Podcast Transcript (Music up) Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: I think it’s very hard to be a creative individual and not show some of one’s background, one’s personal experience, one’s life in one’s work, either by acknowledging it or by sublimating it. John Vick: And that need to sort of express oneself through their work is, I think, very well-represented in the work of Joyce Scott, as an artist and in her work. And in speaking with Joyce, one of the things she said was that she is not trying to make provocative statements, but as long as there’s still things happening in the world that require a response, then her work might be provocative as a result. Jo Reed: That’s John Vick and Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. They joined forces to curate an art exhibit that just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, called Represent: 200 Years of African American Art. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has been long recognized for the breadth and depth of its art by African-Americans. In fact, many museum officials, led by its African-American Collection’s Committee, have encouraged the creation of a catalog that would illustrate the excellence of the museum's holdings. This year, that catalog was published.  Edited by Dr. Shaw, Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, is the first major publication to focus on the museum’s diverse collection of works by African American artists. And to mark the publication, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened an exhibit that focuses on that wide-ranging collection. It's also titled Represent.  The show was curated by Dr. Shaw who's also an Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania and John Vick who's the museum’s curator for Modern and Contemporary Art. I was able to sit down at the museum with both John Vick and Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw at the museum on the day I saw the exhibit.  I began by asking them, “What story did they want to tell about African American artists with this show?” Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Yeah, I think we wanted to tell multiple stories, you know, in part, the rich history of African American artistic creation in the United States back through the period of enslavement when enslaved artists, and freed, and free-born artists were creating work under, often very difficult circumstances. We wanted to tell that story, that historical story, and give a kind of chronological structure to it so that people would see the ways that both artistic production and artistic experience has changed over 200-plus years. And then we wanted to tell the history of collecting in this institution, and show some of the strengths, the breadth and the depth that the collection goes into. So it was really taking a two-pronged approach, one that was historical and one that was also very specific. John Vick: Yeah, there’s more than 750 works, by recent count. It’s getting close to 800, where we’re building the collection every year. And there’s close to 200 different artists represented. About a quarter of the artists that are represented in the broader collection are shown here in this exhibition. And although it is just-- it’s part of these larger holdings, it is something that we think is very representative and really shows the range and diversity historically, so that it is drawing from work as early as the very early 1800s up to the present, but also shows a range of different styles and media. So it’s not just painting and sculpture, but it’s also works on paper, prints, photographs, textiles, and furniture. Jo Reed: Well, I would just like to hone in for a moment on some of the historical pieces. It’s hard not to be moved by that large clay pot that is in the beginning of the exhibition that was made by a slave called David Drake. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: The Dave jar is a very powerful one. It is enormous. It stands about three feet high, and it weighs a considerable amount. It was made by Dave and an assistant in Edgefield County, South Carolina in the middle of the 19th century in the, you know, in the years leading up to the Civil War. We know Dave by several different names. Sometimes he’s called Dave the Slave, sometimes David Drake, sometimes just Dave. On one of his pots he inscribes “Dave belongs to Mr. Miles,” referencing Lewis Miles, the man who owned the pottery where he was working. And Dave is the first instance of an enslaved person signing a work of art, signing an object that they had made, and the fact that he signs and that he writes sometimes poetry, sometimes little historical references to, you know, what day it is, and the fact that he writes on these pots is really significant because it speaks to his literacy in a period when enslaved people in many states where slavery was legal were prohibited, were not allowed to learn how to read or write, but were actively prohibited from attaining literacy. He literally makes his mark on these objects which are virtually indestructible, you know, which have to be pulverized into sand to disappear, and to have his story preserved in these little bits and pieces is really marvelous. Jo Reed: I think it’s fair to say, in some ways, the artist Henry Tanner is kind of the lynchpin of the exhibit. I really don’t