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An Armchair's Astonishing Provenance, with Tiffany Momon
31 Plays5 years ago
This month, Ben speaks with Tiffany Momon, visiting assistant professor at Sewanee University in Tennessee, and founder of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, a scholarly resource that explores the contributions that African Americans have made to the material culture of the United States. Tiffany and Ben focus their attention on a chair made by enslaved craftsmen at Leonidas Polk’s Leighton Plantation in Louisiana, and Tiffany offers tips on what institutions and researchers can do to ensure they’re telling the full story of the decorative arts.
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Transcript
Introduction to Freeman's Auction House
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Since 1805, Freemans has been part of the Fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry, design, and more.
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Freemans celebrates Pennsylvania's long-standing legacy as a major and influential artistic region and is committed to the craftsmanship and artistry of the Commonwealth.
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Whether it is a conoid bench by George Nakashima, a Chippendale carved side chair by Thomas Affleck, or a painting by Fern Coppedge, Freeman's is renowned for selling works by important artists and designers from the Quaker state.
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Freeman's is always looking for and able to evaluate fine art, furniture, and decorative arts made and used in Pennsylvania from the earliest colonial period through the 20th century.
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Visit freemansauction.com to request a complimentary auction estimate or to speak with one of their specialists.
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Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house, sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you wherever you are.
Impact of George Floyd's Death on Antiques Field
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Hello and welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the Magazine Antiques.
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I'm Ben Miller.
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The world feels very different today than it did a few weeks ago when we published our last episode.
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The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th has been a wake-up call.
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And while the central issue driving these protests has been police violence against Black Americans, we've also been called to open our eyes to an even broader array of racial injustices.
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And the world of antiques and decorative arts is part of that.
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We have serious problems as collectors and dealers and researchers and connoisseurs.
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Problems not only in terms of the barriers that exist in our field that make it difficult for black people and people of color to enter, but also in the way that we allow white material culture to dominate the space.
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Now, in some small way, I'd like for Curious Objects to be one place where these necessary conversations can happen, and that is starting today.
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My guest today is Tiffany
Tiffany Momin: Historian and Her Project
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Momin.
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Tiffany is a historian of material culture with a specialty in historically black colleges and universities.
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Last year, she initiated an exciting project called the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, which we'll be talking about today.
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And that's an organization that's working to investigate and document the untold stories of black artisans in American history.
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Tiffany is also a visiting professor at the University of the South in Suwannee, Tennessee, which is exciting to me because Suwannee also happens to be my hometown.
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And it's particularly relevant because today's curious object relates to Suwannee history.
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And it has one of these just unbelievable stories that I think you're going to find really fascinating to hear about.
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But first things first, Tiffany, welcome to the podcast.
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Thanks for joining me.
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Thanks for having me, Ben.
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Now, we have a lot of ground to cover, but I actually just want to start with you.
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And I'm hoping you can tell me a little bit about what drew you to start studying material culture in the first place.
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Well, Ben, it really started when I began doing my family's genealogy about 10 years ago at this point.
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And, you know, for me, at the time I was working in corporate America.
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And so genealogy became a hobby.
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And, you know, I was finding people.
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I was looking at their jobs.
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I was, you know, putting them into the context of history.
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And the next thing I knew, I found myself being.
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in graduate school pursuing a master's degree and a PhD.
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But what always sort of guided me was my own family.
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When, as I was growing up, my grandfather passed when I was five or shortly before my fifth birthday.
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So I have very few families.
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memories of him.
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But some of the things that I think about when I think about my family and craftspeople and material culture is my grandfather because he was a brick mason.
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And so one of the things that, you know, sort of informs me is that, you know, I can go back to my mother's hometown in Arkansas and I can drive around and look at the local Walgreens that my grandfather worked on and I can look at the other buildings that he worked on.
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And just something about that resonated with me, right?
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Because, you know, who he was as a craftsperson, what that means that he's left behind a legacy on the built environment, all of those sort of things, all of those thoughts, you know, really guide my work that I do with the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive.
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I love that personal connection, and it's such a key reminder of the very tangible connections that we can actually make to our past through this field of study.
Suwanee's History of Slavery and Roberson Project
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Definitely.
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Now, let's jump in because the podcast is called Curious Objects.
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Let's dive into talking about our curious object today, which relates to the work that you're doing at Suwannee.
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And we should probably give a little context here because...
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Suwannee is a small liberal arts college in southern middle Tennessee.
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It's where I grew up and it's where you're serving as a professor right now.
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But the history of the university is actually intertwined in some pretty startling ways with the history of slavery and the economics of slavery in the South.
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And so you're involved with a project there called the Roberson Project, which is trying to look into some of these questions of how the history of the university relates to the history of slavery and what we should be thinking about and what people at the university should be thinking about in terms of those connections and that legacy.
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So do you want to just tell us a little bit about the Roberson Project and then tell us about this fantastic object?
