers arriving in the late 1850s.
In 1859, Le Monde illustrator reproduced a page of engravings related to a minstrel show, then in Paris.
The scene is framed by two caricatured black poutine, one with exaggerated lips and nose,
and the other with dense, curly hair carrying a banner to announce a LaBeouf American.
We're kind of comedic clowns.
A U.S. flag drapes at left over a box of vignettes, which include a scene of nine musicians seated in a semi-circle at top.
And this is the standard minstrel stage structure.
Two images of dancing figures flanking a central vignettes and four figures playing stodgy puritans at the bottom at centre.
A figure with his face in profile to reveal exaggerated physiognomy plays the banjo.
Neither his body nor his instrument are contained within the frame.
His feet project outward towards the viewer and billow toward the Puritans, and the banjo overlaps the ongoing cakewalk at right.
This juxtaposition of Puritan and blackface constructions reinforces the differences between these identity performances,
though as between last week and this,
the US community in Paris adopted both to construct narratives of cultural uniqueness through fraught and problematic tropes of innocence.
Smalls has can contextualised blackface in Third Republic, France,
when it became particularly popular as a tool to frame anxieties about Frenchness and xenophobia.
He describes these quote visual shenanigans of racialized spectacle as tools to render otherness
invisible minstrelsy operated in tandem with colonialism by exercising the black body in France,
where, as Mitchell has recently argued, quote blacks could not and should not be a part of the French body politic.
A system of exclusion was built as Beth Gordon, Janine Lewicki,
Dana Hale and many others have argued French imperial projects designs narratives of blacks from Africa as primitives which justified colonialism.
And I show you here a map of French West Africa. By 1914, the Dahomey Kingdom, heir to the oil empire, had been annexed as a French colony in 1894.
In the 1890s to hominins were exhibited in Paris in human zoos like the Jordan to act in a
touchstone where Parisians would observe so-called primitive people to build a sense of difference.
A colonial village with two hominins on display in traditional dress was constructed at the Universal Exposition in nineteen hundred.
And that's what I showed you in these two stereo views, and the space featured rustic, straw roofed huts, roughly stucco,
wood architecture and other elements of a perceived primitive culture to justify French colonial oversights.
Primitive East caricatures based on minstrelsy circulated perniciously in French visual culture in evolutionary narratives applied to human society.
The cakewalk, for example, became a symbol, as Gordon argues of quote, black regressive traits.
The reader reproduced this caricature by George Edward that literally says this reversion
with the title quote how the Parisian insists on demonstrating that we descend from the ape.
The caricature traces three pairs performing the cakewalk, leaning their bodies backward while prancing forward white figures that left
black or black face figures at centre and monkeys at right there curled tails,
echoing the ribbon shape, edging the box.
The image implies a social evolution that places white copy of the dance farther along in progress from the animal forms than the black figures.
Ideas of the cake walk as evolutionary regression framed the perceptions of Americans as primitive when they performed in blackface.
Other minstrel shows in Paris likely propelled U.S. artists in the AP to host their own.
They would have observed that such displays had currency in bohemian Paris and with elite audiences.
And here I show you a painting other minstrel show by Jean-Francois Afellay that James Smalls has written about at length,
painted in 1887, presenting black figures as curiosities for French observers overlapping with.
Practises of race display in the human zoos, the performers are carefully confined in a space between the audience, in the background and the viewer.
And colour operates suggestively. Most of the viewers are white and wear white,
and the ground separating the performers from the viewers is literally ensconced in strokes of whiteness,
while roughly renders ambiguous whether these are black or blackface performers, illustrating how,
as Smalls argues, quote, blackness becomes a floating signifier a malleable trope in Paris.
The AP photograph renders the blackface explicit.
Here, the pairing of white tuxedo clad and blackface figures on stage blurs the boundaries that Raphael polices.
Yet, as in Rafales painting, we remain distanced from the figures on the stage.
Here, with a blinding reflection of whiteness reflecting on the wood in the context of popular performance in France,
like the one Rafaela relates French viewers primitive IST, I was primed to receive blackface as a claim to primaeval identity.
