I am a curator, writer, and fourth-year Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture at Pitt. My research considers the roles artists played in constructions of race and national identity in the Americas in the 20th century. For the Humanities Engage Curricular Development grant, I partnered with a cohort of art historians including fellow Ph.D. student Jacqueline Lombard and faculty mentors Dr. Gretchen Bender and Dr. Christopher Nygren to develop a module on the Image of the Black in Western Art (IOB). Considered to be the authoritative reference on representations of Blackness and Black people in Western Art from antiquity to the present, the IOB began in 1960 to redress the erasure of Black people from the histories of Western Art. Philanthropists and arts patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil founded and initially funded the project with the aim to collect images of objects (rather than objects themselves) to showcase the under-discussed long and varied history of Blackness in Western art, yielding a comprehensive repository of over 24,000 images of objects housed all over the world, which are also now available via ArtStor, an online database. The use of the IOB archive in the Renaissance Art course will focus more on the images themselves and their contexts, whereas the module for the Museums course will give more attention to the archive itself, its origins, means of support, interconnected projects, and institutional history and transformation.
This module is an opportunity to receive direct mentorship from Dr. Gretchen Bender, a leading figure in undergraduate art history pedagogies, on a particularly important course in my department. Museums, Societies, and Inclusion is a new course that anchors the new Museum Studies major within HAA. This digital module has the added benefit of reaching students who will go on in the museum field at a time when digitization and the limits of the digital museum experience are being reimagined entirely. This project will allow me to refine and share the digital pedagogies I developed in my online Summer 2020 course, Introduction to Modern Art, through another Humanities Engage grant.
In Museums, Societies, and Inclusion, students will first encounter the IOB as a case study in a unit on the “universal museum,” comparing it with other projects that sought to provide an exhaustive exploration of Western art such as the Louvre and the Smithsonian. Students will connect the origins of museums with their political and historical moment using the IOB as a case study, including its roots in the early 1960s US Civil Rights Movement and the institutional neglect it suffered after the death of its primary patron, Dominque de Menil.
The particularities of the IOB origins, aims, and formats serve as a counterexample to the common assumptions of what museums are, how they operate, and their perceived permanence as institutions. Asking questions about access means considering the project’s forms against its aims: Are hardbound volumes priced at over $100 each and a clunky and exclusive database like ArtStor the best format for these works? Does the project uphold white supremacist canons or critique them? Students will be challenged to think about the value and limitations of the IOB’s aims and forms as they consider what the project might look like if it reflected the values of the Black Lives Matter era.
Curating requires thinking with and against archives. Once we have historicized the collection and its evolution, students will use the online database to practice the kinds of queries put to curatorial assistants and interns, giving them a taste of the mundane and data-focused work that students rarely associate with curatorial labor. These experiences will be research practicums and an opportunity to reflect on the frustrations of databases and strategies to use them creatively, a skill I have honed in my own work within museum-critical exhibitions including Dig Where You Stand.
One of the most valuable aspects of the experience thus far is the collaboration among the cohort of art historians working on the IOB. In addition to my faculty mentor, this project developed in direct partnership with fellow PhD student Jacqueline Lombard who is designing her own module using the IOB for Dr. Christopher Nygren’s course on the art of the Italian Renaissance. Our collaborative efforts are complementary rather than duplicative and provide reciprocal peer-mentorship alongside faculty-graduate student mentorship.