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Sure.
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So the Roberson Project really addresses the needs of the university regarding slavery, race, and reconciliation.
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And it really investigates the university's ties to enslavement through its founders, you know, through teachings, basically through the very founding of the university itself.
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You know, Sewanee was founded to...
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support the continuation of enslavement.
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The idea was that you would send your son to Suwanee and he would learn how to be a good and proper slave holder.
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And so the university itself, you know, it really doesn't come into formation until after the Civil War has ended, but it's built on that legacy, on that foundation.
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Right, because it's sort of founded first in the years sort of right before the outbreak of the Civil War, and then it's sort of reconstituted after the war is over, right?
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Exactly.
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And, you know, what makes Suwannee so unique is that the entire campus is about 13,000 acres.
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But on that 13,000 acres, you have so many sort of monuments or memorials to the Confederacy that
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So as you walk around campus, you know, here are these, one of the most recent events that's happened in the last maybe two to three years was the relocation of a memorial to General Edmund Kirby Smith, which was moved from a prominent location on University Avenue, sort of the main thoroughfare of the university, to
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to the university cemetery at the request of Kirby Smith's descendants.
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And so you have these types of events happening, but really the Roberson Project, you know, it leads thoughtful discussion.
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It invites speakers in.
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One of the most recent speakers was a gentleman by the name of
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Richard Cellini, who leads the Georgetown History Project for Georgetown University, who's also, you know, dealing with these similar issues as Eswani.
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So it, you know, it really facilitates conversation.
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And it's so wonderful to have that group and all the people that are associated with it on campus, especially during a time like this.
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Yeah.
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And, you know, one of the things that you've talked to me about in terms of your work with the project is that there are actually some objects, you know, bringing this back to material culture.
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You know, there's some objects that tie into that very complicated and complex.
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troublesome history.
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And the story about this one particular object, a ceremonial chair, when you told me this story, my mouth dropped open.
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It was just such an incredible series of events and coincidences.
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And I think listeners are going to be really eager to hear about that.
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So tell me about this chair.
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Actually, first tell me what the chair actually looks like.
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So the chair is, when I say ceremonial chair, it puts me in the mind of like maybe a chair you would find in a Virginia courthouse in the 18th century.
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It reminds me very much so of a chair.
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Colonial Williamsburg has one in their collection.
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And there's another one, I believe it's in Christ, at Christ Church in Eatonton, North Carolina.
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But it's a ceremonial chair.
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It's round on the top, but the arms of the chair have these little columns, three or four columns in a row that support the arms.
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And so you can tell upon looking at it that, you know, it was obviously meant, it had some type of important
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Or it was made for someone important.
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It very much so gives you the feeling that it belonged on a pedestal of some sort at a church behind a rostrum or something like that.
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Someone very important was supposed to sit in it.
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Right.
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And it's what struck me the most about it was really not the design of the chair itself, but this little gold sort of plaque that has been that someone many years ago put on the chair that basically says, you know, this chair was made by slaves on Leonidas Polk's late in place plantation in Louisiana.
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Right.
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And so, you know, the first thing I thought when I saw that plaque was, well, I wonder how much, you know, of that story can be verified.
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I also wondered if that story was just one of those, you know, sort of revisionist feel-good stories.
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Yeah.
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that people of that type of, you know, perpetuate or bind into.
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Like a lost cause kind of.
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Exactly.
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And, but over the past year since I've been at Swanee, there have been some excellent, excellent research conducted on the chair.
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When I first started digging around into the background of the chair, I discovered that Polk's Layton Place plantation had been struck by an epidemic in the 1840s.
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So my immediate thought was, well, you know, and so many of the enslaved people there died.
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So my immediate thought was, I wonder if, you know, one of those enslaved people who was sickened by the epidemic died.
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was the creator of this chair.
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Later research came out that Polk's wife, Frances, she was a native North Carolinian, and upon her father's death and her mother's death, she received, she inherited some of the enslaved individuals that they own.
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Her father's plantation was called Runaroy Plantation in North Carolina.
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And I happened to come across a memoir written by Frances's great niece where she recalled that.
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the vast operation that was Runeroy Plantation and how you had all of these different shops for a blacksmith, for a weaver and for carpenters.
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So it turns out that after Polk died, his wife, Frances, sold the plantation slaves, but she bought a few of them back.
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And among the two that she bought back were Taylor and Abraham.
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And Taylor is Abraham's son.
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And they were both carpenters who had been born in North Carolina.
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And not only that, but the chair eventually found itself in a small Episcopal church in New Orleans.
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And guess who also worshiped at that church?
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Abraham and Taylor.
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That's unbelievable.
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Right.
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And the chair ends up at Suwanee because I'm guessing the church was in a period of renovation or remodeling, and this chair actually ended up on the curb in New Orleans.
