Panel 5: Race and exhibition design
Panel Overview:
Emily Mazzola (University of Pittsburgh, US) Exhibition design and the politics of identity in the First Ladies Hall of the United States National Museum
Patricio del Real (Harvard University, US) Staging Brasilidade at MoMA
Jacklyn Lacey (American Museum of Natural History, US) Putting Joseph Towles’ name in the credit line: institutional racism at the American Museum of Natural History
Individual Papers:
Emily Mazzola (University of Pittsburgh, US) Exhibition design and the politics of identity in the First Ladies Hall of the United States National Museum
How do you represent the body of a woman who also represents a nation? When Cassie Mason Myers Julian James and Rose Gouverneur Hoes established the First Ladies Hall of the United States National Museum in 1912, designing mannequins that would honor the presidency, the country, and the women of the White House was their greatest aesthetic and conceptual challenge.
The archive reveals a mannequin design process profuse with anxieties of regarding the slippage between the dressed female form, commercial display, and anthropological practice. Fearful of associating the First Ladies with the frivolities of fashion and positioning them as consumable objects, the founders rejected forms that too closely resembled department store mannequins. When the commercial sphere proved problematic, James and Hoes turned to the Museum’s plaster workshop and its fabricators who specialized in display figures for anthropological installations.
Embracing the display method of anthropology brought new concerns regarding the racial legibility of the First Lady figures, a concern amplified by the First Ladies Hall’s proximity to the Hall of the American Indian. Fearful the First Ladies would be mistaken for racialized anthropological specimens, James and Hoes designed ivory white classicized mannequins. The result was an exhibition characterized by rigid uniformity and pronounced whiteness, a legacy that continues to inform the display of the First Ladies Hall, one of the National Museum of American History’s most popular exhibitions, over a century later.
Emily Mazzola is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh in History of Art and Architecture. She specializes in art of the United States, with a particular interest in political portraiture, female artists and representation, and exhibition history. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut.
Patricio del Real (Harvard University, US) Staging Brasilidade at MoMA
The exhibition “Brazil Builds” is credited with launching the international celebration of Brazil’s modern architecture and the culture of brasilidade. Staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, this groundbreaking show was a collaborative affair that brought together diverse actors and institutions in the United States and Brazil at a critical moment during the Second World War. With “Brazil Builds,” MoMA became a platform where architectural aesthetics met politics. The exhibition was part of concealed and not-so-concealed networks that, operating during the war, managed ‘psychological warfare’ and nascent global postwar politics. It was organized by U.S. architect/MoMA trustee Philip L. Goodwin and architect/photographer G.E. Kidder-Smith, in collaboration with Brazilian colleagues and the National Historic, Artistic, and Patrimony Service, which was part of Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Public Health. The exhibition built new alliances – between modern architecture and tradition, the United States and the authoritarian government of President Getulio Vargas – in an eloquent celebration of brasilidade. It also acted as a Trojan Horse of Brazil’s official ideology of Racial Democracy in the United States.
I focus on the staging of this much-cited and well-studied exhibition and analyze how a multifaceted and racially charged brasilidade was presented in New York during the war. In 1943, Brazilian ideas on history, nature, race, and miscegenation occupied MoMA’s ground floor galleries. Through a series of juxtapositions, comparisons, and collisions, Brazil’s colonial and modern architecture made MoMA’s gallery a ritual space of modernization. I use archival research and a close analysis of the exhibition staging, as well as the works presented, to give evidence on how curatorial decisions enacted official cultural policies that advanced Brazil’s nation building project.
Patricio del Real is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with a focus on Latin America. His current book project, Inventing Latin American Architecture, unravels how postwar politics and modern architecture came together at the Museum of Modern Art. Del Real co-edited the anthology, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012). He holds a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He was Visiting Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University.
Prior, he worked at MoMA’s Architecture and Design Department, on several collection and temporary exhibitions, and co-curated Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980, which received the Society of Architectural Historian’s 2017 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award, recognizing excellence of architectural history scholarship in exhibition catalogues. He was the recipient of the 2015 Ann and Lee Tannenbaum Award for Excellence in Curatorial Practices, given by The Museum of Modern Art Board of Trustees.
