Seeing Race?
How should the race of an artist affect the perspective of the viewer?
Curated by Ian R. Banks
3. Robert S. Duncanson, Landscape with Cows Watering in a Stream, 1871, oil on canvas, the Met, 1974.359
Curated by Ian R. Banks
Contemporary artistic criticism assumes that an artist’s identity, background, and context inform the work that they create; an artist’s interaction with their racial identity receives particular attention. In the mid nineteenth-century, artists of color started to gain popularity and exposure that had previously been reserved for white artists. While still a distinct minority within the artistic community and while race-based chattel slavery was only beginning to be dismantled in the United States, the inclusion of artists of color in the national artistic dialogue provides art historians with additional tools to examine the impact of an artist’s racial identity on their work.
This exhibition places the work of Robert S. Duncanson and Edmonia Lewis into direct communication with their contemporaries. Each painting is of a similar subject and each sculpture depicts a free standing female figure in some situation of distress. The continuity of subject provides a foundation from which the viewer can begin to consider the potential impact of critique based upon racial identity. Should the assumption that the racial identity of an artist is vital to understanding a work be accepted without exception or should an artist’s own perception of their racial identity be the guiding principle with which a work is examined? This question is of particular importance when examining the work of Duncanson. Robert S. Duncanson had a fraught relationship with his racial identity. His work is being contrasted with the work of Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor whose racial-identity clearly informed her work.
This exhibit examines the role of race in our assessment of works of art, with a particular eye towards the effect of an artist’s own relationship with race. For this reason, the works will all be presented with only numerical designators. At the end of the exhibit, the object label will be matched to each number and so will reveal the artist and their biography. This forces the viewer to initially consider each work independently of the race of the artist and to then re-examine the assessment of the work in light of the artist’s race and relationship to their racial-identity. This exhibit does not seek to definitively answer the question of the role of race in the assessment of art but rather forces reflection upon the impact that race has on the perception and making of art.
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Thomas Cole is famous for popularizing American landscape painting through his integral role in the establishment of the Hudson River School. A white man born in England but an early immigrant to the United States, Cole was deeply concerned with American national identity. He painted the American landscape to highlight the unique beauty and power of the natural world that engulfed the continent that the nation was quickly growing to fill, regardless of its current inhabitants. This painting is exemplary of his presentation of nature as something that is explored and appreciated from within its wildness.
Similarly to Thomas Cole, Bierstadt was an immigrant to the United States, though coming from Germany rather than England. Bierstadt quickly became enamored with the uniquely stirring landscapes and participated in the similar narrative of portraying American national identity as wrapped up in its geography. He places Native Americans in the scene but similarly to the figures in Duncanson’s Landscape with Cows, the human figures are simply a piece of the landscape. Unlike Duncanson, Bierstadt does not represent a pastoral scene; instead he focuses solely upon a wild landscape whose alienness is highlighted by the inclusion of the Native Americans as opposed to Duncanson’s cowherds, boaters, and farm.
Duncanson portrays a pastoral landscape with the cows foregrounded and all signs of human progress shifted back. His figures are racially ambiguous, potentially reflecting his own struggle as a biracial man who spent most of his life in Cincinnati, a free city on the border of a slave state. This painting, one of the later works of Duncanson’s career, was painted the same year that Duncanson’s son accused him of hiding is African identity. Duncanson claimed that “his heart was with the down-trodden race” but nowhere in the letter does Duncanson deny that he has distanced himself from his biracial heritage.
Hiram Powers was a white sculptor but used his sculpture to examine issues that concerned him. Completed 20 years before the end of the American Civil War, Greek Slave raises questions about the institution of slavery and its relationship to classicism. The title, pose, and medium all communicate the depiction of a classical work but it is not named as a Venus or another mythological or allegorical figure. Instead, the statue is titled after a nameless slave even if her pose belies greater dignity than that. Powers creates a connection between the classical world and the political issues of his day. Similarly to Harriet Hosmer’s he portrays a woman in chains. Unlike the other two sculptors on display, Powers’ figure has her eyes downcast, she is subservient to the viewer, who may view her naked body without any fear of her knowledge or reprobation.
Edmonia Lewis was biracial—African American and Native American— and often her choice of subject reflects her awareness of her identity as a woman of color with a difficult and robust heritage. Using Hagar, who was unjustly exiled and is the mother of Arab peoples, Lewis mixes the traditional associations of a biblical narrative with the portrayal of a woman of color who is the victim of the sin of a Patriarch. Completed after the abolition of slavery, Hagar shows a woman of color, who also happens to look very Caucasian in her representation, striding forward with hands clasped in reverent prayer and eyes lifted just above the horizon.
Harriet Hosmer’s sculpture shows a Zenobia, a Syrian Queen who declared secession from Rome in the mid-3rd century. She was subsequently captured by Emperor Aurelian and died in captivity. She represents a strong female figure who retains her dignity even when she is subjected to the spectacle of being paraded through the streets of Rome. Hosmer represents her with her face and eyes straight and she is clothed. She retains her agency that Powers’ Greek Slave has lost and without the same desperation that is evident on the face of Hagar. Hosmer and Lewis both choose a woman of color (albeit Syrian rather than Egyptian) for their subject even though they are represented with the appearance of Caucasian women. While Zenobia recalls a classical legend, Hagar recalls a biblical narrative which may communicate the greater degree of connection that Hosmer feels to Western European culture as compared with Lewis’ heritage of African American spiritualism which draws her to biblical narratives.
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