Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: Now this comes up pretty often on this show.
Speaker: The fact that Black American decorative arts have often been overlooked.
Speaker: They don't always fit neatly into established narratives.
Speaker: The scholarship around it can pose unique challenges, and until recently the whole category has often just been frankly dismissed by many scholars and collectors and dealers.
Speaker: But times change, and the last few years have seen a surge of interest in Black American craftspeople.
Speaker: Now as a dealer, I see this in the marketplace with, for example, pieces of silver by black silversmith Peter Benson, which suddenly achieve auction results 10 times higher than what they might have made a few years ago.
Speaker: We've talked about these trends on curious objects before, and they're clear, not just in the market, but also in journals, publications, exhibitions, where we've seen this explosion of interest.
Speaker: And now, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there's a new exhibition called Fighting for Freedom, Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence.
Speaker: It's organized by the Daughters of the American Revolution in partnership with the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive.
Speaker: You can see it now at the Daughters of the American Revolution, and over the next few years it's going to travel to numerous museums across the country.
Speaker: And if you're a long time Curious Objects listener, you will recognize some of the folks involved.
Speaker: The editors of the exhibition catalog are Torin Gatson, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who came on Curious Objects previously to talk about a North Carolina fireback.
Speaker: There's Tiffany Moeman, who's been on Curious Objects before discussing a very unusual chair from Louisiana, which is actually included in this exhibition.
Speaker: And there's William Strolo, curator of exhibitions at the DAR, who has never before been on Curious Objects, but I'm thrilled to welcome him and all three of them to join me today.
Speaker: So William, welcome.
Speaker: And Torrin and Tiffany, welcome back to Curious Objects.
Speaker: Hi, thanks for having us.
Speaker: Yes, thank you.
Speaker: Glad to be here.
Speaker: So I don't normally have three guests at the same time.
Speaker: And I think the usual rapid fire questions would just be chaos.
Speaker: Plus we have a lot to get to and talk about.
Speaker: So instead, let me just ask each of you for starters to tell us in just 30 seconds or so about the one object that you're personally most happy or most excited to have been able to include in this exhibition.
Speaker: And maybe we can start with you, Tiffany.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So the object that I am most in love with in the exhibition is, of course, the bid made by a cabinetmaker named Lewis Buckner from Sevier County, Tennessee.
Speaker: The bid has a date on it of 1889.
Speaker: But what I love most about this bid is, well, number one, I'm a native Tennessean.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Two, it is, it's beautiful.
Speaker: It is one of the most gorgeous beds I have ever seen.
Speaker: And the way that Buckner went about making this bed with all of its engravings from his extensive use of a punch to get shapes into the bed.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's just beautiful.
Speaker: And when you, when you take a look at it, it is a showstopper for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely eye-catching.
Speaker: What about you, Torrin?
Speaker: For me, it would be a small, but as I identify, mighty daguerreotype, so a small image of a young white sitter.
Speaker: And the photo was captured by a man named Augustus Washington.
Speaker: And so Augustus Washington is...
Speaker: probably one of the most preeminent folks in America who does not necessarily have the acclaim.
Speaker: And so Augustus Washington grows up in the North, is educated in part at Dartmouth College, but ends up leaving the university because they were unable to pay for tuition and through a series of events gets into taking photographs.
Speaker: And so this image,
Speaker: that is captured shows Augustus Washington not only as an entrepreneur and a business owner, but it also kind of through a window gleans into the more monumental impact because Augustus Washington, believe it or not, is actually the person who captured the very famous stills of John Brown, which are currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in his four-print still.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: while people know of that image, they don't necessarily know about who took it.
Speaker: And for us to be able to highlight Augustus Washington and all of his work and the work that we have, which is featured on display, actually has his stamped gallery just inside on red velvet.
Speaker: This is Washington Gallery.
Speaker: So for me, it's a story that opens up and blossoms into a lot of what is American history.
Speaker: Gosh, that's fantastic.
Speaker: How about you, William?
Speaker: I think for me, one of the pieces that's very interesting in the show is the armoire we have on loan from the historic New Orleans collection made by Dutraud Bourgeon, who is a Haitian refugee who comes to New Orleans and learns the cabinet making trade from another country.