When the Hall of Man in Africa (now the Hall of African Peoples) opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1968, it was highly acclaimed. Critics and audiences hailed its efforts to tell African histories removed from the leering gaze of Eurocentric racial hierarchies. The Curator of African Ethnology indicated to the press that a major motivation in hall’s curation was to provide a place where New York City’s African American schoolchildren could find a “justifiable sense of pride in their heritage.” This was a relatively radical idea of inclusion and representation for the time, particularly in an institution like AMNH where the entirety of the paid curatorial staff was (and largely still is) white.
The space between the stated ideals of the gallery and the institutional history of the museum is filled with great tension. While the British, white, Oxford-trained social anthropologist Colin Turnbull was the curator of record for the hall, his partner, Joseph Towles, an African American man from Virginia, was a significant contributor. In particular, Towles led the development of a significant section of the hall that discussed the African American experience – likely the first inclusion of the Diaspora in a major ethnological museum display in North America and Europe. Towles’ curation of this section was informed by his own family’s history in Virginia, where several of his ancestors had been enslaved persons. During the time that Towles spent working without official compensation on the hall, several members of the Anthropology staff who were white supremacists conspired to curtail Towles’ access to their department. Turnbull and Towles left the museum and New York City after the Hall was officially opened due to this hostility and racism. Towles went on to earn his doctorate in Anthropology from Makerere University.
In this work, I examine the story of Towles and Turnbull while exploring how the Hall’s activation through museum audiences and critical reception has changed across more than 50 years of social history. I juxtapose these histories while parsing the concept of institutionalized racism through a series of specific acts of racism perpetrated against one individual. I revisit the tense spaces between what the Hall of Man in Africa symbolically activated in the exhibition’s triumphal opening in 1968, and the confusing and often disconcerting exhibition artifact the Hall has aged into overtime.
Jacklyn Grace Lacey is Senior Museum Specialist of African and Pacific Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she has been a member of the Anthropology Division since 2011. Her work at AMNH analyzes museum discourses on African culture and technology. Her recent work is exploring the intersections of infectious disease epidemiology, medical anthropology and the environmental humanities. She recently was named to the Editorial Board of the American Anthropologist, the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal. She received funding from the Carter Center to create a multicultural, multilingual curriculum (“Politics, People & Pathogens”) connecting these topics to the ongoing special exhibition about disease eradication at AMNH, “Countdown to Zero.” She partners with medical practitioners describing the methods and politics of syncretic healing traditions in Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, as well as in Polynesia, the Caribbean and in American diaspora communities. An active museum educator, she has been a mentor in the AMNH Science Research Mentorship Program (SRMP) for 9 years, as well as a curriculum writer and educator in the Lang and ASP educational initiatives at AMNH. A recent publication of particular interest to exhibition histories, “Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50” in Anthropology Now, is a multidisciplinary look at the curation history and context of this historically significant and contested permanent museum exhibition.
Comments
Wonderful presentation Patricio del Real! I very much enjoyed your critical analysis of the MoMA exhibition and the role of Modernism and Modernist Architecture as a carrier of political meanings. I particularly appreciated your conclusion, ”Modernism traveled as a form of whiteness, exotic and colorful but whiteness (a tropical whiteness, as you said)”, it speaks about an architectural language that is very much representative of Western culture and used as a standard for evaluating aesthetics. Thank you for your presentation.
Dear Patricio,
Thank you for sharing your fascinating research. I very much enjoyed your gendered reading of two spaces of the exhibition, as well as your focus on race and pot plants (!) I’ve been tracking pot plants in mid-century museum exhibitions too, so I was delighted to be introduced to these! I have to say I was also very impressed with the way you carefully led us through your slides with the drawing tool. Is that just in powerpoint or…?
