MACON, GA. -- The Center for African-American Decorative Arts has organized the exhibition "Sankofa," on view at the Harriet Tubman Museum from October 31 to January 17.
"Sankofa" is the first comprehensive traveling display honoring Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African-American arts and crafts since 1978, when Georgetown University's John Michael Vlach curated "The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts."
The exhibit derives its name from an Akan/Ghanian word, which means "one must retrieve the past in order to move forward." Adhering to this claim, the work of African-American craftspeople is showcased, their influence on American decorative arts is explored, and the presence and visual traditions of these artisans of African descent in the United States are documented.
Early Nineteenth Century industrialization had a profound impact on African-American crafts. From 1790 to 1860, rapid economic expansion and a ban on the importation of slaves created opportunities for contract slaves and free blacks to accumulate wealth through their artisanry.
These craftspeople influenced basketmaking, pottery, furniture-making, carving, silversmithing, ironworks and other vernacular crafts. Some slave artisans were able to purchase freedom for themselves and their families through sales of their products, and artisan-based black communities appeared in city directories for Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans.
"Sankofa" includes works by artisans of both the folk and Euro-American traditions. It features all forms of decorative arts, including metalsmithing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, furniture design and photography. The exhibit provides a glimpse of African-American life during the Nineteenth Century and focuses primarily on freed blacks who resided in urban centers of commerce.
This focus is mainly due to the difficulty involved in attributing works to slave artisans, whereas freed black artisans' works can be identified via makers' stamps and styles. The scope of the exhibit includes works from three significant regional centers: the South, the East and the West.
Contributing to craftsmanship in the Southern region were Haitian immigrants. Haiti's slave insurrections between the years of 1791 and 1804 sent a surge of fear through the Americas. Planters were horrified by the possibility of the rebellions of the West Indians causing a chain reaction in the States. Instead, the United States witnessed the largest mass migration of highly skilled free and slave artisans that had been seen in its young history.
These individuals entered at every major Southern port in America; most notably New Orleans, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah and Mobile. Among them were carpenters, blacksmiths, silversmiths, masons and joiners. They opened retail outlets for their wares in progressive cities like Richmond, Philadelphia and New Orleans.
Some historians consider the years between 1820 to 1860 a "golden era" for slave and free African-American crafts. During this period, a good share of wealth accumulation and artisan productivity was enjoyed by this sector of the American population (by the early Nineteenth Century there began to appear significant numbers of black artisans listed in city directories nationwide).
Due to the rapid economic expansion of the United States during the Eighteenth Century, it was also possible for many slave artisans to engage in contract labor as a means of generating extra income for their owners. Thus the most highly skilled artisans were contained within the unyielding confines of the institution of slavery.
By 1860, at the onset of the Civil War, the free black population of the United States had increased substantially. Census records list the population of free people of color in the United States at this time as 488,070. Louisiana's free black population was 18,647; New Orleans had 10,689; Baltimore, 25,680 (the largest free person of color population within one city in the United States), and Ohio's, 36,673.
Though the number of free blacks in New Orleans was smaller than those in Cincinnati and Baltimore, this city and its surrounding area represented the most professionally diverse and wealthiest group of free people of color in the United States. They owned $15,000,000 worth of Louisiana real estate. In Louisiana, many autonomous communities were developed, built and owned by freed blacks. Within this group were many artisans.
"Sankofa" features the work of one such craftsman, named Jules Lion (1816-1866), born in France and listed as a free black in the 1851 New Orleans city directory. Lion introduced the daguerreotype to New Orleans and established himself as an outstanding lithographer in this city.
In preparation for the exhibition, center director Derrick Beard's curatorial research focused on African-American furniture makers. Such work encourages the viewer to question how marketplace demands may well have eliminated African stylistic influences from commercial cabinetmaking. African stylistic elements more often survived in vernacular objects.
One of New Orleans' most impressive furniture-making dynasties was the Barjon family. Dutruil Barjon, Sr, was born in Jeremie, Haiti, in 1799. He eventually came to own a gallery on Royal Street in the French Quarter. There, he made and displayed wonderfully crafted beds, chests-of-drawers and armoires. The exhibit features the only known example by Barjon, Sr: a daybed, as well as a complete bedroom set by Dutruil Barjon, Jr. Also included are many photographs, documents, and books related to New Orleans' African-American history.
