Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. — Frederick Douglass
This coming Sunday afternoon, April 3rd at 2 pm ET, we’ll be taking about how institutions navigate hard histories — at Johns Hopkins, at UVA and at the Walters Art Museum. Baltimore folks, you can grab a ticket here and join us live and in-person.
Our hosts at the Walters asked panelists to provide images for an accompanying slide show. Not a straight-forward proposition for us at Hard Histories. We’ve been asking whether we can illustrate our past without leaning on historical images that, much like the myths we aim to challenge, often promote a white-washed story.
Fortunately, during fall 2021 student lab members spent time critically reviewing historical photographs from the JHU archives, curated by our colleagues at Hopkins Retrospective. We talked about what those images reveal and what they conceal. We crafted captions and experimented with modes of presentation. Our aim was to see through to the harder truths about race and racism embedded in them.
Guided by our work in the Lab, the Walters Art Museum will show the above image of the university’s original “History and Politics” seminar room, located on the “Old Campus,” circa 1887. Take a close look at the upper recesses of the space and notice the framed portraits (along with busts, and at least one relief.) You’ll recognize how portraits there aimed to tell a story about the past out of which the study of history and politics was born. And while we weren’t able to make out all the faces, best we could tell they were all white men.
Striking is how familiar this approach to constructing memory — by portraits on the wall — is. JHU was young in 1887, and these portraits were drawn from a general past. But over time they would be replaced by by the faces of the university’s own “greats.” Likely you’ve encountered similar walls that display portraits of leaders, thinkers, and benefactors in much the same way.
While in some instances the faces have changed or expanded — somewhat — the fundamental logic has not. The installation of portraits (like busts and reliefs) tells a story about who is valued and who is not. About what we honor and what we do not. The practice fixes those values on our walls and in our minds with hooks and nails embedded in plaster. Still, the motif is so ubiquitous that we might not think to question it at all.
In the Lab, we asked what it says when we display historical portraits. Beyond the subject’s identity, what ideas do such images memorialize? How is our thinking about power, authority, and leadership shaped by the portraits displayed in our seminar rooms, libraries, dormitories, administration buildings, and more?
It might be tempting to swap out old portraits for new faces, or to introduce “diversity” into the pantheons of the past. Can’t we change course and reappropriate an old portrait practice that began in spaces like the history and politics seminar room of 1887? Can’t we construct our memory as we always have, and merely tweak the details?
At the Lab, we aimed to get some distance on historical portraits and how they have been used. We’ve experimented with breaking the mold by shattering old images. Our signature illustration - on our website, for example - is indeed just that, a reinterpretation of the university’s history as told through photographs. We have fractured them through the shards of broken glass. With this, the authority of the past is undercut. Its nostalgia short-circuited. Its power drawn into question. When you to look closer and puzzle over what precisely the original image was, you are on your way to asking new, hard questions about our past
We look forward to seeing you Sunday afternoon at the Walters.
— MSJ.