My question is about the role of the architect/trustee Philip L. Goodwin. Was it common for trustees to be given curatorial and design control at MOMA and other institutions during this time, do you know? What are the impacts of opening museum curating and design to these figures do you think? I’m interested in the role of trustees in museums in the UK in this time – their input ranges from dictatorial to non-existent, but, in my experience, by the 1940s, the ones who do take on these more active roles are often working in smaller institutions where the curators have very little training. Your perspectives would be gratefully received. Thanks again, Claire Wintle
Thank you Patricio for sharing this excellent presentation. Your focus on the actual experience of viewing the exhibition was great – in your vivid walk through and particularly the relationship with the photography exhibition, which, as you show, is so revealing of the wider agendas at the time. Your reference to the exhibition being described as enticing propaganda stayed with me because I especially liked your attention to both as interconnected elements in this presentation. Looking forward to seeing the book!
Dear Jacklyn, thanks so much for your presentation and acknowledgement of Joseph Towles. It was very moving to me and a good call to action. I very much appreciated how you positioned yourself being a white person and within the tension of your limitations and ethical obligations. I can very much relate to this struggle and your way of framing it really resonated with me. I was wondering about if you know the Research Center for Material Culture situated at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands (probably you do), I am very lucky to be there at the moment and witness that this is a place where they also try to fight institutional racism from within the institution. Maybe this is also interesting for you…
Dear Jacklyn,
Thank you so much for sharing your rich research and using your curatorial skills in the presentation! I really enjoyed and learned. I was curious if are planning on an exhibition on Jo. If so, how would be your approach different? and how/where would you frame him?
I must echo the above compliments of and gratitude for your rich, nuanced, and thoughtful presentation.
I wanted to join the conversation around Jona’s question about institutional self-critique and transparency. Jona, I very much enjoyed your presentation in Panel 1, and plan to respond to it in that forum. (Like Jacklyn, I work at AMNH.) I think there is a world of research in analysis of the “meta” exhibit. I am particularly interested in how such exhibitions emerge, the circumstances in which they are developed, and the narratives they tell and do not tell.
I think, as you suggest, Jona, that these exhibits often only address issues that are already visible or in the public eye. I am certain there are examples where this is not the case, but it seems to me, in my knowledge of the field, that institutional behemoths with dated, problematic collections or exhibits often strive to protect their institutional image (and donors) more than push the boundaries of critique and what is known. Again, while I am certain there are exceptions, I think we have seen smaller institutions are often at the forefront of pushing the narrative toward difficult truth-telling.
Corrie, thank you!
I agree, it seems that the larger an institution is, the more weighs its structure, the politics, the negotiation with different stakeholders. I wonder whether there is a difference owing the different funding models, in Germany, museums are much less reliant on donors, in theory this should make things easier, but, as has come up elsewhere: always a question of how serious an institution is about reflexions and actual self-critique…
An interesting example is “Zurückgeschaut”: since 2017, the exhibit is part of the permanent exhibition at a (very) small local museum in Berlin-Treptow, addresses as one of the first museums, if not the first, the ‘Erste Deutsche Kolonialausstellung’ that took place as part of the Berliner Gewerbeschau in 1896 and its lasting legacies. (This is a review — the show had its own website, but is displaying an error-note http://zurueckgeschaut.de/
An important, devastating exhibition, but another dimension of visibility here, the museum is so tucked away, that few visitors will just chance upon the exhibit…
Thank you, Emily, for your fascinating presentation on elite white femininity as enacted through the development of the First Ladies exhibition! Given the ongoing popularity of that exhibit, it’s important to interrogate its gendered, racial framework.
Since you discuss the connection intersection between classicism and elite white femininity, you might be interested in Joanna Bosse’s Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland (if you have heard of it, apologies for the repetition). It’s about contemporary ballroom dance classes rather than museum exhibitions, but she similarly observes how whiteness is conflated and erased/rendered normative with and through classicism in ballroom dance practices, from the kinds of costumes worn to the adjectives used to describe the moves.
