In early September, the Hood Museum of Art welcomed Mellon Fellow, Associate Professor African and African American Studies Trica Keaton who is also affiliate faculty in the Departments of Sociology and Film & Media Studies. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Dartmouth College Alumni and parents, the Hood offers short-term residences for faculty to study selections from the museum’s collection of over 65,000 objects and consider how to integrate the collection into their teaching. Previous Mellon Fellows have studied topics including early Hollywood photography, Greek and Roman coins, and twentieth-century Central American art.
An interdisciplinary scholar of social life, Professor Keaton’s research and writings broadly focus on issues of racialization, identity, and visual culture in France, Western Europe, the United States, and beyond. Her latest book, forthcoming in February 2023 from MIT Press, is #You Know You’re Black in France When . . . : The Face of Everyday Antiblackness. At Dartmouth, Professor Keaton developed and directs the Afro/Black Paris Foreign Study Program (FSP), which introduces students to the African Diaspora in the City of Light. As a Mellon Fellow, Professor Keaton studied objects in the Hood’s European art collection that could be integrated into a pre-departure workshop for students participating in the program and to prime them for one of their FSP courses: “Decolonizing the French Museum: The Memory and Legacies of Black Enslavement.” In particular, Professor Keaton wanted to explore how objects related to enslavement and people racialized-as-black were represented in European art from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In turn, her expertise contributed to the study of the Hood’s collection.
With Professor Keaton’s questions about race and enslavement in mind, I developed a preliminary checklist of over one hundred objects to explore. Given Professor Keaton’s areas of expertise and pedagogical interests, the focus of the list was primarily, but not exclusively, French objects. Running over the course of five days, the Mellon Program is organized in two parts: in the first half of the day, the faculty member works with a curator to study objects in the collection, while the afternoon is dedicated to writing and research. Each morning, Professor Keaton joined me in the museum’s storage facility to explore the collection. Given the strength of the Hood’s collections of works on paper, the majority of the objects Professor Keaton studied were prints and drawings. We began the residency by pulling from storage French works of art made between 1600 and 1900 that represented people of color. In addition to the works featured above, we examined satirical prints of politicians from Martinique, representations of musicians, and images of North Africa. By sharing these works, Professor Keaton will enable students to reflect on the representation and status of people of African descent in France before the twentieth century.
Reproductive prints, prints that replicate paintings and sculptures, will be especially useful in Professor Keaton’s teaching. For example, the Hood owns a print made after Edouard Manet’s famous painting Olympia, now in the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. The wood engraving reverses the composition of a nude white woman reclining on a bed as a Black woman offers her flowers. This print will allow students to consider how issues of gender, race, and class intersect in nineteenth-century France, an examination they will continue at the Musée D’Orsay. With copies like this one, Professor Keaton can prepare students to interpret images that they will examine in Paris.
In the second half of the fellowship, Professor Keaton and I turned to examining objects related to histories of enslavement, in which people of color are seemingly absent. Some of the objects we pulled from storage appear neutral. For instance, we unwrapped an English tea and coffee set from the end of the eighteenth century.
The set’s ornate sugar basket, made by the silversmith Henry Chawner would have once held carefully cut lumps of sugar. The basket is etched and inscribed with floral details, heightening its decorative function. The craftsmanship, material, and contents would have made this work both a functional object and a symbol of prestige on late eighteenth-century British tables of everyday people. However, the object is also inseparable from the history of enslavement: the production and transport of sugar from the Caribbean, as well as its preparation and serving in Great Britain entailed forced labor. Similarly, the tea and coffee that would be served alongside the sugar involved forced human exploitation the vast British colonial empire. In teaching, this silver set will powerfully bring forth discussions of trade, labor, race, and colonialism.
Following our examination of decorative objects, Professor Keaton and I returned to studying prints, drawings, and paintings that elide the presence of people of color. Products like tobacco, silk, feathers, gold, and cotton were luxury commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth century; their production and export to Europe is inextricably linked to colonial networks of enslavement. For example, images of smoking, such as Cornelis Pietersz. Bega’s Woman Smoking, depicts a woman holding a pipe filled with tobacco, which was most likely grown and harvested by enslaved men and women.
In the final day of Professor Keaton’s fellowship, we looked at representations of the Three Magi, the kings who came to honor Jesus shortly after his birth. One magus, Balthazar, was often depicted as Black in European imagery from the fourteenth century onwards, a seemingly positive identification of a Black man in European art. We focused particular attention on an embroidery of the Adoration of the Christ by the Three Magi, made in France in the seventeenth century. While Balthazar appears in a crown and rich garments that suggest his power, he is accompanied by a body representing either a servant or an enslaved child. The boy looks at Balthazar with subservience and holds up the magus’s gift. This pairing of Black king and submissive attendant suggests the complexity of the development of racial hierarchies in the period before 1800.
Professor Keaton’s teaching and research intersect with an important shift in the Hood’s assessment of European works of art. Curators and staff have already begun to reconsider the interpretation of our European collection to tell more complex and inclusive stories. This work includes writing new labels, such as Francesco Trevisani’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, to discuss the stereotyped representation of a young Black man as a servant. The museum is further committed to acquiring new works that speak to race and racialization in Europe before the twentieth century. New additions to the collection that speak to this goal include a portrait miniature of a young African diplomat, from the court of the Southern Netherlands in the late seventeenth century. Representing a Black-appearing man who held a position of prestige, this portrait challenges common notions of the status of people of color.
Professor Keaton’s teaching and research were a critical prompt to reassess how the Hood’s European paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, and drawings are related to histories of enslavement and racism. Although some of the works are well studied and used frequently in teaching, they have not been examined as a thematic group before Professor Keaton’s residency.
The museum is grateful to Professor Keaton for sharing her time and her expertise to shed new light on the collection. Her time as a Mellon Fellow complements the museum’s move to rethink the stories we can tell with our collection through teaching and exhibitions. We look forward to welcoming Professor Keaton back to the museum to teach with these objects.
This post was authored by: Elizabeth Rice Mattison, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Academic Programming
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth (Beth) Rice Mattison joined the Hood Museum of Art’s staff in July 2021 as the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Academic Programming, where she serves as the liaison to Dartmouth faculty and facilitates the integration of the museum’s collection with the College’s curriculum. As an experienced art historian, she’s committed to engaging diverse audiences with objects to elicit critical thinking and foster transformative encounters with art. In 2020, Beth completed her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Toronto; she also holds an M.A. and B.A. in the history of art from Yale University. She has held positions at several institutions, including the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto; the Musée du Louvre; the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery.
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