How did African-American artists entry into Paris intervene in these cultural conversations?
African-Americans were generally not welcomed at the U.S. artists clubs in Paris vote work.
Fuller was denied admission to her prearranged lodgings at the American Girls Club in autumn 1899 by the director, Miss Actorly,
whom the artist recalled in a later interview in a transcript to which I'm grateful to Renee Ater for sharing with me.
I actually told her quote I would hate to see you ill treated, discriminated against,
and there are southern girls here in the club and they may not show you welcome end quote.
Fuller did exhibit at the clubs in 19 02 and showed her dynamic sculpture The Wretched at the salon of the Societe Nacional de Bozak in 19 03.
William A. Harper, whose royal French landscape is at rights, was denied membership at the AP in 1985, when 13 club members objected to his inclusion.
Yet Tanner was a member of the AP from the summer of 1890 to a photograph from his papers
depicts him seated amongst fellow club members in the garden in front of the AP's first site.
And he's located here labelled labelled himself as Fig. five.
He exhibited at least 15 times between 1896 and 1922 and was a staple in reports on AARP activities and events.
Unsurprisingly, he does not appear to have attended the minstrel shows that we might imagine them
to have been almost inescapable at the club through the racist sheet music,
the soundscape of racial antics in the rehearsals of the offensive lyrics and jarring tones of the music
echoing in the club quarters attached to the artist who was fastidiously seeking equality in France.
Several scholars working on blackface and music have noted a recurrent quote terror that
minstrelsy and cited for African-Americans as it restaged white mastery even after emancipation.
Tanner's paintings of the period, like Daniel in the Lion's Den, which he exhibited at the Salon des artist Forcé in 1896,
inflect biblical stories that draw on torments and that reveal a sense of self and interiority.
Art historians Dewey Moseby and Maurice Frank Woods have read Daniel as an extension of Tanner himself,
adding minstrelsy to other injustices imposed on the artist.
One imagines how the growling sounds from the prowling lions pervade an echo in the basement prison like the echoes of minstrel songs.
Daniel offers a spiritual quietude and interiority that counters the noisy antics of minstrelsy in the same way Tanner's faith,
work ethic and imaginative art practise supersede the racist structures.
He navigated a metaphorical den of hungry lions.
There is a thickness to the painted surface,
and in the end you can see the kind of texture and impasto in the image on the left protective and insulating paints,
building and impenetrability in response to the thick club harshness of the Paris art world around him.
Exhibited again at the Palais de Bazaar at the Exposition in 19:00, Daniel in the Lion's den won a gold medal there.
Tanner's painting offered a bookend to the exhibit of American Negroes in the Palace of Social Economy,
which was just a ten minute walk from the Grand Palais.
And on the map on the screen, Ive starred where Tanner's painting was and where the exhibition were now going to talk about was in.
Stalled. This exhibition intercepted the stereotypes of blackness built both by the U.S. colony and
by French exotic science displays in Paris with a small congressional budget of $15000.
It was organised over a five year or five month period by Thomas Callaway,
W.E.B. Dubois and Daniel Murray to be placed amongst sociological studies and humanitarian projects.
It comprised about one quarter of the display, and you can see the layout of the room at the rate with boxes around this exhibition,
and it was actually in the same room as the equitable life insurance company display bring,
likely bringing in a piece for Pixar to whom I mentioned earlier as involved with the minstrel shows.
The exhibit of American Negroes inhabited only a 12 square, 12 foot square space, with a few adri adjacent to the trains.
But the exhibit offered a massive array of well-organised material.
Its linear structure, order and balance immediately counters the sloppy and unwieldy caricature of
African-Americans built by minstrelsy by refusing to define blackness in any singular way.
It revealed the limitations of the stereotype.
Further, its manifold representations of complex ideas of blackness could not be contained by a single photograph.