I was also curious about any potential connection with art museum practices at the time, more specifically if there’s any relationship between the ivory plaster mannequins used for the initial iteration of the First Ladies exhibit and the custom of displaying plaster casts of famous classical sculptures in American art museums. Plaster casts were admittedly falling out of favor by the time the First Ladies exhibit went up, so maybe not, but I wanted to ask.
Anyway, your presentation has me thinking about a lot of things, so thank you for sharing such interesting work!
Dear Sara,
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch my presentation. I am not familiar with Bosse’s work but I greatly appreciate you letting me know about it, it is on its way to now.
The relationship of the ivory plaster mannequins to other forms of museum display practice is a something I am working to unpack and continue researching. I have been so interested in the relationship to anthropological display, I haven’t given much thought to how the mannequins might relate to classical plasters. The National Gallery was however, definitely still part of the United States National Museum in 1914, and I think that might an incredibly fruitful line of investigation. Thank you for your question! I look forward to working towards an answer as I continue to develop the project.
@emilymazzola that all sounds great! I’ll have to keep an eye out for your work at future conferences as you continue to develop and research the project, as it sounds like it will be fascinating.
Dear Emily,
I am unfortunately only attending parts of this conference and mostly late in the evenings and am so glad that I stumbled across your talk. I was very thought provoking, I liked the clear analysis and the consistent conclusions. I just learned a lot. I am wondering, are there other museum spaces that you are also looking at in your work as examples next to the First Ladies Hall?
Jacklyn Lacey (American Museum of Natural History, US) Putting Joseph Towles’ name in the credit line: institutional racism at the American Museum of Natural History
When the Hall of Man in Africa (now the Hall of African Peoples) opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1968, it was highly acclaimed. Critics and audiences hailed its efforts to tell African histories removed from the leering gaze of Eurocentric racial hierarchies. The Curator of African Ethnology indicated to the press that a major motivation in hall’s curation was to provide a place where New York City’s African American schoolchildren could find a “justifiable sense of pride in their heritage.” This was a relatively radical idea of inclusion and representation for the time, particularly in an institution like AMNH where the entirety of the paid curatorial staff was (and largely still is) white.
The space between the stated ideals of the gallery and the institutional history of the museum is filled with great tension. While the British, white, Oxford-trained social anthropologist Colin Turnbull was the curator of record for the hall, his partner, Joseph Towles, an African American man from Virginia, was a significant contributor. In particular, Towles led the development of a significant section of the hall that discussed the African American experience – likely the first inclusion of the Diaspora in a major ethnological museum display in North America and Europe. Towles’ curation of this section was informed by his own family’s history in Virginia, where several of his ancestors had been enslaved persons. During the time that Towles spent working without official compensation on the hall, several members of the Anthropology staff who were white supremacists conspired to curtail Towles’ access to their department. Turnbull and Towles left the museum and New York City after the Hall was officially opened due to this hostility and racism. Towles went on to earn his doctorate in Anthropology from Makerere University.
In this work, I examine the story of Towles and Turnbull while exploring how the Hall’s activation through museum audiences and critical reception has changed across more than 50 years of social history. I juxtapose these histories while parsing the concept of institutionalized racism through a series of specific acts of racism perpetrated against one individual. I revisit the tense spaces between what the Hall of Man in Africa symbolically activated in the exhibition’s triumphal opening in 1968, and the confusing and often disconcerting exhibition artifact the Hall has aged into overtime.
Jacklyn Grace Lacey is Senior Museum Specialist of African and Pacific Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she has been a member of the Anthropology Division since 2011. Her work at AMNH analyzes museum discourses on African culture and technology. Her recent work is exploring the intersections of infectious disease epidemiology, medical anthropology and the environmental humanities. She recently was named to the Editorial Board of the American Anthropologist, the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal. She received funding from the Carter Center to create a multicultural, multilingual curriculum (“Politics, People & Pathogens”) connecting these topics to the ongoing special exhibition about disease eradication at AMNH, “Countdown to Zero.” She partners with medical practitioners describing the methods and politics of syncretic healing traditions in Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, as well as in Polynesia, the Caribbean and in American diaspora communities. An active museum educator, she has been a mentor in the AMNH Science Research Mentorship Program (SRMP) for 9 years, as well as a curriculum writer and educator in the Lang and ASP educational initiatives at AMNH. A recent publication of particular interest to exhibition histories, “Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50” in Anthropology Now, is a multidisciplinary look at the curation history and context of this historically significant and contested permanent museum exhibition.