think that’s overstating it. His work “The Annunciation” is the first painting by an African-American that the Philadelphia museum acquired, and it has a central space in this exhibition, but it’s also a very important painting to the museum overall. John Vick: Yeah, I mean, I think it marks for us an important starting point, because it-- when it was acquired it was not only the first work by an African-American artist to be acquired by any major museum in this country, but it was also the second work by a contemporary artist to be acquired. And I think it’s important when we, you know, are living in 2015, and we are looking at work that was produced 115 years ago to remember that is was, at a point, brand new, and that it was at a point contemporary. We are presenting it in a historical context here because we’ve now-- we’d like to think at least-- come very far since then. There are a great many artists who I think probably looked at Tanner as something of a role model. Someone like William Henry Johnson, who also traveled and lived in Europe to excel in his career and pursue his career. Jo Reed: And Tanner left the United States and moved to Paris in 1891 and lived there. John Vick: Yes. And then generations later, Barbara Chase-Riboud, a Philadelphian who moved to France as well. But others who just saw his example and the work that he did and tried to emulate it, not necessarily stylistically, but, you know, wanted to make strong and powerful careers out of their work. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: And, you know, Tanner’s work was really celebrated in the United States by scholars like W.E.B. Dubois who often wrote about Tanner’s production in “The Crisis”, which was the-- and still is the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. And so, even though many younger artists could not see Tanner’s work that was being done in France, they knew about him and they knew about him as an example of someone who was able to have a very highly lauded career. Tanner won all sorts of medals from the French government and they would go, as John mentioned, to visit him outside of Paris. It was a pilgrimage, you know, for young black artists when they went there. Even if they didn’t necessarily-- and Tanner often complained, you know, “They come and they don’t really want to talk to me. They don’t really want to hear. They just want to be with me.” <laughs> And he wanted to talk about his painting techniques and the glazes and the different ways of painting that he had developed. But the other thing about his work is the way that he changed religious painting in the end of the 19th century so that rather than making kind of-- you know, historicizing the life of Mary in “The Annunciation”, he uses a contemporary Middle Eastern woman, a woman from North Africa, where he visited frequently, in a contemporary bedroom to show Mary in the present moment, to show that religious importance, which was so important to his upbringing as the son of a minister, as the son of a bishop, to show the way that these religious values, these cultural values that were very important to him were really present in his work. Jo Reed: Why the title the exhibition, and the catalog, “Represent”? Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: “Represent” means a number of different things. In the context of the exhibition we wanted to point to it as a term that both literally means kind of art historically “re-present”, to show again, right? Or to show in a different way. And so there’s that, but then there’s also the colloquial use of the term, which has come to mean standing for oneself, but also representing standing for a community, one’s heritage, one’s legacy, the place that one comes from to represent for that community. And so with this exhibition and with the catalog we see “Represent” as a way for the museum to say, you know, “this work is Philadelphia,” you know, “it is Philadelphia’s artistic, our historical treasure and it’s all of ours.” Jo Reed: You know, what struck me about the title is that African-American artists are expected to represent their history in some ways. They’re so often seen as African-American artists rather than, artists, and in the catalog, you recount a story in which the New York Times art critic lambasts two abstract artists for not painting black enough, I mean that’s my paraphrase, but was his thrust. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: I think the issue of how to just be an artist is one that many non-male artists have had to deal with, <laughs> women artists in particular, but also artists who are not of European descent. And in large part that’s due to the way our culture is structured. It has historically been so placing white male artists at the center of the art world as a default due to the history of academic training in this country, the inaccessibility for both women, white women and people of color, to that source of training. So that folks who are not white or male have historically, particularly in the nineteenth century, you know, ended up at the margins. You know, to go back to Tanner, Tanner was really the first black artist to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and had a terrible time of it. His-- there’s a horrible story of his classmates tying him to an easel, crucifying him in effect, and wheeling him out into the middle of Broad Street in Philadelphia and leaving him there, you know, sending a very pointed message that he was not welcome inside the studios of the academy. But he also experienced a lot of support from his teachers. So, black artists have struggled to be seen simply as artists in part because it was very hard for them to just be artists in the first place. Jo Reed: And what it means to be a black artist, the responsibility, if you will, of black artists—this is a contested idea. