A visit to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk struck a chord as I was thinking about race, gender and place and how we bring these themes to life in teaching and public history. The Chrysler Museum is getting ready to close for a year long renovation, and paintings have been removed, and moved to make way for repairs to the building.
The result is some fascinating juxtaposition of space and content.
Blank space frames rooms of untouched, well-curated art and artifacts. Paintings are paired with sculptures from different schools of thought and centuries. The subjects of gender and race are highlighted in new ways by the juxtaposition of pieces of art that are not usually displayed side by side or framed with empty space. One set of paintings in a half empty gallery set a Degas’
Dancer with Bouquet next to Mary Cassatt’s
The Family, which is next to Gauguin’s
The Loss of Virginity. The contrast of the innocence of Cassatt’s mother and children with the despair of the Gauguin and the exhaustion and depth of Degas’ ballerina give striking portraits of what it meant to be a woman at the turn of the century: maiden, mother, whore. This tryptic was set off and made more striking by the gaps in the flow of artwork around it.
Imagine if we could rearrange art galleries like this on a regular basis? Curators put enormous effort into arranging exhibits to put paintings together in meaningful and provocative groupings, but economy of space means that empty space is rarely used to emphasize the content. As we think about how location can set off content, space and context become increasingly important in highlighting how art and exhibit design can draw our attention the space around an individual item or a grouping.
As we begin to imagine a commemoration of 1619, the arrival of enslaved Africans, negative space, silence, and watchful presence, may speak louder than words. We bring some of this attention to loss in the planned libation ceremony, which will close the conference.
Over the next few weeks we will be featuring some of our subject experts and moderators on the blog. This week we’ve asked our participants a few questions about how they have incorporated the themes of gender, race, and contact into their scholarship and teaching.
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Name: John K. Thornton
Institutional Affiliation: Boston University
Title/Position Held: Professor
Scholarly Interests: History of West Central Africa, African Diaspora, Atlantic History[/twocol_one_last]
How has your exposure to the conference and the themes stemming from our conversation (commemoration, race, gender, class, relationships between native people and Europeans and Africans, etc.) impacted your own research?
My research on this topic began when I read Engel Sluiter’s article identifying the Portuguese vessel that brought the first Africans to Virginia. I wrote my own article on the African background of those “20 and odd Negroes” in the
William and Mary Quarterly. From this research on African background, I published, along with Linda Heywood, our book on the “Angolan Wave” that carried Africans to the English and Dutch colonies in the Americas in the same period. Independent of these researches, I also was working on Atlantic History, studying how Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans encountered and shaped each other. Since 1995, I have been teaching a course on Atlantic history with a focus on this period and on cultural encounters. Cambridge University Press is publishing (print versions out in September) my book
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1350-1830.
If you teach, have you started incorporating the events and themes of 1619 into your classes? How?
My Atlantic history course tries to deal with encounters and engagements in all the Atlantic world, Africa, America and Europe, and the back and forth of influences. A lot of this work is comparative, so the 1619 events enter into my classes through studying other encounters, such as those of the Spanish and Portuguese in earlier periods and in various circumstances.
How do you think we should commemorate 1619 in our community?
I believe that it is vital to focus more attention than is usually given to the African component of American society. It is also important, I think to take some of the focus away from slavery (or from the role of Africans as laborers) and more into the cultural interactions. We can highlight what Africa has given all Americans as a way of shaping our culture over time.