Comments
Wonderful presentation Patricio del Real! I very much enjoyed your critical analysis of the MoMA exhibition and the role of Modernism and Modernist Architecture as a carrier of political meanings. I particularly appreciated your conclusion, ”Modernism traveled as a form of whiteness, exotic and colorful but whiteness (a tropical whiteness, as you said)”, it speaks about an architectural language that is very much representative of Western culture and used as a standard for evaluating aesthetics. Thank you for your presentation.
Dear Patricio,
Thank you for sharing your fascinating research. I very much enjoyed your gendered reading of two spaces of the exhibition, as well as your focus on race and pot plants (!) I’ve been tracking pot plants in mid-century museum exhibitions too, so I was delighted to be introduced to these! I have to say I was also very impressed with the way you carefully led us through your slides with the drawing tool. Is that just in powerpoint or…?
My question is about the role of the architect/trustee Philip L. Goodwin. Was it common for trustees to be given curatorial and design control at MOMA and other institutions during this time, do you know? What are the impacts of opening museum curating and design to these figures do you think? I’m interested in the role of trustees in museums in the UK in this time – their input ranges from dictatorial to non-existent, but, in my experience, by the 1940s, the ones who do take on these more active roles are often working in smaller institutions where the curators have very little training. Your perspectives would be gratefully received. Thanks again, Claire Wintle
Thank you Patricio for sharing this excellent presentation. Your focus on the actual experience of viewing the exhibition was great – in your vivid walk through and particularly the relationship with the photography exhibition, which, as you show, is so revealing of the wider agendas at the time. Your reference to the exhibition being described as enticing propaganda stayed with me because I especially liked your attention to both as interconnected elements in this presentation. Looking forward to seeing the book!
Dear Jacklyn, thanks so much for your presentation and acknowledgement of Joseph Towles. It was very moving to me and a good call to action. I very much appreciated how you positioned yourself being a white person and within the tension of your limitations and ethical obligations. I can very much relate to this struggle and your way of framing it really resonated with me. I was wondering about if you know the Research Center for Material Culture situated at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands (probably you do), I am very lucky to be there at the moment and witness that this is a place where they also try to fight institutional racism from within the institution. Maybe this is also interesting for you…
Dear Jacklyn,
Thank you so much for sharing your rich research and using your curatorial skills in the presentation! I really enjoyed and learned. I was curious if are planning on an exhibition on Jo. If so, how would be your approach different? and how/where would you frame him?
I must echo the above compliments of and gratitude for your rich, nuanced, and thoughtful presentation.
I wanted to join the conversation around Jona’s question about institutional self-critique and transparency. Jona, I very much enjoyed your presentation in Panel 1, and plan to respond to it in that forum. (Like Jacklyn, I work at AMNH.) I think there is a world of research in analysis of the “meta” exhibit. I am particularly interested in how such exhibitions emerge, the circumstances in which they are developed, and the narratives they tell and do not tell.
I think, as you suggest, Jona, that these exhibits often only address issues that are already visible or in the public eye. I am certain there are examples where this is not the case, but it seems to me, in my knowledge of the field, that institutional behemoths with dated, problematic collections or exhibits often strive to protect their institutional image (and donors) more than push the boundaries of critique and what is known. Again, while I am certain there are exceptions, I think we have seen smaller institutions are often at the forefront of pushing the narrative toward difficult truth-telling.
Corrie, thank you!