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And as the story goes, someone thought that since this has ties to Polk, maybe Suwanee would want it.
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The chair ends up at Suwanee.
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And it sits on the stage in the chapel and is used during, you know, official university events.
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And that was until it was decided to remove the chair and actually place it in the university's archives.
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So I have to say, you know, we'll get into this more later, but...
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You know, I've sometimes heard from scholars in the decorative arts that researching the history of black crafts people and the work of black crafts people is just very difficult because, you know, his documentation is scarce and et cetera, et cetera.
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But this chair is such an incredible counterexample to that because how many objects, how many early American pieces of furniture do we have that have that kind of provenance behind them, you know, that we can actually learn and trace?
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I mean, that's to be able to track that geography from North Carolina to Louisiana to Tennessee and generation by generation down to today.
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That's an amazing lineage.
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Oh, it is most definitely.
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Yeah.
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When I first started researching for the chair, I kept looking for Louisiana examples, anything that closely looked like it.
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And I couldn't find anything.
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And that was obviously because I was looking in the wrong state because that chair is.
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Yeah.
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Got North Carolina ties.
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So yeah.
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And you know, one thing I think about when we're researching black craftspeople, words matter.
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And I think one of the things that we have to do as we do this work is to get out of the idea of thinking that this work is a
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It's just too difficult or that it's so hard.
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You know, I'll admit that it looks different.
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Right.
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You know, you won't find, you know, white craftspeople listed in a bill of sale.
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Right.
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But you can find enslaved black craftspeople listed in a bill of sale.
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So the research techniques, the approach, the research design, all of that is entirely it's different.
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And you have to employ different strategies.
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Now that doesn't mean that the work is too hard to be done.
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You just need to take the initiative to do it a little differently.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Okay, well, and I want to talk more about that later in the conversation, for sure.
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But I'd love to hear more about just, you know, the work that you're doing with the Robertson Project and at Sewanee.
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Have you uncovered some other stories, like the one behind this chair, or other stories about Sewanee history that have really surprised you?
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I will say that one of the things that sort of, when you think about Suwannee as a university and as a town, you don't tend to think about very many black people being there.
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So one of the things that sort of surprised me when I first began looking into research for the Roberson Project was that, you know, although the historic African-American neighborhood
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in Suwannee looks nothing like it did when it was heavily populated by African-Americans.
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I was really surprised how many African-American members of the community had such strong ties to Suwannee and such pride in being from Suwannee, such pride in having grown up from Suwannee, because being from the other side of the state,
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in West Tennessee, born and raised in Memphis.
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You know, it's just not something you think about when you think about Sewanee.
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And one of the things that I've most enjoyed about the Roberson Project itself is its commitment to community engagement.
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I've really enjoyed the
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meeting community members and looking at the ties between African American communities in Suwannee, in nearby, in Deckard, and in Winchester and Tracy City as well.
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Just the other day, I was looking into Bershaba Springs, which is not too far from Suwannee.
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And I was reading through old newspapers and I uncovered that, well, you know, Bursaba Springs itself, it was a resort town and...
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Yeah, basically it was a resort economy based around the water springs there.
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And I soon discovered that within the city of Nashville, so about maybe an hour and a half away, there is a contingent of African-Americans who would travel up to Bershaba Springs every summer just to do that resort work.
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And so you find all of these newspaper articles of, you know, this man or this woman is leaving for the summer for Bershaba Springs.
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Wish them well on their trip.
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And then I uncovered the story of an African-American man.
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And I'm ashamed to say that his name was.
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escapes my mind right now.
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But he would hold church services for these resort workers in his home.
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And he just became so well known for his home being sort of a gathering place for these resort workers.
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on their days off.
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So there are so many stories.
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And one of the things that those stories from those towns neighboring Swannies sort of reinforce is just how connected we all are.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, well, and it really fleshes out a picture of Middle Tennessee culture that is a lot more complicated than certainly what I was sort of told about growing up there.
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Right.
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Well, this is maybe a good place to transition to talking about the Black Crafts People Digital Archive.
The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive
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You know, this is a project that, you know, is really long overdue.
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It's something that seems just obviously desperately needed in our field.
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Tell me about the inception of the project and what you're trying to do with it.
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Sure.
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So in the summer of 2018, I had the privilege of attending the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Summer Institute.
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And my project for that summer was the Pinckney Mansion, circa 1750 Pinckney Mansion in Charleston, South Carolina.
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which burned in 1861.
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But the history behind the mansion was that the master carpenter on the project was a black man by the name of Quash, who then becomes, he gets baptized in the Anglican church and he gets the name John Williams.
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And so my project was the mansion itself, but I really wanted to tell the mansion, the story of the mansion through Quash's eyes.
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And what sort of shocked me the most was how much documentation existed on the construction of the house, how much documentation that Quash or John Williams himself left behind when Williams begins the work on the Pinckney Mansion.