Maryland, also the birthplace of great African-American liberators, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, had the largest group of free people of color in the United States. In fact, in Maryland, free blacks and slave populations were almost equal: there were 83,942 of the former, and 87,189 of the latter in 1860.
The exhibit offers three portraits painted by black Baltimorean Joshua Johnson, born a slave in 1761. Because his father was a white plantation owner (George Johnson) and, in accordance with the manumission custom extended to children of white male/black female unions, Joshua was set free at 19. He went on to become one of America's earliest portrait painters. His remarkable talent earned him the privilege of painting many members of Baltimore's wealthy merchant class.
Maryland's surrounding states also had a large free black population. In Virginia, slaves who had white fathers were set free when they reached 33 years of age. Consequently, their free black population was 58,042. Pennsylvania, an abolitionist state and a center for the Underground Railroad, had a total of 56,949. New York followed as a close third with 49,005 and North Carolina had 30,463 free blacks.
The exhibit includes work by North Carolina cabinetmakers Hence Smith, Thomas Day and his son, Devereaux Day; Cincinnati bedmaker Henry Boyd; and Missouri plain chair builder William Kunze. Also included are the creations of unknown African-American journeymen who produced Neo-classical, Empire, and Revival objects.
By including pieces by these nameless commercial craftsmen, the exhibit extends the viewer's understanding of the work of both slave and free black workers. These works also raise questions about stylistic interactions between workers, and with European-influenced artisans.
Thomas Day (1801-1861) was born free to a Revolutionary War veteran and owned the largest furniture gallery in antebellum North Carolina. He is renowned for his delicately designed beds, rockers, bureaus, sofas, sideboards and millwork. The exhibit features, as its showpiece, one of Day's most exceptional creations: a secretary carved with an unusual scroll pattern, which is visually reminiscent of the Sankofa design. The concept of looking backward in order to move forward is symbolized by a bird with feet pointed in a forward direction and head, eyes and beak pointed backward.
Day's secretary is particularly distinctive because blacks of this period rarely used such clearly recognizable African patterns and designs. For many reasons, these artisans chose to center their work around the "European" tradition.
"Sankofa" also features the work of New England landscape artist Edward Mitchell Bannister in addition to a rare portrait of Abraham Lincoln done by Philadelphia artist David Bustill Bowser. The latter portrait was once owned by a Philadelphia Nineteenth Century African-American businessman, Robert E. Purvis. Purvis was the only black to serve as president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1860, Cincinnati was a city caught in the cross-fire of the war between the states. It was considered the "gateway to the West," had pro-slavery neighbors to the South, and served as both a center for the abolitionist movement and a frequent stop for runaway slave bounty hunters.
As mentioned earlier, Ohio had an impressive number of free blacks and an abolitionist patronage, which helped to develop some of the country's most skilled artisans. One such person was Robert Scott Duncanson (1821-1872), who initially worked as a portrait painter and later became one of America's best landscape painters. He was the first African American to attain international acclaim, and his work has circulated throughout England, France and Italy. Some of his paintings were purchased by the King of Sweden and England's Queen Victoria.
Duncanson began his career as an apprentice to James Pressely Ball (1825-1905). Ball owned the largest daguerreotype gallery in the West. In the early 1870s J.P. Ball & Son moved further west to Helena, Mont. Here the subject matter and patronage of his portraiture shifted from whites in Cincinnati to blacks and Chinese in Helena. The "Sankofa" collection features a rare cabinet card of one of these Helena middle-class black families, a black newlywed couple.
It was also during this Civil War period that the call to "Go West" was heeded by wagonloads of fortune-seeking African Americans. San Francisco was the center for African-American culture in the region. It was there that the first black California-based painter and lithographer, Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918), established himself.
Brown arrived in San Francisco in 1861 and joined the lithography firm of Cuchel & Dresel. By 1867 he bought out the company and renamed it G.T. Brown & Co. "Sankofa" features one of Brown's western landscape paintings, dated 1882.
Also included are many rare Nineteenth Century African-American books, slave bills of sale, slave rental receipts, runaway slave reward ads and photographs of African-American Nineteenth Century life.
Among three very special items is the accounting ledger of William A. Leidesdorff, a California ship captain, who later became a San Francisco landowner and the first black US diplomat. The Leidesdorff ledger provides documentation of his schooner business from the years 1843 to 1844.