I agree, it seems that the larger an institution is, the more weighs its structure, the politics, the negotiation with different stakeholders. I wonder whether there is a difference owing the different funding models, in Germany, museums are much less reliant on donors, in theory this should make things easier, but, as has come up elsewhere: always a question of how serious an institution is about reflexions and actual self-critique…
An interesting example is “Zurückgeschaut”: since 2017, the exhibit is part of the permanent exhibition at a (very) small local museum in Berlin-Treptow, addresses as one of the first museums, if not the first, the ‘Erste Deutsche Kolonialausstellung’ that took place as part of the Berliner Gewerbeschau in 1896 and its lasting legacies. (This is a review — the show had its own website, but is displaying an error-note http://zurueckgeschaut.de/
An important, devastating exhibition, but another dimension of visibility here, the museum is so tucked away, that few visitors will just chance upon the exhibit…
Thank you, Emily, for your fascinating presentation on elite white femininity as enacted through the development of the First Ladies exhibition! Given the ongoing popularity of that exhibit, it’s important to interrogate its gendered, racial framework.
Since you discuss the connection intersection between classicism and elite white femininity, you might be interested in Joanna Bosse’s Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland (if you have heard of it, apologies for the repetition). It’s about contemporary ballroom dance classes rather than museum exhibitions, but she similarly observes how whiteness is conflated and erased/rendered normative with and through classicism in ballroom dance practices, from the kinds of costumes worn to the adjectives used to describe the moves.
I was also curious about any potential connection with art museum practices at the time, more specifically if there’s any relationship between the ivory plaster mannequins used for the initial iteration of the First Ladies exhibit and the custom of displaying plaster casts of famous classical sculptures in American art museums. Plaster casts were admittedly falling out of favor by the time the First Ladies exhibit went up, so maybe not, but I wanted to ask.
Anyway, your presentation has me thinking about a lot of things, so thank you for sharing such interesting work!
Dear Sara,
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch my presentation. I am not familiar with Bosse’s work but I greatly appreciate you letting me know about it, it is on its way to now.
The relationship of the ivory plaster mannequins to other forms of museum display practice is a something I am working to unpack and continue researching. I have been so interested in the relationship to anthropological display, I haven’t given much thought to how the mannequins might relate to classical plasters. The National Gallery was however, definitely still part of the United States National Museum in 1914, and I think that might an incredibly fruitful line of investigation. Thank you for your question! I look forward to working towards an answer as I continue to develop the project.
@emilymazzola that all sounds great! I’ll have to keep an eye out for your work at future conferences as you continue to develop and research the project, as it sounds like it will be fascinating.
Dear Emily,
I am unfortunately only attending parts of this conference and mostly late in the evenings and am so glad that I stumbled across your talk. I was very thought provoking, I liked the clear analysis and the consistent conclusions. I just learned a lot. I am wondering, are there other museum spaces that you are also looking at in your work as examples next to the First Ladies Hall?
Jacklyn Lacey (American Museum of Natural History, US) Putting Joseph Towles’ name in the credit line: institutional racism at the American Museum of Natural History
When the Hall of Man in Africa (now the Hall of African Peoples) opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1968, it was highly acclaimed. Critics and audiences hailed its efforts to tell African histories removed from the leering gaze of Eurocentric racial hierarchies. The Curator of African Ethnology indicated to the press that a major motivation in hall’s curation was to provide a place where New York City’s African American schoolchildren could find a “justifiable sense of pride in their heritage.” This was a relatively radical idea of inclusion and representation for the time, particularly in an institution like AMNH where the entirety of the paid curatorial staff was (and largely still is) white.
The space between the stated ideals of the gallery and the institutional history of the museum is filled with great tension. While the British, white, Oxford-trained social anthropologist Colin Turnbull was the curator of record for the hall, his partner, Joseph Towles, an African American man from Virginia, was a significant contributor. In particular, Towles led the development of a significant section of the hall that discussed the African American experience – likely the first inclusion of the Diaspora in a major ethnological museum display in North America and Europe. Towles’ curation of this section was informed by his own family’s history in Virginia, where several of his ancestors had been enslaved persons. During the time that Towles spent working without official compensation on the hall, several members of the Anthropology staff who were white supremacists conspired to curtail Towles’ access to their department. Turnbull and Towles left the museum and New York City after the Hall was officially opened due to this hostility and racism. Towles went on to earn his doctorate in Anthropology from Makerere University.