Another photograph looking towards the entrance of the room just to the right of the exhibition includes bookcases Jim pointing out here,
which I think part of the exhibit and then in the photograph on the right's looking down the hallway.
The image only hints at these cases to the left, but in here there were small dioramas that I'll talk about later, which were placed.
In addition, many parts of the exhibition, especially photographs and written texts,
were in bound volumes that aren't captured in the renderings of the space.
Although all or almost all are extant in the Library of Congress collections, together, the display builds a cumulative intermediate set of arguments,
with material compiled from black colleges, boarding schools and businesses, and it won a grand prise medal as well as 15 individual medals.
Scholars in the history of photography and in African-American studies including Deborah Willis,
David Levering Lewis, Mabel Wilson, Sean Michelle Smith,
Laura Wexler, Judith Davidoff and many others have shown that the exhibits accumulated arguments operated on multiple visual and discursive levels.
The multivalent display did not have a unified message.
For instance, ideological directives from black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington and Dubois do not align,
and there are other competing threads. I'm happy to talk through with you in the Q&A.
Yet many of these distinct threads cohere in their shared attempts to counter the caricatures of blackface and of primitivism,
as one reviewer put it to quote correct erroneous ideas which may have gained currency
unquote and in their articulation of their own cultural use in order to do so.
The concept of the new Negro, which emerged in this period and became codified in the 1920s, drew attention to the idea of burgeoning culture.
Calloway's ideas emphasised the display of African-American development and possibilities,
and he summarises the exhibition's attention to and here again, I quote from him.
Advancement made with regard to domestic and educational life as a result of the newborn aspirations of the race to boys.
Claims about the role of candidness in the exhibition also reinforce these ideas.
He summarised it as a quote Honest,
straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people picturing their lives and developments without apology or gloss and above all, made by themselves.
This language calloway's advancement and newborn aspirations and Dubois is honest,
straightforward without apology or gloss underscore narratives of birth,
youth, incipient culture, directness and unmediated imagery that paralleled the South projections in the mostly white U.S. colony in Paris.
These ideas echo comments from contemporaries I shared with you at the first lecture, such as from Gilbert Parker,
who claimed in 1891 that Americans as a whole see quote without the intervening veil of
convention and tradition the narratives the exhibition proposed about African American culture,
its progress, fraternity and origin story.
Drew on characteristics that paralleled and ultimately fuelled wider cultural projections of the U.S. colony in Paris.
So even as they're countering stereotypes of minstrel shows,
as Smith observes quote disrupting centralised narratives that depicted people of colour as the uncivilised infants of human evolution.
Many images traded in the same myths of U.S. culture as useful and in progress that were already circulating in France.
Within the persuasive space of the display. Images, charts and texts fostered the useful trajectory of black culture in the reconstruction era,
arguing for a parallel reversal from the liability of relatedness to the asset of being new information and looking to the future.
This narrative of directness of origins and incipient both subtly and overtly weaves through many of the objects on display.
One of the sociological charts from the Atlantic University uses the colour black to denote percentage
of enslavement and green as symbolic of freedom to highlight the moment of 1865 as a key origin point.
Many parts of the display focussed on literacy and writing as a symbol of budding African-American education and cultural production.
For instance, another chart highlighted the decline of the literacy following emancipation.
Librarian of Congress Daniel Murray made a pamphlet listing 14 known books published by African-American authors,
and two hundred examples were on view in the exhibition. And one reviewer speaking in particular about this part of the display noted that the display
revealed how quote a people without a country and without favour undertook a literary practise,
and this reviewer's tone suggests this idea again of culture information writing of literature published following emancipation.
The author described it as the quote first literary utterance of the Negro, who has been to school.
It is also prophetic of what may be expected.
It is the promise that authorship of the most interesting and valuable kind will develop in the course of the progressive life of the race.
End quote. Such literacy was underscored in the photograph of the Reading Nurse by Thomas Askew that I showed you last week,
and I'll show you some other photographs.
And as we go through them, think about the kind of array of variation in skin tone across the photographs itself,
a counter to the singularity of blackface.