Speaker: cabinetmaker of color and you know the construction inside of it is fascinating looking at you know how barjon measured out the piece marked it up um where i mean all the various elements go together based on on how he kind of methodically planned this piece out and just the elegance overall elegance of it it's a massive it's a large armoire and then also that you know i think it's interesting that he's coming to america
Speaker: and is being taught by another cabinetmaker of color.
Speaker: And he then takes that tradition and passes it on to his son, who then takes up the trade after he leaves the country and goes to Paris.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Well, those are all great objects, and I am very excited to get to today's specific curious objects.
Speaker: But first, just a couple of quick notes.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: I am devastated to be bidding Adia to my longtime producer and editor, Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Sammy was there at the very first meeting we ever had about creating this show before it was even called Curious Objects.
Speaker: And he has been a central part of bringing it to life and shepherding through all these years and all these many, many episodes.
Speaker: Sammy, you've made me and my guests sound much better than we had any right to, and I couldn't have done it without you.
Speaker: So wishing you all the best with your next chapter.
Speaker: Listeners, I want to say thank you to you also for listening, whether this is your first ever episode or your hundredth.
Speaker: Yes, we're well over a hundred episodes now.
Speaker: Your energy is what keeps this show alive and, frankly, what makes it fun for me to do.
Speaker: And I love to hear from you, whether that's on Instagram at Objective Interest or via email at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: I'm afraid our responses have been a little slower than usual lately, but we're doing our best to catch up, so please keep those messages coming.
Speaker: I love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker: Also, if you'd like to support the show, we don't ask for money, but the ratings and reviews that you leave us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify especially are, well, they're both lovely to read and also helpful for convincing the algorithms to send us new listeners.
Speaker: So thank you very much for that.
Speaker: Now, our curious object today is a table.
Speaker: It's a breakfast table.
Speaker: And for starters, I wonder if one of you can tell me what makes a table a breakfast table.
Speaker: This particular table is what we call a Pembroke table.
Speaker: And if you were to stand in front of it, the tabletop is in...
Speaker: three pieces.
Speaker: So you have this central slab on top and then the two sides that fold down.
Speaker: And then they are supported underneath to be held up by these wedges.
Speaker: So these pieces hinge out and then hold the sides of the tabletop up.
Speaker: And it rests on these four long legs that end in this Terry Paul foot, this claw foot with casters underneath of it.
Speaker: And in between there are pillars that hold up the tabletop from the legs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this table was made in Virginia.
Speaker: And tell me, what are the elements of it, the material, the style, construction that can point toward that Virginia origin?
Speaker: So the table was made in Norfolk around 1819, and the woods consist of mahogany, poplar, white pine, and sycamore.
Speaker: It's also painted green and has some gold gilt in it as well.
Speaker: And we know that this comes from a shop in Virginia because of the archival record.
Speaker: So that really is the telling fact for us here that the table was made in the shop of James Woodward and was... Hold on, I'm blinking on the name now.
Speaker: Tiffany, do you remember offhand?
Speaker: It was sold to Humberston Skipwith.
Speaker: And he lived in.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And he lived on the Prestwood plantation in Mecklenburg County.
Speaker: And so he gets a suite of furniture from James Woodward and it included this table.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we're talking about Norfolk, Virginia, right in 1819.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So tell me about this James Woodward cabinetmaker.
Speaker: What do we know about his business and the shop that he was running?
Speaker: Well, we know a lot about him actually, thanks to research from various scholars over the years.
Speaker: And so James Woodward was one of the most prolific cabinet makers there in Norfolk in that time period.
Speaker: And, you know, his shop was massive.
Speaker: It was so massive that when he passed away in 1839, there were over 125 pieces of furniture in his inventory.
Speaker: So we know that this is a very large operation.
Speaker: We know that he starts making furniture in the neoclassical style early on in his career and that he's providing furniture to some of the best folks, the best, I'll say, more well-to-known folks there.
Speaker: in Norfolk.
Speaker: And what we know is that he also used enslaved labor in his shop, and that points directly to the labor of an enslaved cabinetmaker named James, who is one of the many hands that contributed to this table.