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He'd been enslaved by the Pinckneys, as best I can tell, for about at least a minimum of 10 years at the time.
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So he was a young man in his 20s when he begins that project.
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But he had been a very integral part of the Pinckneys' lives.
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Eliza Lucas, who's famous for her botany experiments with indigo in South Carolina,
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she marries Charles Pinckney and she brings John Williams over into the Pinckney marriage as one of the enslaved people in her dowry.
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But before she married him, Williams had been a Lucas family carpenter.
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He built just about everything for the Lucas family.
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He trained other enslaved men on their plantations in the carpentry trade.
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He built wooden indigo vats for Eliza.
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He built deer coops.
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He just he was basically her right hand man, so much so to the point that when Williams gets placed on trial shortly, I think maybe three or four years after the Stono Rebellion, Williams gets placed on trial and accused of infirmation.
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inciting a rebellion, Eliza Lucas goes to his trial and sits in the audience.
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And I always viewed that as her showing her support for his innocence.
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And, you know, slave court trials in South Carolina at the time, unfortunately, they didn't keep records of all of the cases.
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But what we do know from Williams's case was that the court found him innocent.
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One of the men who was accused with him was hanged and the other was whipped.
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And Williams escaped with no punishment.
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And then just, you know, maybe five years after that, he found himself in charge of the carpentry work on the Pinckney Mansion.
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and lucky for us today, Charles Pinckney very much viewed himself as a gentleman architect, so he wrote everything down.
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So you have in the Pinckney papers held at the University of South Carolina, you have the construction records for the house, and included in the construction records for the house are John Williams' handwriting.
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And it's probably one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen in my life.
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You have him signing his name to payment receipts.
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I can see, you know, the papers show how much he got paid.
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Not only that, but it shows his John Williams ledger.
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So Williams is keeping up with the enslaved men who are coming to work for him.
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And he's taking attendance on them.
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And he's not only taking attendance, but he's also writing down what they did.
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And so it's just this remarkable story.
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And about a month after the mansion is completed, the Pinckney, Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her husband, Charles Pinckney, free John Williams.
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And he is the only enslaved person I have ever found a record for that that they actually freed.
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But they free him.
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And two weeks later, he puts an ad in the South Carolina Gazette.
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And he basically says, I'm free.
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I'm here and I'm ready to take on any carpentry and joinery work.
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So he sets up as an independent crafts person.
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Yes, he sets up as an independent crafts person in Charleston, and you think the story would stop there, but it actually keeps going.
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He finds himself with a royal land grant from William Henry Lytleton, the South Carolina royal governor, and he establishes a plantation on the Santee River.
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Only smoke.
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Yes, it's just the most remarkable story.
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But within that story, I found myself very drawn not only to Williams, but to these enslaved men that he was, you know, supervising on the construction of the mansion.
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And within the Pinckney papers, Pinckney is not only has his own work crew working on his house, but Pinckney is sending these enslaved carpenters to other places around the city.
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to do work.
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And so you have, you know, records that say, you know,
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John went to Thomas Shoebrick's house on the bay to build a fireplace.
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And you just have all of these records.
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And so what I did was I began plotting their movements around Charleston on just a plain old free Google map because I was so interested in where they were going.
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And maybe, you know, I was looking at, well, what streets might they have taken to get from the Pinckney Mansion?
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down to the wharves of Charleston?
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Or how did they, you know, where were they going?
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What might they have seen along the way?
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Who might they have passed along the way?
00:26:42
Speaker
Was there a way that they maybe didn't want to go?
00:26:45
Speaker
Maybe they didn't want to walk past the workhouse or, you know, something like that.
00:26:50
Speaker
And that really was, little did I know at the time, but that was the start of the project.
00:26:55
Speaker
Because from there, I was like, well, I wonder how many other black crafts people I can put on a map.
00:27:01
Speaker
And it just snowballed from there.
00:27:04
Speaker
So what's the answer to that question?
00:27:07
Speaker
How many black people have you been able to to find records for and to start to put together, you know, geographic information and and that sort of thing?
00:27:19
Speaker
What what does the project look like right now?
00:27:22
Speaker
Sure.
00:27:22
Speaker
So we are gearing up for our soft launch this August.
00:27:28
Speaker
And our specific focus right now is Black craftspeople in 18th century Charleston.
00:27:34
Speaker
And that includes both free and enslaved.
00:27:38
Speaker
and the project has two components.
00:27:40
Speaker
So one of them is the digital map itself and the other is the archive, the digital archive.
00:27:46
Speaker
And the archive very much works in the way that you think an archive would.
00:27:50
Speaker
We take a craftsperson, we assign them a unique identifier and that identifier follows them from the archive to the map.
00:28:01
Speaker
And what we do is we take the documentation.
00:28:04
Speaker
So let's say for example, we are looking at the ad
00:28:07
Speaker
of a runaway craftsman in the South Carolina Gazette.
