Annual Meeting of the College Art Association
“Every historian of the multitude the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaves is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.”
In her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman sets out to recreate the history and landscape of black social life, working outside the confined boundaries of the archive and within the powers of the creative imagination. Working from Hartman’s model, and inspired by the generative work emerging from the 2019 “Black Portraiture(s) V: Memory and the Archive Past. Present. Future.” Conference, this session further explores the challenges and the potential within writing African American art history in the absence of archives.
Of particular interest is the reclamation of overlooked histories as reparative gestures. Each presentation reveals the historic failures of the discipline to recognize black artists, as well as the deep tensions one must confront working with artists and their estates. We also consider the labor that goes into archive-building projects. Such work does not qualify as original scholarship under the requirements for academic promotions, and institutional commitments to building these archives and collections are often temporary. We ask, therefore, not only what it means to perform this work, but what are its consequences.
Jordana Moore Saggese and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis will speak of their work to create archives (and art histories) for the contemporary artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Carrie Mae Weems, respectively. Appointed as the Curator of African American Manuscripts and Rayna Andrews as Archivist for its African American Collecting Initiative at the Archives of American Art, Erin J. Gilbert offers a firsthand account of the project of bringing the papers and collections of African American artists into the Smithsonian. Leigh Raiford, working on a multi-year project to archive the personal photography of former Black Panther Party Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver, reflects on the tensions between labor, organizing, and producing scholarship on Black women’s lives. And Cheryl Finley will discuss her Mapping Art History at the Atlanta University Center project, which combines traditional archival research methods and digital humanities platforms to foreground underrepresented narratives, movements, artists and practices.
Each of the six panelists will present short, 8-minute papers on their individual projects, which will be available pre-recorded on the CAA website. A live roundtable discussion, moderated by Nicole Fleetwood, will take place on February 12th at 6:00pm.