Speaker: Yeah, so I want to get to James here in just a second.
Speaker: And first, I'm just curious, you mentioned that we know that this table came from this shop in 1819, and we know the very unusual name of the person who bought it.
Speaker: It's quite uncommon to have that kind of documentation with a piece of furniture from this period, isn't it?
Speaker: Oh, for sure.
Speaker: And yeah, that's not something that you see very often.
Speaker: But with that documentation and with a comparison of this particular table to other furniture pieces from Woodward's shop, it's a pretty strong attribution.
Speaker: And now you mentioned that Woodward had enslaved labor in his shop.
Speaker: It was a very large shop.
Speaker: Presumably there were numerous workers there.
Speaker: Do you have much of a sense of what the balance was?
Speaker: How many enslaved craftspeople might there have been?
Speaker: How many free craftspeople there might have been?
Speaker: Just paint a picture for me.
Speaker: What kind of business was this?
Speaker: So that is one of those things that I would love to find out.
Speaker: And it could be a situation where there's just more research needed there, because that could really tell us more about the dynamic of some of these early cabinet shops.
Speaker: It's one of those questions that's always burning at the back of my mind.
Speaker: But, you know, due to limitations in the archive, we can never sort of pinpoint
Speaker: exact numbers and who was here when and things change and all of those sorts of things.
Speaker: But I will say that, you know, when Woodward begins to advertise his cabinet making business in a newspaper down in Norfolk,
Speaker: He talks about some of the men that he has working in his shop and he said, quote, he had workmen who could execute all orders equal to any importation.
Speaker: So what's happening in that shop, it's very, very skilled labor in that shop.
Speaker: And we'll talk about this in detail a little bit later.
Speaker: But Woodward often refers to James as a journeyman cabinetmaker.
Speaker: and not an apprentice, you know, sort of as a testament to his skill.
Speaker: And just, sorry, just to clarify for listeners, so an apprentice is sort of someone who's being schooled in the arts, and then a journeyman is someone who's completed that apprenticeship, you know, traditionally and is sort of on their way to potentially becoming a master, right?
Speaker: Yep, that's exactly right.
Speaker: So James, as a journeyman, is above that apprenticeship level and is required to work independently, think independently, follow instructions and design plans and all things of that nature.
Speaker: So let's talk a little more about James.
Speaker: So he was effectively, I was going to say apprentice, but not apprentice.
Speaker: I mean, he really was sort of a full on skilled laborer of the sort that if he weren't enslaved, you might have to pay a lot of money and wages to somebody with those skills, right?
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: And for James, the records show that he is initially a part of this system known as the hiring out process where individuals can work for other individuals, not their primary enslaver.
Speaker: and are sometimes paid wages.
Speaker: However, you know, through the institution of enslavement and it's all of its peculiarities, at times that money went directly to the owner.
Speaker: But at times you did see enslaved people who were able to generate revenue.
Speaker: And so James was hired out to James Woodward, trying to keep the Jameses together.
Speaker: But James, the enslaved, was hired.
Speaker: excuse me, hired out by his owner, Elizabeth Bailey.
Speaker: And so, you know, this kind of doubles down, though, on an earlier comment to just how bustling of a shop you could have, and one could argue for the need for extra help, skilled help and skilled labor in an already moving shop.
Speaker: Yeah, so tell me more about this arrangement, because it's quite unusual.
Speaker: And it's, well, maybe not unusual, but it's maybe a little bit contrary to what people may think of or intuit about slave and owner relationships.
Speaker: Because this is more of a complex sort of financial situation than just the one-dimensional, you know, this person owns that person and has full control over everything they do, right?
Speaker: Yes, it is definitely a much more complex situation.
Speaker: And this is just an excellent window into how nuanced in certain cases the institution of enslavement could be, but also for craftspeople who have the skill and the proficiency to add another layer that changes the dynamic of how we look at enslavement.
Speaker: And so for the case of
Speaker: of the enslaved man James, he's being hired out undoubtedly for his skill to James Woodward, who has the shop.
