[A couple weeks
back, we held the 48th annual Northeast MLA Convention
in Baltimore. Thanks to the work of President Hilda Chacón, Executive Director
Carine Mardorossian, and many many more, the convention went off beautifully.
This week I’ll follow up on five particular events and conversations—add your
thoughts, whether you were there or not, in comments, please!]
On three
exemplary and inspiring sides to the wonderful Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American
History & Culture.
1)
The Lynching Tree: Like the city and state in
which it’s located, the Lewis Museum features a wide and deep range of African
American and American histories, from slavery and shipbuilding to sharecropping
and jazz, Civil War soldiers to boxers, and many many more besides. But I was
particularly struck by how the museum presented the histories of lynching—after
reading materials and placards on those histories, visitors enter into a
secluded, dark room under the low-hanging eaves and branches of wizened tree,
and watch a powerful looping video of lynching images and stories. I haven’t
had a chance yet to visit the National Museum
of African American History & Culture, and can’t wait to see how the National
Lynching Museum & Memorial develops; but in my experience, the Lewis
Museum’s lynching exhibit was more evocative and potent than any I’ve
encountered. Remembering lynching is about a highly complex and fraught balance
of pain, discomfort, knowledge, and mourning, and I felt all those sides to the
story under the branches of the Lewis Museum’s tree.
2)
Past and Present: While that lynching exhibit is
rightly focused on a particular set of histories, however, the Lewis Museum’s
overall exhibition m.o. is quite different. Materials and artifacts from https://www.google.com/intl/en/options/the 19th
century or earlier are usually exhibited right next to, indeed in conversation
with, photographs or artifacts from the more recent past or even our own
moment. These materials are always related to one another (such as artifacts of
slave shipbuilding in Frederick Douglass’ era next to photographs of mid-20th
century African American shipwrights), and so offer narratives of continuity as
well as change. The exhibits don’t usually make those narratives explicit in
any way, though, instead asking viewers and visitors to think actively about
the relationship between the materials, and thus between past and present, then
and now. I’m tempted to call such exhibits Living History, but I think the
effect is actually more multi-directional than that—not only bringing histories
to life in our own moment, that is, but also putting our own moment back into conversation
with the legacies and heritages out of which it has arisen. And whatever we
call it, this exhibition motif is consistently both thought-provoking and
moving.
3)
Sons: When my NeMLA colleague and friend John Casey
had the chance to visit the Lewis Museum, the special exhibition (ongoing through
the end of July) was Sons:
Seeing the Modern African American Male. Featured the photographs of James Taliaferro, Sons highlights
multi-generational African American families from the Baltimore area, with the
explicit goal of representing the many different sides to manhood and
masculinity in that community in our 21st century moment. Given on
the one hand the prominence of the museum’s namesake and Baltimore native Reginald F. Lewis in such
conversations, and on the other hand the ongoing and very distinct presence of
African American men like Baltimore’s Freddie
Gray in the news, the exhibition felt particularly salient in many ways.
Yet what struck me most about Sons was the same thing I highlighted about the Boston
MFA’s 2015 Gordon Parks exhibit: the fundamental, inescapable humanity of
these photographic subjects. Even for those of us who resist all racist or discriminatory
definitions, the truth is that a category like race all too easily reduces
individuals and families to types, representations of larger communities. We’re
certainly all that, but we’re also all individuals, and all sons and daughters
as well. That’s a simple point but not an easy one always to remember, and this
wonderful exhibit helped me do just that.
Special
reflection post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other NeMLA memories to share?
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