The second item, the only privately-owned letter written by California's first and only black governor, Pio Pico, addresses his nephew in San Francisco and is dated 1878.
The third highlight is the only extant autobiographical Arabic manuscript written in America by an enslaved African, Omar ibn Said (1770-1864) in 1831, recently purchased at an auction by Swann Galleries in New York City. A Muslim scholar from Senegal, Said writes of his capture and subsequent life in America.
The exhibit also presents widely varying craft forms. A large storage jar by Dave, the Edgefield, S.C., slave potter, is on display. The works include fine and folk art paintings by David Bustill Bowser and Joshua Johnson. A large serving spoon created by Philadelphia silversmith Peter Bentzon is shown.
The exhibition has sparked research into local African-American material culture and has brought attention to existing scholarship. Historical archaeologists, such as Theresa Singleton and art historian Robert Farris Thompson, have provided valuable insights toward understanding these objects, and a reference bibliography is now available through the Winterthur Library.
Each venue has contributed material to the exhibition. Following the opening of "Sankofa" in Chicago, Beard encouraged New Orleans curators to create wall texts naming local African-American craftsmen cited in early Nineteenth Century business directories. When the exhibition was shown in Baltimore, The Maryland Historical Society added African-American-made, Obate Sisters samplers. The society also arranged an extensive public education program, which included local collectors of African-American materials as resources.
Many of these arts and crafts were made by anonymous craftspeople, whose baskets, quilts, colonoware pots, and furnishings served primarily utilitarian household purposes. A number of the objects also incorporate spiritual or healing references. Recent exhibitions curated by Gladys Marie Fry, Eli Leon, and Maude Wahlman, for example, have highlighted spiritual references in African-American quiltmaking. Some of the African-derived, asymmetrical quilt patterns include coded symbols, such as "haint lines," which were believed to allow unhealthy spirits to escape between the seams.
In another example, archaeologist Leland Ferguson recently reinterpreted his research into the origins and uses of colonoware pottery. Such small pots were initially thought to have been used primarily for domestic cooking purposes. Ferguson has since speculated that they may have been used as medicine jars, as he found to be the case in West Africa.
Spiritual symbols on similar objects have encouraged further research into Nineteenth Century African-American values. Such research has prompted more complex interpretations of crafted objects referencing biblical passages, such as in the "Morning Star" cane exhibited in "Sankofa."
African-American literacy was often outlawed, so tracing attributions of specific stylistic motifs presents daunting challenges. As African-American identifications have been clarified, mis-attributed pieces have been deleted from the exhibition. Such revelations have highlighted the dilemma of attempting to trace the origins of specific artistic motifs back to Africa.
Recent research on Thomas Day, for example, suggests that he may have communicated with a brother, who served as a missionary in West Africa. Day's cabinets, architectural elements, fireplace mantles, door surrounds and furnishings in Milton, N.C., include apparently African-derived stylistic references.
A May 1996 conference, co-sponsored by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) and Winston-Salem State University, brought together scholars analyzing just such African contributions to the American decorative arts. Speakers agreed that there is broad documentation of the retention of "Africanisms" in African-American vernacular forms. Dale Rosengarten's Charleston presentations on Low Country coastal baskets, for example, demonstrated close connections to West African rice fanning basket traditions. Similarly, Eli Leon linked African and African-American strip-quilting patterns.
Scholars at the MESDA conference urged researchers to examine how African crafts influenced the overall framework of Nineteenth Century decorative arts.
Art historians, curators, and cultural anthropologists are exploring social and regional contexts, multiple object uses, the creolization of influences and idioms, the role of African Americans as consumers of these objects, and spiritual meanings of motifs in vernacular objects. "Sankofa" reaffirms these research directions while celebrating opportunities for collectors of these arts and crafts to be more involved in interpreting their meanings.
The exhibit has stimulated vital discussions about new interpretations of the quality of life of Nineteenth Century African Americans. The exhibit presents creative craft exploration and freedom within African-American decorative arts, and challenges traditional historical interpretations of African-American life in the midst of slavery. "Sankofa" also offers new insights into the spiritual mysteries imparted by many of these objects.
The Harriet Tubman Museum is at 340 Walnut Street. For information, 912/743-8544.
The Center for African-American Decorative Arts is currently seeking venues for "Sankofa."