Speaker: But James, as was mentioned, the enslaved was a journeyman cabinetmaker, meaning that he would have been through a period of time where he did apprentice, learned skills, and became highly developed.
Speaker: Now, where the plot thickens, so to speak, is that it appears that the enslaved man James
Speaker: enters into another subcontract with James Woodward, his then person who he was reporting to being hired out.
Speaker: So you could say, you know, potentially with air quotes, his enslaver to buy himself and then repay the debt in one year.
Speaker: where he would work as a journeyman cabinetmaker.
Speaker: So here you have an enslaved person entering into a contractual agreement and ergo obligation with their then enslaver through another contract to ultimately secure freedom.
Speaker: And I think it's a great example of how, one, the great lengths to which individuals went through to secure their freedom, but also
Speaker: just how intricate and complex, again, as you mentioned, the institution of enslavement could be.
Speaker: This is fascinating.
Speaker: James Woodward, the cabinetmaker, loaned money to the enslaved James in order to buy his freedom from his owner, Elizabeth Bailey.
Speaker: James Woodward essentially pays the enslaved James to be able to free himself, emancipate himself from her.
Speaker: What does he get in exchange for that?
Speaker: He had to essentially indenture himself, but work for a year in James Woodward's shop.
Speaker: So James Woodward was getting a year's worth of labor for the price of emancipating the enslaved James.
Speaker: And it makes me wonder, I mean, why would James Woodward not simply have purchased James for himself?
Speaker: That's a great question.
Speaker: And again, it's another one of those, when you look at this agreement between all of the parties here, it's another one of those that also makes you wonder why Woodward wouldn't have done that.
Speaker: I mean, it could be a host of reasons, right, as to why Woodward didn't want to enter into an agreement where he owned someone and their labor as well.
Speaker: Tell me a little about that.
Speaker: I mean, what are some of the reasons you could imagine for that?
Speaker: that Woodward might not have wanted to own him.
Speaker: I think there's a lot happening here.
Speaker: And when we think about the nature of enslavement during this period of time, when we think about what's happening in these shops, it could have may well been that
Speaker: Woodward did not want to function as an enslaver.
Speaker: It could be that, you know, it's hard to tell.
Speaker: Maybe there was some type of an affinity relationship between the two men.
Speaker: And Woodward, you know, was on board with James becoming a free man and a free cabinetmaker.
Speaker: So it sort of gets into all of those, I wonder,
Speaker: types of questions, but I really do think that those are very good questions, right?
Speaker: Because it's getting us to think about the dynamics of these relationships.
Speaker: It gets us to really thinking about how sometimes complicated people are.
Speaker: And it really makes us sort of ask new questions about all of these old objects.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, isn't that such a common property of all kinds of antiques and historic decorative arts?
Speaker: You know, they're always...
Speaker: some answerable questions and then usually a lot of unanswerable questions and you kind of have to to lean into your imagination to to fill in some of those gaps right absolutely
Speaker: Yeah, and I'll just say, you know, we talked about, as I mentioned earlier, and this notion of the fluidity of the situation between the enslaved man, James, and the shop owner, James Woodward.
Speaker: But when we really look at time in the 19th century, and particularly in this time,
Speaker: It's not uncommon for there to be a very fluid mix or interchangeable mix of individuals working in these shops.
Speaker: And I think that that's something that is another reason why this object is very important as we dissect it and pull it apart for its kind of cultural references that
Speaker: You know, it perhaps is very conceivable because we have other objects in our exhibition that do speak to this where you have a shop where the owner has enslaved free people of color and white people all working in this group together.
Speaker: And so when you think about that in context, then you're able to envision a system or a shop or a business where perhaps an enslaver doesn't need a particular person to be enslaved to benefit from their labor and skill, you know, while that said person who was formerly enslaved may also benefit financially.
Speaker: So how would an enslaved person like James have ended up in a cabinet making shop like this in the first place?
Speaker: I mean, as we've talked about, this is highly skilled labor.
Speaker: You look at this table and it's incredibly sophisticated work, at least to my naive eye.
Speaker: I mean, it's on par with
Speaker: the best furniture that you'd find coming out of places like Philadelphia or New York, or maybe it's even in some ways competitive with, I guess, as Woodward was advertising, competitive with imported furniture from Europe.