The exhibition included a set of framed mastheads of Black owned newspapers, a charts and photographs of the planets in Richmond, Virginia,
being assembled and printed as ways to articulate burgeoning control over representation to many of the photographs in a
Atlanta series depict young children in one three barefoot boys sit or lean against a faux rock in a portrait studio,
as though pausing from play in a portrait of a young girl at writes.
Askew places her between two sculptures and holding an oversized picture book that seems to depict stone architecture.
She is pensive, and her social mobility is implied by her curiosity and the sumptuous fabrics which flank her.
This focus on children underscored a projection of metaphorical cultural use, but in culture also emerged in representations of tutelage,
such as in the transmission of knowledge in a piano lesson imagined in a wealthy black parlour at Left,
an echo of Turner's paintings of instruction from the 1890s, to which we'll turn our attention next week.
Some of Frances Benjamin Johnston photographs from the Hampton School also use construction metaphorically to signal progress in this one.
Three students, two black and one Native American working to model a space and imply an incipient development
and maturity in their acts and in their compositional scaffolding of the figures.
Through work, there will be progress and it is this social mobility that minstrelsy sought to repress.
These themes came to the fore in the dioramas value, rising education and progress in Black Life, which were placed in those hallway.
The trains I mentioned earlier and I've been scouring for photographs.
So if anyone happens to know if there are other photographs of these models,
the only ones I've found are the one that I show you on the screen to the right.
These models were made by painter Thomas Hunter and his students at the Washington, D.C., Coloured Public School on.
Street and stair builds an integrated arts curriculum which crossed fine arts,
meanwhile, in industrial arts and across architecture and landscape drawing alike.
The models here are visible under the counter, where they were displayed in the American exhibition in Buffalo,
and they were made with miniature figures of persons, schoolhouses and surroundings.
One visitor described. They traced for one reporter progress from quote the most primitive backward hut to
the finely appointed and commodious coloured high school building in Washington,
Calloway lingers on this origin point. Quote A family of sex slaves has just emancipated.
Just behind them are woods representing the darkness of slavery and before them is a winding path leading into an unknown future.
A baby signifies a mother's quote first joy of freedom and the young boy,
the character whose development is traced through these nine models, of course, grows to become the principal of the M Street School.
The model's frame the central role of education in enabling that progress with the growing child,
a metaphor for the growth of African-American culture extent reviews herald the models as a display of black development after emancipation.
Fellow teacher and later principal of the M Street School, Anna Julia Cooper, a formerly enslaved person, celebrated the model's arguments in 1892.
Cooper published a book called A Voice from the South by a black woman of the South, which was listed in Murray's pamphlet.
And in a review of the exhibition, she described hamster's models lingering on the last one as the quotes climax of the upward
struggles of her people and the chasm bridged in the second generation along the shadowy path,
unquote quote reinvigorating the trajectory of education and self-determination at the centre of hamster's models.
Cooper later completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris,
where she wrote a dissertation on French perceptions of enslavement after the French Revolution.
In recounting the details of the contents and reception of the exhibition on the whole, Callaway lingered on the models,
arguing that this would be the quote most attractive feature of goal building a hierarchy across the Intermedia
Display that rendered the models the most legible and the most accessible even more than the photographs.
Callaway declared quote If thousands have looked at other features of the exhibit,
tens of thousands have studied these models dramatic figures of real life.
They speak to the most ignorant visitor end quote.
So the primitive and primitive ized ideas of blackness designed by the ape minstrel
shows builds a cultural immaturity in Paris that was ironically matched by the incipient
culture projected by parts of the exhibit of American Negroes in the context between
behavioural cues as a contest between behavioural cues linked with blackness.
These projections in Paris were marked by paradoxical savvy.
These competing ideas of innocence, primitive and incipient suggest the layers and ruptures in constructions of U.S. culture on the Parisian stage.
The ways in which these projections of US black identities in Paris contradict each other.
And yet still enforce a larger hole speaks to that complexity and ambivalence.
