Curator’s Corner: Highlights from the Diaspora
by Bethani Blake

Writer, scholar and literary critic, Ralph Ellison wrote, “I am an invisible

man… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or

figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

The tension between visibility and invisibility pervades the latest selections on

view in the John H. Motley Study, featuring works from the permanent

collection of both The Amistad Center for Art & Culture and the Wadsworth

Atheneum Museum of Art. Surveying the Afro-American landscape, each artist

examines a specific moment in the historical canon and how it has informed

their individual experiences in the United States. Moody and challenging,

this installation urges viewers to consider the remarkable agency of Black

Americans in response to cruelty.

Anne Dunbar’s Portrait Bust of Cinque remains one of the most important

objects from the Randolph Linsly Simpson collection in how it defines the

role of The Amistad Center: to provide visibility and context for those who

have been excluded throughout history. Actualized at Yale University in 1932,

this bust of Sengbe Pieh—commonly referred to as Joseph Cinque—memorializes

the Mende man who led the 1839 uprising on La Amistad slave ship. The

violence of overtaking a crew of seamen, two Cuban plantation owners, and one

biracially Black cook with sugar cane machetes was a response to one of the

most nefarious impositions: the transatlantic slave trade. To further expose

the abhorrent conditions in which forcefully captured Africans emigrated to

the West Indies and America, I have paired this bust with a slave ship

lithograph published in New York City. The US practice of enslaving people

from Africa was made illegal on 1 January, 1808, yet this print is dated 1836

suggesting an abolitionist agenda. But what I find most provocative about

Dunbar’s bust is her realizing of Pieh’s humanity, transforming the famed

1840 mezzotint print by Nathaniel Jocelyn into tangible non-fiction and

recognized personhood which exists now as freestanding plaster, a testament

to Black resilience when faced with inhumanity.

Although the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in the early 19th

century, the American economy continued to thrive under enslaved labor.

JPMorgan Chase released a statement in 2005 acknowledging their role in

enslavement as they would hold over thirteen-thousand enslaved African

Americans as collateral for loans between 1831 and 1865. Referencing the

historical commodification of Black bodies and labor, collaborators Hank

Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev created three “credit cards” highlighting

systemic racism that is very much embedded into the economy. Thomas and

Alexiev pair familiar banking iconography with the intentional use of numbers

that recall specific dates in the historical canon such as the recorded startdate of

slavery and cardholder names including William Lynch, Christopher

Columbus, and Thomas himself. Lorna Simpson’s Counting also addresses

issues of Black labor and enslavement. Through the process of

photogravure, an intaglio print-making process which produces tonally

conscious, smooth prints, Simpson sets an anonymous Black figure above

a South Carolina smokehouse once used to house the enslaved, and a

protective hair style. She has integrated text, which is poetically

vague, possibly suggesting the amount of time and physical labor that

has been imposed upon visible, yet unidentifiable Black subjects and

ambiguous sites connected to enslavement. These works, juxtaposed with

Glenn Ligon’s Runaways series, create an interesting commentary on the

systems that have shaped the Black experience in America. Runaways are

a portfolio of ten prints adapted from 19th century runaway slave

advertisements, published by plantation owners to recover enslaved

people who escaped captivity. The language seen on each print were

written by the artist’s friends who were asked to write as if they

were filling out a missing person’s report on Ligon himself, and the

typography and graphics are appropriated from preexisting newspaper

ads and anti-slavery materials.

Ashante Kindle, Carrie Mae Weems, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Richard Hunt are

also included in this rotation with works that offset the heavier themes of

enslavement. Kindle’s Dark & Lovely (Nocturnal Grace) critiques dangerous

beauty products which disproportionately affect Afro-women and Weems

deconstructs societal assumptions about dysfunctional family structures by

centering the loving bonds she shares with hers. Most notably, pantomime

performance meets photography in Lyle Ashton Harris’ Americas: Kym, Lyle &

Crinoline where the artist challenges the complicated hierarchies of skin

tone and social constructs around sexuality. But it is Ligon, however, who

brings us back with White #15, a text-based stencil painting which features

nearly illegible text. Ligon includes excerpts from Richard Dyer’s essays on

the invisibility of whiteness—as in being white makes one the invisible

default causing non-white racialized groups to become the visible “other”.

This, combined with text from Ellison’s 1947 novel The Invisible Man is

incredibly profound as Ligon has ironically obscured Ellison’s words with his

clever use of black paint leaving the act of seeing deeper up to the viewer.