Speaker: I mean, these are deep, deep levels of skill.
Speaker: that required presumably many, many years of work and experience.
Speaker: So what kind of path might an enslaved person like James have followed into being able to practice a trade like that?
Speaker: I think it depends on a lot of things, right?
Speaker: I think we have to take into the context of what life was like in Norfolk at this time period.
Speaker: You know, it's a port city.
Speaker: It's bustling.
Speaker: It's home to so many cabinet-making shops.
Speaker: And scholars have found that there were over four dozen furniture-related craftsmen working in Norfolk during this time period.
Speaker: So it's popular there, right?
Speaker: Woodworking is.
Speaker: And I think for someone like the enslaved man, James, he could have very easily picked this trade up back at his enslaver's home.
Speaker: We do know that Elizabeth Bailey's husband was a cabinetmaker as well.
Speaker: And so he could have learned from his enslavery, he could have learned from other enslaved men who lived with him on that plantation or in an urban setting.
Speaker: He could have come across it in many ways.
Speaker: And so when we think about it that way, you know, there are also just sort of eyewitness accounts from this time period that talk about
Speaker: You know, enslaved boys carrying the work bags, the tool bags of white cabinet makers as they move throughout cities like Norfolk and Charleston.
Speaker: You hear a lot of examples of cabinet makers who are also enslavers teaching young boys the craft and young enslaved boys the craft and letting it grow with them.
Speaker: Because when you think about it, if you invest that type of skill, learning and knowledge into your enslaved person, that enslaved person then begins to earn you as an enslaver money.
Speaker: So it's in your best interest in many ways to have an enslaved craftsperson that's also involved in the trades because it's another way for you to sort of make a passive income.
Speaker: So do we have any idea whether James was actually involved with this particular table or what can we infer about that?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So what we can infer about that was that he was present in that shop during this table's construction.
Speaker: We know his name.
Speaker: We know that the nature of cabinet making shops is that he was not, you know, people don't often work alone solely on one piece of furniture by themselves.
Speaker: And so for us, when we were thinking about what this object could tell us and how it could contribute to the show, one of the things that we wanted to communicate to our visitors is that while we know James's name and we know that he was present during this time,
Speaker: We also don't know who else was there with him.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, again, it raises questions about what's happening in the shop.
Speaker: It encourages people to think about how there are many, many hands involved in all of the pieces that we see in our in our museums and decorative arts exhibitions.
Speaker: And again, it really gets us thinking about who's there that we know and who also is there that we don't know of.
Speaker: Now, the piece was loaned to the exhibition by the Museum of Early Southern Record of Arts.
Speaker: What do we know about where it's been since 1819 and how it made its way from that shop in Norfolk to eventually to Mazda and now into this exhibition?
Speaker: We know from Mesda's extensive research files that the table made by James in James Woodward's shop has been with the family until roughly the 1940s when it was sold at auction.
Speaker: And with it, there's documentation at the table.
Speaker: There is a bill from the Norfolk cabinetmaker, James Woodward, to Humberston Skipwith.
Speaker: for the sale of this table.
Speaker: So we were able to say that this piece was for certain made in Woodward's shop, that it resided for certain at Elm Hill and at Prestwood, and then when it was sold, carried that story with it to auction when eventually it lands at Mesda.
Speaker: So, I'd love to hear your thinking, maybe all three of you just in general, and Tiffany, you were speaking to this a minute ago, but a number of objects in the exhibition were produced in white owned workshops.
Speaker: And that does make it difficult or even impossible to know whether a particular enslaved worker was interacting with a particular piece.
Speaker: And I mean, I guess to flip that on its head for a bit, it can also be impossible to say whether a particular white owner was involved in the production of a particular piece.
Speaker: This is something we get in silver all the time with somebody like Paul Revere, who ran a sprawling large shop and who, in many cases, probably never touched
Speaker: many of the objects that came through with his mark stamped on them.
Speaker: So it's always difficult to say exactly whose hands were on which object when.
Speaker: But I'd just be curious to hear your thoughts about how that uncertainty influences the stories that you're trying to tell.