The cases show how complex messages,
building and dismantling racial hierarchies emerge from the dialogic spaces across the city in performance and exhibition spaces.
And for further conversation on that.
I hope that you will join the Birkbeck and Durham centres for nineteenth century studies on Friday at five p.m. for another roundtable about race,
gender and intermedia art, practise in fantastical Paris and my torch colleagues will post the registration link in the chat bar.
Now, while this competing set of cultural performances was largely bifurcated across these two groups in Paris, one individual,
Agnes B. Moody, offers an exemplar of this innocence entanglements through her savvy adoption of identity markers in both spaces.
Most days at the Paris Exposition in 19:00, one could find moody performing as an Aunt Jemima character serving corn cakes in the Corn Kitchen,
a thick shawl perpetually wrapped around her shoulders. This lunch bar was located in the agricultural annexe,
about 20 minutes on foot from the exhibit of American Negroes, offering free food made with corn.
It was a ploy assertively trying to build a European export market for corn, then regarded largely as animal feed.
The press circulated stories about it being Indian corn, in particular as a uniquely American product.
Thus tracing a settler colonial export.
It also more often circulated a fantasy image, which you see at left of what the mini pavilion could have looked like,
rather than what the lunch counter looked like that was actually installed,
which you see on the right discussions of the display cultivated ideas of Americans as naive.
The Syracuse Evening Herald reported quote while predicting some quote Yankee trick
the wily Parisian holds back while he warily watches his unsophisticated cousin,
the provincial, who has boldly accepted the proffered food.
But of course, in the article, the French become quote willing to learn a good thing from the barbarians.
The Corn Kitchen simultaneously cohered and past native black and white Americans as primitive,
moody and another unknown black woman representing the quote typical mammy from the South,
as reported in the press, signified the agricultural labour so often centred in enslavement,
as well as larger narratives of servitude as they acted in accordance with the stock minstrel character.
Some newspaper articles caricatured Moody's dialect and her disinterest in the wonders of the exposition,
filling out readers imaginations of her as a rural simpleton.
But while Moody performed to stereotype in the Corn Kitchen, she was an activist,
an intellectual and a member of various clubs seeking race equality born in enslavement in Hagerstown, Maryland.
She escaped with her family to Canada in the early 1850s and spent much of her adult life in Chicago.
She was a second vice president of the National Association of Coloured Women and was active in conversations to condemn lynching.
After the year after the exposition, when other black intellectuals Calloway, Dubois,
Cooper and the artist Fuller convened in the US Pavilion in August nineteen hundred for a dinner to celebrate Black Americans in Paris,
Moody took her place amongst them, so she may have played primitive,
but that social performance in white spaces effectively obscured the ways in which she was actually working for progress.
Thank you for your attention, and I'd like to invite Joan Smalls to return to talk through this material.
Thank you, Emily, for a really wonderful paper.
And as you know, I have done research on minstrelsy and its reception in France,
but not linking this American part of it, which I find very, very, extremely, extremely interesting.
I was just wondering, I had a lot of questions as I was going through your your your talk.
And one of them, one of those has to do with the idea of of the minstrel shows when the ape was were conducting them.
Was there any sort of documentation of sort of the individual shows you, you know, in terms of someone writing about it?
Or is it recorded in some way?
And the reason I ask that is because I sort of parallel it with the, for example, in France later on with the fully Birger,
when you have all of these things that these kinds of interesting shows that happen, but those were never really recorded.
You know, no one was sitting there, actually, you know, giving critiques of them.
So I was just wondering in terms of the context in which you're looking at, you know, think about the themes.
I love the synergies and overlaps between our interest in minstrelsy in France, with your work on the bohemian spaces,
especially in mathematics and then this kind of sort of sub community in another part of Paris happening simultaneously.
And I think the American case is so interesting because it in many ways the U.S.
artists community in Paris tries to separate itself from that bohemian culture.
And so it's odd that there's this kind of synergy there.
But to answer your question in terms of documentation, there isn't a kind of archives of the club in any one place.