00:28:10
Speaker
We connect that primary source since the Gazette is very much open source, you know, because it's so old.
00:28:21
Speaker
So we take that newspaper clipping of the runaway craftsman.
00:28:28
Speaker
um, black, uh, crafts person, we link that, um, to an entry in the archive, so you, and we dump information into it, essentially.
00:28:37
Speaker
So, um, say for example, the ad, we also include an image of the ad, but we, um, transcribe it, you know, if the ad says that to please return, um, I don't know, John, um,
00:28:52
Speaker
to Mr. Momin's plantation on the Santee River.
00:28:57
Speaker
Then we go and we immediately start looking up.
00:28:59
Speaker
Well, can we find Mr. Momin's plantation on the Santee River?
00:29:04
Speaker
And what are the GPS coordinates to that plantation?
00:29:08
Speaker
And that's how our craftsperson ends up with GPS coordinates so that then we can plot them
00:29:16
Speaker
on the map.
00:29:19
Speaker
So yeah, we are working in 18th century Charleston, South Carolina and the Lowcountry right now when we go live.
00:29:28
Speaker
And right now we're very much so in the process of cleaning up all of our data.
00:29:33
Speaker
And I tell people right now we're also in the process of
00:29:39
Speaker
you know, playing around with the website, essentially trying to see if we can break it, you know, because we want to make sure we want to make sure that when it goes live, that if a person, you know, clicks these three things, they'll get what they're looking for.
00:29:52
Speaker
And we want to make sure that, you know, everything factors well into like ADA compliant and we want everything to be accessible for all.
00:30:01
Speaker
And so right now we're just in there playing around saying, you know, what works, what doesn't work, how we can make this, um,
00:30:09
Speaker
all look better.
00:30:10
Speaker
So in August we will launch with our version of what we call our master map.
00:30:17
Speaker
So it's the individual map where every craftsperson gets a GPS point on it.
00:30:24
Speaker
And then we'll also launch with the archive.
00:30:27
Speaker
In this first launch we are expecting about 700 to a thousand names.
00:30:33
Speaker
and every six weeks we will drop at least 500 more names into the archive and the digital map.
00:30:41
Speaker
And so it will just, it's a project that we don't see as, you know, just one thing and we're done.
00:30:47
Speaker
It's going to keep growing.
00:30:49
Speaker
And one of the interesting components of the website is that we will have a page for contributions.
00:30:55
Speaker
So if any scholar, any museum curator, any genealogist
00:31:01
Speaker
has a black craftsperson in their family, no matter the location, no matter the time period, they'll be able to use the website portal to drop that information in there.
00:31:11
Speaker
And we will add those craftspeople to the digital archive with attribution to the contributor.
00:31:19
Speaker
Later on... Right, so there's a crowdsourced element.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yes, yes, definitely.
00:31:24
Speaker
And later on this fall, we will be moving on into Tennessee.
00:31:30
Speaker
obviously because that's my home state, but we'll be looking at black craftspeople in Tennessee.
00:31:36
Speaker
And from there, we've got an entire list of places that we feel like sort of meet the criteria and have the potential to give us enough to populate geographic areas.
00:31:51
Speaker
Now, for listeners who are interested in following the project, looking at it when it goes live and maybe even participating or contributing some names that they're familiar with, what should they be doing right now?
00:32:05
Speaker
They can follow us on Instagram at blackcraftspeopleda.
00:32:13
Speaker
They can also visit the website at blackcraftspeople.org.
00:32:17
Speaker
There's a link on the website to the Instagram page as well.
00:32:21
Speaker
But right now, our main portal to get information out to the public is the Instagram page.
00:32:27
Speaker
And we use that to do every Tuesday and Thursday, we push content out, whether it's just some research that we've done on our own.
00:32:38
Speaker
We link research done by others, but it's really just brief introductions to African-American craftspeople.
00:32:46
Speaker
And it's basically our way to basically talk or engage with the public.
00:32:54
Speaker
It's been exciting for me to see some pieces of silver up there on your Instagram page.
00:32:58
Speaker
Oh, great.
00:33:08
Speaker
We'll be right back after this with Tiffany Momin.
Listener Engagement and Feedback Request
00:33:12
Speaker
First, I just want to say, as always, thank you for listening.
00:33:14
Speaker
I really appreciate your comments and your feedback, which you can send to me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:33:24
Speaker
Tiffany's organization, the Black Crafts People Digital Archive, is on Instagram as well at Black Crafts People DA.
00:33:32
Speaker
And you can see images of the chair online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:33:40
Speaker
If you'd like to help support Curious Objects, the easiest way to do that is to leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.
00:33:48
Speaker
Those ratings and reviews really help new listeners to find the podcast.
00:33:52
Speaker
So I'm very grateful to those of you who are able to do that.