Speaker: That's an excellent point.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: It's one that kind of underscores the value of our work because when you look at this example of James, let's if we go back for a second and just look at Norfolk from more of a demographic sense, you know, when you look at 1820, for instance, just picking a year or a time frame, so to speak, the population hovers just short, just shy of about nine thousand, about thirty three hundred of which are enslaved.
Speaker: So, you know, that's close to 30 percent of the population.
Speaker: Why that's important is because enslaved people in their presence, which we know about and are somewhat comfortable historically talking about now, it's still not fully underscored as to what that means as far as
Speaker: their importance and from the day to day aspects of a city or a shop running to the more integral or nuanced perspectives that these individuals are everywhere and participating in most of your municipalities or your building functions and what have you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then when we overlay this idea that in a shop, once a person is,
Speaker: or a shop owner attains notoriety, as you mentioned, Paul Revere perhaps being one of the more notable silversmiths, everything becomes ascribed to them.
Speaker: However, in many cases, they are not by the sweat of their hand creating.
Speaker: And so with that kind of monumental understanding as well, we're able to see that day to day, you have a number of people in shops making things.
Speaker: Now, the last thing I'll say to that is that in many cases, we also in cabinet shops see that it is ordered by design.
Speaker: And what I mean by that is you have several people participating in the building or the composition of a piece of furniture, right?
Speaker: So you may have a joiner and you have other individuals who are
Speaker: utilizing their skill to accomplish one task in the building of the table.
Speaker: So when you look at it from that vignette, it's very easy to see how someone like James, who is listed, right, and is titled as being someone of a journeyman level, so not an apprentice, somebody who knows the craft, knows what they're doing well,
Speaker: And then you have James Woodward, the shop owner, bragging and boasting about what they can do and the pieces that they can make.
Speaker: You know, we're able to make those reasonable historical deductions and say that you see people like James are participatory in these actions.
Speaker: And then I'd also like to add to that, you know, when we look at Woodward's own words, when he's advertising, he's saying, hey, there are men in this workshop.
Speaker: So he's fully stating that, you know, this is a group project, right?
Speaker: A group effort.
Speaker: And so I think that when we think about it that way, you can really begin to see just how much of a group effort creating furniture such as this table really was.
Speaker: Is it coincidence that the three of you are all, I think it's fair to say, on the younger end of the spectrum as far as arts curators?
Speaker: I mean, is this exhibition sort of in some way reflective of a new wave of thinking?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I think it's fair to label it that way.
Speaker: And I think that, you know, it's, you know, we're all, you know, from the same generation, roughly near the same ages.
Speaker: But I also think it has a lot to do with just our training and the folks who trained us and our college professors and all of those sorts of things that sort of instilled in us this way of imagining more.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And when I say that, what I really mean is it's particularly with this exhibition, when we're talking about concepts like freedom and liberation, one of the things that we constantly had to do right was to to think about how freedom and liberation mean different things to different people.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in sort of conceptualizing those things where we're constantly imagining more.
Speaker: And I think it's fair to say that that's how we also approach our museum and curatorial work, right?
Speaker: is thinking in that way and fully embracing, right, what that means to sort of go beyond sort of the standard game plan for how you do this work, but how can we do this work on a higher level that seeks to humanize everyone that's involved in this process, that seeks to bring recognition to everyone involved in this process, and to really seeks to be inclusive
Speaker: in the work that we do and in how we present that work to visitors.
Speaker: And I'll add to that, you talk about the trends and the shift in the field.
Speaker: You know, I don't take lightly that, yeah, the three of us, you know, maybe on the younger-ish side of the
Speaker: things.
Speaker: But it also speaks to the gradual yet present, you know, transition of the field to be able to recognize and actually document that there is participation, right?
Speaker: So in our show, there are a few objects that like the breakfast table,
Speaker: Or narrowly, or if we look through an historical lens, may not have 20, 30, 40 years ago given any attribution to any of the other individuals who were known through documentation, known to be working in that shop, or known to be enslaved and or apprenticed to shop owners.