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Historically there have been different political prescriptions about how black artists should behave. This becomes a big debate in the 1920s. You have many different opinions on it. W.E.B. Dubois, for example, says that there is no-- you know, and I’m paraphrasing, “There’s no art,” you know, that he values, “unless it’s propaganda.” And in this case he means positive propaganda for African-Americans in the country. And he’s a big supporter of someone like Tanner. And then you have other thinkers in that moment, Alain Locke who encourages African-American artists to look to Africa, look to what he calls the ancestral legacy, which he writes about in a volume that he publishes in the 1920s called “The New Negro”. And he says, “This is your heritage and you need to take it up and European artists”-- he doesn’t name them but he means Picasso and Cubists, etcetera, “European artists have been looking at this and using it and if anybody--if anybody should be using this work it’s African-American artists and you need to figure out how to do that.” And that’s a big struggle. Locke throws down the gauntlet and he says, “Use it!” and black artists say, “How?” <laughs> You know. And their work, I think, shows a lot of the work from the 1920s shows that exploration, how to utilize this ancestral legacy, how to utilize African art, also how to provide a kind of positive visual propaganda à la Dubois in order to serve a community. And when you get into the 1950s and 60s there are many artists who simply say, “I just want to be an artist, thank you very much, and I want to do my work and maybe some of it will be representational and will be positive, but maybe some of it will be abstract and will explore other artistic ideas.” And, critically, they receive pushback by some critics, like Hilton Cramer of The New York Times who just does not understand that that’s possible that a black artist can create non-representational work and still have it have a kind of a deep, culturally specific, historical meaning to it in the case of Barbara Chase-Riboud. And then there are members of the black community also, and there are multiple black communities within each community, you know, so artistic communities respond in multifaceted ways to this dilemma. And even in the present moment, I think it’s still a consideration for younger artists in their twenties and in their thirties, artists who may deal with history in their work, who may deal with racism in their work, but also may have other works that don’t overtly, you know, visually seem to speak to that. Jo Reed: Well you mentioned Barbara Chase-Riboud. You know, she created a series of abstract sculptures, which she titled the Malcolm X series, one of which is in this exhibit. John Vick: Yeah. She produced, starting in 1969, a group of sculptures dedicated Malcolm X who had been assassinated several years before. She made these works. They were abstract, non-representational. They were crafted from folded sheets of wax that were then cast in bronze, which were then suspended above a structure that-- the structure was hidden by these very beautifully wrapped and braided and bound threads of silk or wool or other fibers to create these relief-like structures that would sort of hover against the wall and seemed to spill down in this sort of watery fashion. Absolutely beautiful, exquisitely made. Sometimes they had a very bright bronze sheen to them and other times they were matte black. The titles of these works have sort of changed over time. They were originally referred to as monuments to Malcolm X, and they’ve been sort of just generally referred to since as “Malcolm X” and they were made not to represent the man himself, who had lived, but to stand as some sort of marker of his legacy, of his history, and also to be an object that one could look at and meditate upon his life, I mean he had a very transformative life, Malcolm X, and that idea of transformation, the engagement in the world around him, in a broad popular sense, but also the individual experiences that he went through. Those are things that can branch out into broader meditations on history and humanity in a way that she, Barbara Chase-Riboud, that is, the artist, thought could be accessed or hinted at or sort of drawn out through an abstract form. A comparison that she suggested to me when I worked with her on an exhibition last year was, “No one questions that the Washington Monument looks the way it does, you know.” And when you say that it really becomes very clear what she’s getting at, which is that there was a double standard that her work, because she was African-American, and her work, specifically, because it was named for an African-American figure, was being judged in different terms. Jo Reed: I was struck by the way you grouped these works together. And, one in particular, an abstract work, John Dowell’s “To Weave through Time,” was extraordinary to see in person. The catalog really can’t do it justice, I just kept coming back to it again and again--partially because it was just so extraordinary to see it in person, and partially because of the painting it was next to—another abstract painting by Alma Thomas. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Yeah, the Dowell is a piece that you have to see in person. Jo Reed: Absolutely. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: It is so stunning, and before I had seen it, I had only seen these reproductions. And I thought, “It’s white and then there are some little flecks of color, maybe?” And when John and I went and saw it in storage together it was a revelation, because it has so much texture to it and the sensitivity to the use of color that Dowell has and line. And you see so much fluidity in it and it’s just a really, really gorgeous, gorgeous piece that, you know, one would never know <laughs> just by looking at the picture how much is there. John Vick: Completely not. There’s a lot of different reasons for putting things together and I think it’s always nice in an exhibition to create a variety of reasons for doing things. So maybe it’s like in that instance that two things look good together, that aesthetically they really balance each other out or complement each other. Or maybe set off some sort of conversation that’s more based on contrast. Maybe it’s that the subject matter of two different works have some sort of historical significance that links them together. We have some work that’s presented, made in the 30s and 40s that are all of scenes around New York and specifically in Harlem. To group them together provides a sort of inroad to understanding that moment in time. And then there’s also, you know, this is just a third example. There are plenty of other ways that you can group works of art, but maybe there are artists who had some sort of connection in their own time that knew each other, that maybe collaborated somehow or engaged in some way or another. So, those provide different points of access and points of comparison or difference when you’re thinking about grouping works, either in pairs or trios or a whole exhibition in general. To think that it’s not just about all the images have to be about the same thing or they all have to be about artists who had the same kind of training or that everything has to look the same and all be paintings, but that you can find nuances and differences of ways to make connections, I think is important. Because the hope is that visitors then come to the show and realize that things are paired and put together in different ways and that they can then sort of take the initiative to draw connections in their own way and not be intimidated that there’s only one way to approach things, one way to see things, but that they can sort of engage on their own terms and sort of be creative and really explore the ways to think about art and artists and history. Jo Reed: You created a wall that’s just devoted to portraiture, that’s really at the end of the show. Tell me what the thinking was behind that. John Vick: That was one, probably the most dramatic step apart from the general plan of organizing the exhibition to follow the catalog. ‘Cause the catalog is organized mostly historically and chronologically as is the show with the exception of one wall, which pulls together about 20 portraits from the collection from the 19th century to the 20th century.  And the idea there was just to sort of create a different way of looking at the material, something that is not historical but is rather thematic. I think visitors would have gotten less out of the show if the whole thing was done thematically, and I think it’s more important, especially with this material that spans so much time, to really emphasize and privilege the history and the art history of these works and to present it in a way that can be experienced so that that history is really understood. But having something that’s slightly different, that is thematic and in this case portraiture was our inroad, it allowed us to show work from a broader spectrum that was made maybe 100 years apart by artists of more different backgrounds in terms of their training or their interests or their artistic priorities and also a greater variety of mediums and styles and so forth. So that the sense of the difference and range and uniqueness that comes out as you’re walking through the exhibition is sort of, in a way, summarized at the end and reinforced in that way. Jo Reed: There are, what, 17 paintings on that wall? John Vick: I think there’s-- yeah, I think there’s 18 individual framed works that are incredibly diverse and a little mesmerizing and confusing in some ways, but also sort of fun and maybe a little more playful in other ways. So just I think to show that there’s a variety of ways to present works of art is important to show more transparently that we as a museum sort of alter the way that things are experienced and presented; that we control the way you view them, so that people know that there’s multiple ways of doing it; so that they don’t think that there necessarily is just one way, but there’s other ways to do it and that we’re making choices that we do it one way or the other. Jo Reed: I do want to talk about the photographs and prints because you have some remarkable ones, and I don’t want to give them short shrift. Let’s begin with the photographer, James Van Der Zee. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Van Der Zee was an artist who was born in Massachusetts, but in his early twenties moved to New York City and began a studio photographic practice there. He had at least three different studios in and around 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and over the course of nearly a century he photographed in the studio both portraits of individuals, of groups, he did a lot of club photography and documented the life of that neighborhood, of Harlem. And then he also photographs individuals well into the 1980s. And Van Der Zee, in addition to having a studio practice, also did street photography, and we see images of daily life on the streets of Manhattan, and he has this very kind of large repertoire, some things are very stage-y. There’s a photograph on that wall of Daddy Grace, this very charismatic preacher who was very well loved and prominent in the 1930s. And Daddy Grace is shown in this very theatrical garb as a kind of Israelite gesturing very dramatically. And to have different works by an artist-- some of the collection goes quite deep into individual artists. Van Der Zee is one, Dox Thrash, a print maker who was active in the 1930s with the Federal Art Project with the WPA from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal the museum has a marvelous collection of prints made by Thrash who perfected his own technique called “carborundum printing” as a part of the Philadelphia print workshop. So there are places in the exhibition where maybe one or two works are shown, but they actually stand for a much larger body of work that is actually accessible through the print study room to visitors if they want to come. You know, they can come and see more of these artists’ works, particularly in prints, drawings and photographs. Those things are not easy to get to, but they can be gotten to if scholars or interested people want to see them. John Vick: To that point, I’d add we have one really-- we have two really marvelous quilts that are in the exhibition: one by Faith Ringgold, another by Sarah Mary Taylor. And the quilt by Sarah Mary Taylor is one of several that came as part of a large gift to this museum and along with the department of prints, drawings, and photographs our department of costumes and textiles also has a study room where you can make an appointment, you can see things that are regularly in storage, you can do that if you’re a class, if you’re a scholar, or if you’re just anyone. Just a matter of setting a time and doing it. So, just as exhibitions are an opportunity as are catalogs to make the collection more accessible to the public, make them more aware about what is here, those are other resources that we have that are meant to sort of open the museum even more to the public. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: And the diversity in this exhibition really shows how many different ways people have been able to express themselves, have chosen to express themselves, the kind of facility they have had with different media and materials. And it’s really wonderful to show that diversity. And I think for audiences coming through, for them to see the diversity of art made by people of African descent in the United States, and many of them in the exhibition are from Philadelphia or worked in Philadelphia, went to school-- art school in Philadelphia, to see that I think is really important. Jo Reed: And how long do people have a chance to see Represent? John Vick: I think it closes April 5th, but of course the catalog is gonna have a life that’s gonna last much longer. Jo Reed: The catalog in itself is really an event. It is an extraordinary piece of work. So hats off to you, Gwendolyn. I honestly could not put it down. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Oh, thank you very much. You know, in writing the catalog one of the things that was most important to me was that it be accessible and that it be both scholarly, but also for a very kind of broad readership and that people be able to keep reading it. <laughs> Jo Reed: It’s so lucid. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Oh, thank you. As an African-American art historian and an historian of African-American art, you know, there are so many different communities that I feel responsible to, and to be able to get out of the ivory tower every so often, you know, is very important to me, and having this opportunity was something that I’ll never forget. John Vick: And I think on behalf of the museum it’s something that we will be forever grateful for. Jo Reed: I am grateful, too, so thank you both. And thank you for your time. (Music up) John Vick: Thank you very much. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Thank you. Jo Reed: That was Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania and John Vick of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was the consulting curator, and he was the organizing curator of the exhibition at the museum, Represent, 200 Years of African American Art. Dr. Shaw was also the editor of the catalog that accompanies the show. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.