00:33:55
Speaker
This episode is supported by Freeman's Auction.
00:33:58
Speaker
Since 1805, Freeman's has been part of the Fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry design, and more.
00:34:07
Speaker
Freeman's hosts many departmental and single-owner auctions throughout the year and are always accepting consignments of suitable works across auction and collecting categories.
00:34:16
Speaker
Visit freemansauction.com to request a complimentary auction estimate or to speak with one of their specialists.
00:34:23
Speaker
Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house.
00:34:25
Speaker
Sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you wherever you are.
Personal Experiences with Racism
00:34:41
Speaker
It was about two weeks ago now, not long, I mean, just a few days after George Floyd's killing, when through the BCDA you put out a statement, which I saw on Instagram and...
00:34:57
Speaker
I saw it really widely shared by a lot of people that I follow on social media.
00:35:05
Speaker
But you put out a really powerful and very personal statement about the experience of being a Black American in the decorative arts world.
00:35:20
Speaker
And I was hoping that you would talk a little bit about that and
00:35:24
Speaker
share with listeners something about the sorts of experiences you've had that might be different from the experiences of white scholars and curators in this world.
00:35:39
Speaker
Would you want to read that statement now or summarize it?
00:35:45
Speaker
Sure.
00:35:47
Speaker
So, you know, with everything that was happening about two weeks ago, I felt compelled to say something, but I wasn't 100 percent
00:35:56
Speaker
sure on what I'd say.
00:35:58
Speaker
I'd sat down and I'd sort of began writing it and then I'd stop and I'd be like, well, you know, and I really sort of took my time because all of it, I don't think people, you know, truly understand how traumatizing it is when things like police brutality happen.
00:36:21
Speaker
And I don't think people really pay a lot of attention to the way that they
00:36:26
Speaker
share the images or the videos.
00:36:30
Speaker
And for me, you sort of, you begin to, I'll just be honest, it bothers me, right?
00:36:40
Speaker
And so it just became to the point where I was like, I don't know what I'm going to say, but I should say something.
00:36:49
Speaker
And so the very first message I wrote was nothing like the message that ended up
00:36:57
Speaker
getting published and so Victoria who's one of the interns on the project and handles the social media for us you know she was like hey you know I know you were you know working on this message do you have anything you'd like me to post and I was like you know just give me one minute
00:37:16
Speaker
And that's when I decided that I should probably tell the story of what happened to me as a child.
00:37:22
Speaker
And I told it because people needed to hear it.
00:37:29
Speaker
People close to me needed to see how real
00:37:32
Speaker
this is right and so the story and you know I probably hadn't talked to anyone about this in maybe 20-25 years you know and the story was and I remember it like it was yesterday because this is trauma that you don't forget you just sort of bury it right
00:37:57
Speaker
And you live with it until something reminds you of it and it bubbles up out of your core.
00:38:03
Speaker
And I think I might have been 10, might have been 11.
00:38:09
Speaker
And I would, you know...
00:38:13
Speaker
As a kid, you go outside, you sort of walk around, you look for your friends you usually play with, and sometimes nobody's outside.
00:38:20
Speaker
So you end up, you know, alone.
00:38:22
Speaker
But I was just walking around the neighborhood in which I lived.
00:38:26
Speaker
And, you know.
00:38:27
Speaker
It was in Memphis.
00:38:28
Speaker
In Memphis, yes.
00:38:30
Speaker
And minding my own business.
00:38:34
Speaker
And I am, you know, headed back to my house.
00:38:39
Speaker
I remember I wasn't that far from my house.
00:38:42
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, there's this truck that's this.
00:38:48
Speaker
And I can still see it in my head.
00:38:50
Speaker
There's this blue Ford pickup and it just comes swerving onto the road.
00:38:56
Speaker
There are three white men in the cab and they're
00:39:01
Speaker
Me, I'm a little black girl.
00:39:03
Speaker
I'm alone.
00:39:04
Speaker
I'm just walking.
00:39:06
Speaker
And they yell at me and they call me an N-word bitch.
00:39:12
Speaker
And it startled me.
00:39:17
Speaker
And I just ran.
00:39:20
Speaker
I ran all the way home and I was terrified.
00:39:24
Speaker
Because what if they were following me?
00:39:26
Speaker
What if they were coming back?
00:39:28
Speaker
What if they saw where I lived?
00:39:30
Speaker
I was terrified.
00:39:33
Speaker
And I ran all the way home and I got in the house and I found my mom.
00:39:39
Speaker
And, you know, I told my mom what happened.
00:39:42
Speaker
And it's just this moment that I just can't.
00:39:49
Speaker
Just the look on my mother's face, you know, that you can't even send your kid, can't let your kid play outside.
00:39:57
Speaker
And, um,
00:40:02
Speaker
And we talked about it and she told me that something similar had happened to her when she had been a little girl in her hometown in Arkansas and she was walking to school.