Speaker: Whereas now you're seeing institutions
Speaker: who are changing that narrative, even if it is just in their captioning by saying, you know, from the shop of, you know, just that one sentence changes the whole scope and the tenor of that kind of conversation by bringing more value to
Speaker: and more legitimacy to the other people who have kind of been left out of the documentary record for any number of reasons, many of which we know.
Speaker: And so I think it's important work in that, like,
Speaker: Now, Tiffany, you wrote a really interesting essay in this catalog about the history of exhibitions of Black art and Black craft.
Speaker: And in that essay, you write about this exhibition from 1976, which was called Two Centuries of Black American Art.
Speaker: I think it was in Los Angeles.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You quote this art critic of the time, Hilton Kramer, who wrote, and I'm just going to quote from your essay here, quoting Hilton Kramer.
Speaker: This is a difficult show to review, and this difficulty ought to be acknowledged at the outset, at least for a critic whose primary interest lies in assessing artistic merit,
Speaker: and who remains unpersuaded that he is performing a useful service if he allows extra artistic standards to obscure the difference between superior artistic achievement and its absence, this exhibition presents problems that ought to be more openly discussed than they usually are nowadays.
Speaker: And he says that the show was more interesting as a social history than for its aesthetics.
Speaker: and that there is simply too much here that does not belong in a serious museum exhibition, that it was a social documentary about the Black American artist rather than an anthology of achievements.
Speaker: And you write that Kramer's critique was without a doubt misguided, but the damage was done.
Speaker: I'm curious because I think some people, perhaps including some listeners, are skeptical of the intersection of art with social history and with ideology, even if that ideology is social justice.
Speaker: I wonder what you would say to them, Tiffany.
Speaker: Honestly, what I would say is you can't separate the two.
Speaker: You can't separate the artist from what the artist is experiencing and what they're living through or living under, right?
Speaker: Because so many times we hear when we go to these lectures and we read exhibition catalogs,
Speaker: Something that often gets said a lot is, oh, you know, the artist was painting what was around them or painting what they were saying.
Speaker: So in that regard, they're painting what they're seeing and what they're experiencing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I don't know why it would be any different.
Speaker: for a black artisan who is also painting what they're seeing and experiencing and putting that into their art.
Speaker: And I think if you attempt to sort of to pull slavery out of it and say that, well, you know, we can't talk about that, you're not only doing the artisan, the craftsperson a disservice, but you're also doing yourself a disservice, right?
Speaker: Because we need to be able to understand and acknowledge
Speaker: what people went through in the midst of creating the objects that they created, right?
Speaker: And we know that, you know, for everyone, it wasn't easy.
Speaker: We need to be comfortable with saying that, hey, this was a craftsperson who lived under this type of oppression, who was subjected to all of these different things.
Speaker: It still was able to create something so beautiful that we're all still staring at it today and talking about it as it sits on a museum platform.
Speaker: And to me, that's very important because it shows on the artisan's behalf, it shows tenacity.
Speaker: It also shows resistance, right?
Speaker: And so I think it's important.
Speaker: It's very important that we acknowledge all of that.
Speaker: So no, and in short, you can't separate the two for me.
Speaker: You can't.
Speaker: So, I mean, I'm a story driven guy, like as an antiques dealer and as a collector, like what's interesting to me is always, I mean, yes, the beauty of the object and the craftsmanship behind it, those are critical, but also the story around it, the context, the,
Speaker: the ways that it does prime your imagination and invite you to do further research and to try to understand what was happening around this piece as it was made and then as it traveled through time and space.
Speaker: And yet I think if I try to understand the point that Kramer, this critic, was trying to make,
Speaker: He was saying, well, there is a certain standard of objective beauty, and what I'm seeing in this exhibition is less attention on that standard of objective beauty and more attention on historical considerations and social and anthropological documentation and so on.
Speaker: And he sees the art gallery as a place that shouldn't be concerned with those things, or the museum as a place that shouldn't be concerned with those things and should instead just be concerned with this abstract ethereal notion of beauty.
Speaker: But are you saying that even that notion of beauty can't be separated from the context of the artist and their life and their experience?
Speaker: Oh, no, I wouldn't separate that at all.