But since I've been working on this material, I've been assembling newspaper articles and also exhibition catalogues in individual artists papers.
And that's how I've come to learn about the minstrel shows has been mainly through their reports in the newspapers,
and I've been surprised to the extent to which people went through these kind of detailed discussions of actually what songs were performed,
which members were participating. There's a kind of rich archive that is starting to emerge from those newspaper recordings that have kind
of enabled me to to piece together in greater detail kind of what order things happened in and such.
I also think that they may be linked with Colombia's Varsity Club.
They started in 1894 to have an annual fundraiser show that wasn't necessarily minstrelsy, but just kind of theatrical performance.
And Murchison, who I mentioned as playing Mr. Tambo in the 1898 show.
He was a student at Columbia then, and he was a musician who often performed in those shows and was a member of the Banjo Club at Columbia.
And so I think that he was really instrumental in offering to club leadership ideas
about what they could include in the performance and kind of how to put it together.
Great, that's that's really interesting. It's really, really interesting. I have a lot of questions, but I'm going to let other people question.
I'm going to read from the questions that we have here. And I think the first question that you touched on it, but maybe you could elaborate on this.
This is a question from Jane Gabel. She writes.
Or. Yes. Jane writes, for instance, the American Girls Club turned away medivolve fuller.
Was there a difference in the way Americans treated blacks and the way they were treated by the French?
Yeah. Thank you, Jane. That's a great question. I did mention Fuller's kind of unwelcome at a girls club in 1899, and incidentally or not,
actually who was the director as actually is documented as attending the AARP minstrel show a couple of months later.
And I do think that those examples, the case of Harper and the case of Fuller,
do you suggest that there was a difference in the kind of possibilities?
Tanner's case is a really complicated one,
because he there is another story that has been published a couple of times that Penny de Bois described Tanner
wanting to have a position on a committee at an artist club in Paris and that nobody would vote for him.
And this has always been assumed to be talking about the American Heart Association of Paris.
And I always thought that that didn't make sense to me because of the ways in which he's, as I mentioned,
so deeply integrated into that other club and exhibiting there, and he's also on committees there.
And so what I think has happened is that to parse this comment is actually about the Paris Society of American Painters,
which is another U.S. artist's club in Paris that was formed around a generation kind of earlier generation of ex-pat U.S.
artists whose main goal was to try to control which American paintings would be in the international exhibitions in Europe.
And Tanner joined that organisation. And I think that that's the space where he ultimately suffered racism in that way.
And I think so. To get back to Jane's question, Tanner is also a really interesting figure because he has written some things
that suggest that race did not make an impact on his art career in France.
But then he also has written about the kind of effects of racism on his life and progress.
And so it's kind of difficult to read between the lines, but certainly the fact that he expatriated to France and had his career there,
I think, are tied to a sense of greater access in France in the art world than he would have had in the United States.
Great, thanks. Thanks for that. Here's a question from Kwabena Slaughter.
The question is Booker T. Washington is standing backstage in all of these stories.
Why is his influence not being acknowledged? Its photo is on the wall in that image on the right.
Right now, it's what? Yes. Yes. Thank you for your question.
Yeah, no. So Washington is appears in the exhibition, and he also was involved in facilitating the Tuskegee display that is in the exhibition space.
And certainly, his influence and ideas are underscored in many of the parts of the display.
But in terms of the kind of official organisation the figures were Callaway and Dubois and Murray,
and they're the ones who are listed in the kind of fair records the official reports of the fair.
And your question gets at one of the kinds of nuances across the exhibition that scholars have traced,
which is that there is a kind of emergent tension between Washington and Dubois that becomes clear in this movement.
They both see education as crucial to the development of progress for African-American culture.
But for Washington, he is invested in industrial schools that are teaching skills like manual skills that can be kind of wielded and taught.
Whereas Dubois is much more interested in promoting a kind of liberal arts education model where students are studying in all fields.