00:40:15
Speaker
And all I could think about when I think about the moment now is my own children and how that's, I never want to have to say that to my own children.
00:40:27
Speaker
I never want to have to say that, well, that happened to me too.
00:40:31
Speaker
You know, and I think and I had to share it because I wanted people to know that you see me out and about.
00:40:39
Speaker
Maybe you've seen me at, you know, a conference or antiques forum and you would look at somebody like me and that you wouldn't think that that happened to them.
00:40:50
Speaker
But I wanted people to know this is how real this is.
00:40:53
Speaker
This happens to even people who.
00:40:56
Speaker
Even people you know, you think you know, or you know, it's a very real thing.
00:41:03
Speaker
And it's traumatizing.
00:41:06
Speaker
And this was, you know, not to date you, but you're not 80 years old.
00:41:11
Speaker
You know, this was not something that was happening in 1965.
00:41:13
Speaker
This was like 1996.
00:41:13
Speaker
So, you know, you would think that, you know...
00:41:24
Speaker
Things had changed, but we're constantly reminded that the more things change, the more they actually stay the same.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:34
Speaker
Tie that in for me to the BCDA.
00:41:36
Speaker
And how does that link up now with your experience in the decorative arts world?
Researching Black Craftspeople in Antiques Field
00:41:43
Speaker
I think it finally...
00:41:45
Speaker
pushed me to really sort of say the things that I've been saying to my decorative arts friends in private.
00:41:55
Speaker
And I really felt like, you know, as a decorative arts scholar, I constantly hear, well, it's too hard to find black craftspeople, you know, and all of these other things.
00:42:08
Speaker
And I don't think people fully understand how disrespectful that is.
00:42:15
Speaker
why is it too hard to find my people?
00:42:18
Speaker
It just takes a little extra work.
00:42:19
Speaker
It's not too hard, you know?
00:42:22
Speaker
And so the conclusion to that statement was me basically saying, you know, it's not too hard.
00:42:28
Speaker
Just admit that you don't want to do the work or just admit that for your institution, you know, donor relationships,
00:42:38
Speaker
And not making your donors uncomfortable is what really matters.
00:42:43
Speaker
I see so many institutions sort of skirt around the issue and I'm like, just address it head on, you know, and I say address it or admit it so that you can then see what you're doing.
00:42:57
Speaker
who you are, you can see that yourself reflected back, hopefully, and understand what that means to people like me in the field and understand what that means to your visit, to your black visitors, to your black patrons.
00:43:13
Speaker
And, you know, something I always think about is, you know, people say one of the, you know, these sort of stereotypes or myths,
00:43:21
Speaker
You know, a lot of African Americans don't go to museums.
00:43:24
Speaker
Well, it's because they can't see themselves in your museum.
00:43:28
Speaker
There is no representation there.
00:43:30
Speaker
Right.
00:43:31
Speaker
Right.
00:43:33
Speaker
People, when people go to museums, they want to be able to connect with the art or the historical objects.
00:43:38
Speaker
They want to see themselves.
00:43:40
Speaker
And if you've made no gains in that area, if you if you don't have the collections to support that, if you don't know enough about your own collections, then you're sort of dismissing an entire segment of visitors.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:55
Speaker
I mean, that's been such a huge problem at Sewanee, not a museum, but obviously, but a college, but where there's been this just refusal to sort of look in the mirror and think about the role that they've played themselves in this history.
00:44:14
Speaker
Exactly.
00:44:16
Speaker
And the, you know, of course, the conservative older generations, mostly of donors that you don't want to upset.
00:44:23
Speaker
And so you sort of beat around the bush and you pretend to be concerned without actually doing anything.
00:44:29
Speaker
And it's just a recipe for for total stagnation.
00:44:33
Speaker
Right.
00:44:35
Speaker
But you told me a story that I thought was really instructive in terms of this sort of supposed difficulty of researching black artisans.
00:44:51
Speaker
And you were telling me about the example of the Guilford Limner.
00:44:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:44:55
Speaker
I thought listeners might be interested to hear your take on that.
00:44:58
Speaker
You know, one of the sort of examples I kept hearing over and over as a student was just different people I'd come across who were looking for this limner who I believe lived in Guilford, Kentucky.
00:45:09
Speaker
And people were conducting all of this research trying to pinpoint who is this person, man, woman, that's going around Guilford and doing these paintings.
00:45:21
Speaker
And you just sort of I would overhear conversations about people hunting that person down.
00:45:27
Speaker
Oh, I can't wait until I find them.
00:45:29
Speaker
And I've been looking for them for years and so on and so forth.
00:45:33
Speaker
And it just struck me one day that, you know, you can spend all this time hunting down that one craftsman.
00:45:44
Speaker
And, but you don't say that that work is too hard, but the work you say is too hard is the work to find black crafts people.