Speaker: Because to me that that beauty and what the artisan experienced is part of the story.
Speaker: It's part of how we understand why they were why they were creating art and what they were creating.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think, again, if people would like to just go into a gallery and sort of stay at this one level and just, you know, see things for their beauty.
Speaker: Well, OK.
Speaker: But for someone like me, that's not enough.
Speaker: I want to fully immerse myself into the person that created the object, what their life and experiences were like, so I can understand why they made what they made and how they also made it.
Speaker: And a lot of times, what I perceive is, let's just be real.
Speaker: When you have situations like that and you have critiques like that, sometimes it is also tone-depth to the realities of life, right?
Speaker: And when you change the subject or change the field matter, it's very interesting.
Speaker: In fact, even curious to me how the conversation also shifts, right?
Speaker: So not to go down a rabbit hole, but I'll give you an example.
Speaker: Mary Chestnut is famed.
Speaker: Her Civil War diary is famed as one of the best accounts of what is going on during the war.
Speaker: And it is used over and again as supplemental evidence.
Speaker: Now, this doesn't discount Mary Chestnut's view.
Speaker: It doesn't discount what she observed.
Speaker: It's relevancy because she was there.
Speaker: But I don't feel like that same credit is given when you have individuals identifying and self-identifying the beauty and the work and their story, but also when you have people who
Speaker: who have commissioned, who owned in certain cases, or who profited from them also exerting that same force.
Speaker: And so the reality is James Woodward, who was the shop owner, who was the enslaver, right?
Speaker: Who is profiting from this entire system had no issue talking about the revel and the majestic work that's being produced in the shop, knowing full well who is all contributing to it.
Speaker: I think it is a miscarriage of history when you do not present all of the evidence.
Speaker: And the evidence in many cases is also the situations in which many of these people are producing these feats of work.
Speaker: And so if we look at James again, he is enslaved.
Speaker: He goes into a contract, has the ability to buy his freedom so he can actually see light at the end of a tunnel for which so many would never.
Speaker: And if I'm to really follow and dig into the critique that was made as an example,
Speaker: we would be just providing too much historical evidence.
Speaker: I don't think there's such a thing as too much historical evidence.
Speaker: In turn, I think it's more so of providing a backdrop to just how important and marvelous these works and these feats are.
Speaker: And to add on to what Torin was saying, I often think about in some of those critiques like the one you mentioned, when people are saying, well, you know, maybe this isn't beautiful or he mentioned something about artistic standards here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so something that I'm often questioning when people raise make statements like that one is, well, who taught you what was beautiful and what types of biases might they have had?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I think you have to keep I mean, you could keep interrogating that that that statement, that critique, I mean, for days.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But for me, that's one of the things that often comes back to who told you what was beautiful and what types of biases might they have had.
Speaker: Well, I love that despite trying to derail this with a philosophical rabbit hole, you guys managed to bring it back around to the breakfast table and make it concrete again.
Speaker: And I really appreciate you talking me through that.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: fascinating catalog.
Speaker: I can't wait to see the exhibition.
Speaker: And I'm sure listeners, while some of them may have seen it by now already, others, I hope, will make a trip to see it either where it is now or as it travels around.
Speaker: And I also highly recommend that they pick up a copy of the catalog.
Speaker: Where is the best place for listeners to go to see where the exhibition is going to be, to see where they can buy a catalog?
Speaker: What should they know?
Speaker: Visitors, people can find out more about the exhibition by going to the DAR's website, which is dar.org slash museum.
Speaker: And there they can find out more about the exhibition here at the DAR Museum.
Speaker: They can also purchase a copy of the catalog through our shop.
Speaker: here at the DAR Museum.
Speaker: And then they'll also be able to see the full travel schedule for the exhibition as it leaves here early next year.
Speaker: So the exhibition will be open at the DAR Museum through 2025.
Speaker: And then starting in 2026, it will travel to four other locations until the end of 2028.
Speaker: And that full schedule will be online.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Well, Tiffany Momin, William Strolo, and Torin Gatson, thank you so much for coming on Curious Objects, and congratulations.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva with web support from Sarah Palotta.
Speaker: Christine Hildebrand is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