And I think that what happens in the parts of the exhibition and scholars have traced
this in greater detail and between the materials related to Tuskegee and the materials,
for instance, from Atlanta, are that you end up with like two very different ideas about education and labour and kind of mental labour,
physical and mental labour. Thank you for your great question.
And this is another question that relates to what you were just saying.
It's a question from Amanda Burden, Amanda says.
I suspect the Tuskegee dioramas are rooted in the models for which you are searching.
That's an interesting question, and I'd like to talk to you more, Amanda, about that.
So the Tuskegee photographs, there are five of them that were made by William Shepherd,
who was from Minnesota, and there's only two of them digitised at the Library of Congress website.
But I've seen all of them. And one of my students this semester is working on her paper on those photographs in particular,
and those are most of the photographs are representations of kind of industry.
There's a lot of photographs of black labourers in the fields. And I think kind of stylistically,
they seem really interesting because they're basically a photograph of a bunch of photographs that are overlaying each other.
And so there's a kind of collage effect that really differentiates those from the rest.
But the models that I mentioned were made in Washington, D.C. by the End Street School,
and the narrative that emerges there is more based on this kind of progress from like the cabin to a kind of smaller home to the the school itself.
And I think about those models as more tied with DuBose's ideals of furthering a kind of broader liberal arts education for black individuals.
And I cut this for time.
But Myra Fuller actually was asked by a Calloway to repair those models, which were damaged in transit to Paris, which she did.
And in 1987, she produced her own set of models for the Jamestown Exposition.
And there's actually 16 models, and they share some elements with Hunter's models.
And but interestingly, the origin point that she chooses is actually 16 19 instead of 1865, which is Hunter's choice.
So I hope that that answers your question, but I'm happy to talk further with you about Tuskegee and the DC models.
Right. I have some information here that Amanda was talking specifically about the 1940s dioramas, the 1940s.
Yes. Yes. OK, I'll have to check on that.
Problem. So, Emily, so this this topic, it's really actually quite large, and I'm sure that you're discovering things all the time or are you I mean,
are you still on the lookout for more and more information and imagery from this sort of cultural transplantation?
And it's sort of reception and it's.
Yeah, I mean, it just seems wonderfully rich in terms of wonderfully expansive.
Even though it's a part of your project, it seems like it's a whole project in and of itself that could develop even even further.
Yes, this happens to me all the time, James. Every project seems to mushroom into what could be its own book, for sure.
One of the things that I've been trying really hard to do with this material,
especially because there's been so much written about the exhibition of American Negroes,
is to try to kind of pull the threads that that are kind of thread that hasn't yet been addressed.
And to kind of put it in closer dialogue with the U.S. colony in Paris in this way through through minstrelsy.
But yes, I'm still looking for kind of references to the minstrel shows.
And then, as I was working on this chapter again recently was when I came across the figure of Agnes Moody,
who kind of emerged in both the literature on the dinner that was held in August in the pavilion.
And I was initially kind of surprised that she was there because I had recognised her name from reading about the Corn Kitchen.
And so that kind of led me to try to learn more about her.
And I think that she's a kind of iconic figure for the ways in which she is using these stereotypes in really effective and savvy ways.
And so I think she's also someone I'd like to learn more about. I'm really glad you said that because I was wanting more.
When you when you gave your your paper on that, so that's wonderful to to to know that you're you're interested in expanding that.
I think that's a really rich and wonderful topic as well. So I think we're close to time here.
And so I want to thank everyone out there for sending us your questions.
And I'm sorry if we were not able to get you to answer all your questions.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank Emily for her thought provoking lecture this evening and also talked for hosting our event today.
Set the evening for you as the afternoon for me, but thank you also to all our viewers at home for watching as well.
And please join us next for next week's event,
which is the fourth and final and the terror lecture series on Wednesday, March 10th at five p.m. That's GMT UK time.
And Emily will be joined by Alastair Wright, associate professor in the history of Art at the University of Oxford, affiliated with St John's College.
So we hope you will be able to join us then. And so thank you once again for joining us.
Have a good day, the rest of the day. By.