00:45:53
Speaker
And it just struck me as how almost, well, not almost, but how absurd that was.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:02
Speaker
Because you, you know, you see no difficulty in that continuous work year after year looking for that limner.
00:46:08
Speaker
Right.
00:46:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:11
Speaker
So.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, but you want to look into, you know, one iron worker in Charleston, South Carolina, who was an enslaved person.
00:46:19
Speaker
And, well, you know, you give up before you even start.
00:46:22
Speaker
Exactly.
Importance of Inclusive Storytelling in Museums
00:46:24
Speaker
So to sort of take a step back and broaden this a little bit, for those of us who are in this field, either as, you know, in my case, as a dealer or as curators or as collectors, you know, what should we be thinking about and what should we actually be doing to try to change the way that our field interacts with
00:46:50
Speaker
the world of black craftspeople and also the way that we just interact with black people and black culture and sort of historically box out anybody who doesn't fit the mold of a well-to-do white scholar or collector.
00:47:15
Speaker
What should we be doing differently?
00:47:18
Speaker
I would say, you know, just just from my experience is to make sure that you're telling through your exhibits, through your educational programs, through your interpretations, make sure that you're telling, you know, diverse, historically responsible stories.
00:47:37
Speaker
Make sure that these stories are, you know, historically informed.
00:47:42
Speaker
And make sure, you know, that they're inclusive.
00:47:45
Speaker
You know, I completely understand that, you know, when you're putting together a museum exhibit, you can only get so many words on that label, either before it's too long or before people become disinterested.
00:47:59
Speaker
But make sure that the words that you do put on that label, that they are reflective of the humanity behind the object that's on display.
00:48:10
Speaker
So if you know that this object came out of a shop that used the labor of enslaved craftspeople,
00:48:20
Speaker
Maybe you don't automatically attribute that object to the shop's owner.
00:48:25
Speaker
Maybe that attribution is, oh, this came from, you know, this person's particular shop, because then that opens it up.
00:48:33
Speaker
Right.
00:48:35
Speaker
That makes people think, well, that could have come from any shop.
00:48:39
Speaker
any worker in that shop, right?
00:48:41
Speaker
Which could very much so be the truth.
00:48:46
Speaker
I mean, me and you had a conversation about silver dealers and them putting their stamps on things, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the back molding that silver and adding the repoussé to that coffee pot, right?
00:49:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:03
Speaker
So I just, I'm all about making sure your stories are inclusive, remembering that people want to, your visitors want to see themselves in the exhibit and not shying away from the truth.
00:49:18
Speaker
You know, I think that's very important.
00:49:21
Speaker
And I think that at some point, you know, when I think about the type of decorative arts world that I'd like to be a part of and that I'd like to contribute to, at some point, you've got to be willing to tell the truth, right?
00:49:35
Speaker
And if the truth of the matter is, you know, that this happened, that there were enslaved craftspeople behind that object, tell that story.
00:49:43
Speaker
Don't shy away from that.
00:49:47
Speaker
I really appreciate those words, Tiffany.
00:49:52
Speaker
It's a lot of very good food for thought.
00:49:54
Speaker
And I really appreciate your time today.
00:49:56
Speaker
It's been great to hear from you.
00:49:59
Speaker
And I hope that listeners can take something away from this and think about some changes that it might be time to make.
00:50:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I think one of my big things is just always, you know, if you don't have the answers, then maybe seek out someone else who does.
00:50:25
Speaker
If this, you know, area is not of your expertise, it's okay to...
00:50:31
Speaker
And ask someone for some assistance, because at the end of the day, what we all want is, you know, a thriving museum community that, you know, tells these stories the way they deserve to be told.
00:50:45
Speaker
And so I kind of...
00:50:47
Speaker
you know, I, I hear people's frustrations, especially from my, you know, friends that are in the curatorial fields.
00:50:55
Speaker
And, you know, it's, I hear you and I see you and I'm, I'm rooting for you, you know, to be able to do what, you know, needs to be done to make your museums and historic sites more inclusive.
00:51:09
Speaker
Well, Tiffany Lumen, it's, it's been a pleasure.
00:51:10
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:51:12
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ben.
00:51:21
Speaker
Bye.
00:51:23
Speaker
That's all for today.
00:51:24
Speaker
I'll just give one more reminder to send any comments, suggestions, or ideas that you have to CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
00:51:33
Speaker
A number of listeners recommended Dr. Momin as a guest for the podcast, and I'm thrilled that you did.
00:51:38
Speaker
If there are others you'd like to hear from in the future, don't keep it to yourself.
00:51:42
Speaker
I would love to hear about it.
00:51:44
Speaker
And again, if you can spare a minute right now before you run off to leave us a rating and a review, I would be genuinely grateful for that support.
00:51:53
Speaker
Curious Objects is published by the magazine Antiques.
00:51:56
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:52:00
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:52:02
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.