In this work, I examine the story of Towles and Turnbull while exploring how the Hall’s activation through museum audiences and critical reception has changed across more than 50 years of social history. I juxtapose these histories while parsing the concept of institutionalized racism through a series of specific acts of racism perpetrated against one individual. I revisit the tense spaces between what the Hall of Man in Africa symbolically activated in the exhibition’s triumphal opening in 1968, and the confusing and often disconcerting exhibition artifact the Hall has aged into overtime.
Jacklyn Grace Lacey is Senior Museum Specialist of African and Pacific Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she has been a member of the Anthropology Division since 2011. Her work at AMNH analyzes museum discourses on African culture and technology. Her recent work is exploring the intersections of infectious disease epidemiology, medical anthropology and the environmental humanities. She recently was named to the Editorial Board of the American Anthropologist, the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal. She received funding from the Carter Center to create a multicultural, multilingual curriculum (“Politics, People & Pathogens”) connecting these topics to the ongoing special exhibition about disease eradication at AMNH, “Countdown to Zero.” She partners with medical practitioners describing the methods and politics of syncretic healing traditions in Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, as well as in Polynesia, the Caribbean and in American diaspora communities. An active museum educator, she has been a mentor in the AMNH Science Research Mentorship Program (SRMP) for 9 years, as well as a curriculum writer and educator in the Lang and ASP educational initiatives at AMNH. A recent publication of particular interest to exhibition histories, “Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50” in Anthropology Now, is a multidisciplinary look at the curation history and context of this historically significant and contested permanent museum exhibition.
Comments
Wonderful presentation Patricio del Real! I very much enjoyed your critical analysis of the MoMA exhibition and the role of Modernism and Modernist Architecture as a carrier of political meanings. I particularly appreciated your conclusion, ”Modernism traveled as a form of whiteness, exotic and colorful but whiteness (a tropical whiteness, as you said)”, it speaks about an architectural language that is very much representative of Western culture and used as a standard for evaluating aesthetics. Thank you for your presentation.
Dear Patricio,
Thank you for sharing your fascinating research. I very much enjoyed your gendered reading of two spaces of the exhibition, as well as your focus on race and pot plants (!) I’ve been tracking pot plants in mid-century museum exhibitions too, so I was delighted to be introduced to these! I have to say I was also very impressed with the way you carefully led us through your slides with the drawing tool. Is that just in powerpoint or…?
My question is about the role of the architect/trustee Philip L. Goodwin. Was it common for trustees to be given curatorial and design control at MOMA and other institutions during this time, do you know? What are the impacts of opening museum curating and design to these figures do you think? I’m interested in the role of trustees in museums in the UK in this time – their input ranges from dictatorial to non-existent, but, in my experience, by the 1940s, the ones who do take on these more active roles are often working in smaller institutions where the curators have very little training. Your perspectives would be gratefully received. Thanks again, Claire Wintle
Thank you Patricio for sharing this excellent presentation. Your focus on the actual experience of viewing the exhibition was great – in your vivid walk through and particularly the relationship with the photography exhibition, which, as you show, is so revealing of the wider agendas at the time. Your reference to the exhibition being described as enticing propaganda stayed with me because I especially liked your attention to both as interconnected elements in this presentation. Looking forward to seeing the book!
Dear Jacklyn, thanks so much for your presentation and acknowledgement of Joseph Towles. It was very moving to me and a good call to action. I very much appreciated how you positioned yourself being a white person and within the tension of your limitations and ethical obligations. I can very much relate to this struggle and your way of framing it really resonated with me. I was wondering about if you know the Research Center for Material Culture situated at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands (probably you do), I am very lucky to be there at the moment and witness that this is a place where they also try to fight institutional racism from within the institution. Maybe this is also interesting for you…
Dear Jacklyn,
Thank you so much for sharing your rich research and using your curatorial skills in the presentation! I really enjoyed and learned. I was curious if are planning on an exhibition on Jo. If so, how would be your approach different? and how/where would you frame him?
I must echo the above compliments of and gratitude for your rich, nuanced, and thoughtful presentation.
I wanted to join the conversation around Jona’s question about institutional self-critique and transparency. Jona, I very much enjoyed your presentation in Panel 1, and plan to respond to it in that forum. (Like Jacklyn, I work at AMNH.) I think there is a world of research in analysis of the “meta” exhibit. I am particularly interested in how such exhibitions emerge, the circumstances in which they are developed, and the narratives they tell and do not tell.
I think, as you suggest, Jona, that these exhibits often only address issues that are already visible or in the public eye. I am certain there are examples where this is not the case, but it seems to me, in my knowledge of the field, that institutional behemoths with dated, problematic collections or exhibits often strive to protect their institutional image (and donors) more than push the boundaries of critique and what is known. Again, while I am certain there are exceptions, I think we have seen smaller institutions are often at the forefront of pushing the narrative toward difficult truth-telling.
Corrie, thank you!
I agree, it seems that the larger an institution is, the more weighs its structure, the politics, the negotiation with different stakeholders. I wonder whether there is a difference owing the different funding models, in Germany, museums are much less reliant on donors, in theory this should make things easier, but, as has come up elsewhere: always a question of how serious an institution is about reflexions and actual self-critique…
An interesting example is “Zurückgeschaut”: since 2017, the exhibit is part of the permanent exhibition at a (very) small local museum in Berlin-Treptow, addresses as one of the first museums, if not the first, the ‘Erste Deutsche Kolonialausstellung’ that took place as part of the Berliner Gewerbeschau in 1896 and its lasting legacies. (This is a review — the show had its own website, but is displaying an error-note http://zurueckgeschaut.de/
An important, devastating exhibition, but another dimension of visibility here, the museum is so tucked away, that few visitors will just chance upon the exhibit…
Thank you, Emily, for your fascinating presentation on elite white femininity as enacted through the development of the First Ladies exhibition! Given the ongoing popularity of that exhibit, it’s important to interrogate its gendered, racial framework.
Since you discuss the connection intersection between classicism and elite white femininity, you might be interested in Joanna Bosse’s Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland (if you have heard of it, apologies for the repetition). It’s about contemporary ballroom dance classes rather than museum exhibitions, but she similarly observes how whiteness is conflated and erased/rendered normative with and through classicism in ballroom dance practices, from the kinds of costumes worn to the adjectives used to describe the moves.
I was also curious about any potential connection with art museum practices at the time, more specifically if there’s any relationship between the ivory plaster mannequins used for the initial iteration of the First Ladies exhibit and the custom of displaying plaster casts of famous classical sculptures in American art museums. Plaster casts were admittedly falling out of favor by the time the First Ladies exhibit went up, so maybe not, but I wanted to ask.
Anyway, your presentation has me thinking about a lot of things, so thank you for sharing such interesting work!
Dear Sara,
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch my presentation. I am not familiar with Bosse’s work but I greatly appreciate you letting me know about it, it is on its way to now.
The relationship of the ivory plaster mannequins to other forms of museum display practice is a something I am working to unpack and continue researching. I have been so interested in the relationship to anthropological display, I haven’t given much thought to how the mannequins might relate to classical plasters. The National Gallery was however, definitely still part of the United States National Museum in 1914, and I think that might an incredibly fruitful line of investigation. Thank you for your question! I look forward to working towards an answer as I continue to develop the project.
@emilymazzola that all sounds great! I’ll have to keep an eye out for your work at future conferences as you continue to develop and research the project, as it sounds like it will be fascinating.
Dear Emily,
I am unfortunately only attending parts of this conference and mostly late in the evenings and am so glad that I stumbled across your talk. I was very thought provoking, I liked the clear analysis and the consistent conclusions. I just learned a lot. I am wondering, are there other museum spaces that you are also looking at in your work as examples next to the First Ladies Hall?