African Past: Migrant Present
A museum or art gallery is a unique kind of space: however limited in size, it can gather objects from different locations, times, experiences, and visions into a microcosm. Its curator is self-conscious about how visitors will navigate objects in a room, or through several rooms. So if a story is unfolding, what is the story and who is telling it? Professor of Curatorial Studies Dr. Kelli Morgan writes that "the art museum developed as the colonial space where Euro-descended peoples exclusively represented themselves," and the first three images shown below suggest how simply traveling through a gallery--or even a virtual tour of one--tells that dominant story. The fourth image shows an in-progress floor plan for a 1986 gallery show called African Past: Migrant Present, which gathered nearly a hundred works in many different media: paintings, drawings, kites, embroidery, tin lanterns, baskets, fish nets, carved walking sticks. Supported by the Geneseo Migrant Center (GMC), it was curated by Professors Mary Arnold Twining and Sue Roark-Calnek. The exhibition was so well-received that it went on to stagings in Buffalo and at the Eastern Stream Conference in Philadelphia (1987).
The curators wanted to link the artistry of migrant farmworkers to African aesthetics and culture. Yale professor of art Robert Farris Thompson, a consultant and invited speaker, called this sphere of influence the "Black Atlantic"; at the exhibit, it encompassed works created by migrant workers from the US, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. Twining wrote that artifacts had been created from "locally obtained materials. They approximate what is available to artists in their home communities....They take materials as they find them and adapt their art to their changing environment." Small rural towns in Western New York, then, weren't removed or exempt from African history: a gallery in Geneseo was just as valid a point of connection to the knowledge passed through generations.
Let's think of the draft floor plan for the gallery, drawn on grid paper, as a cartographic map: a journey that creates meaning through space, its world telling visitors about the one outside of Lederer Gallery. In fact, for one iteration of the show Thompson would lead a walk-through of the exhibit with something like this in mind. African Past: Migrant Present was segmented into four parts:
- A section on Americans of African descent, with poems referencing spoken-word traditions and crafts like brooms, quilting, and carved walking sticks;
- A section on recent migrants from the Caribbean, whose images of boats invoked the sea spirit Agwé for guidance and safety;
- A section featuring a wide range of objects that “recreate[d] images of home for migrant farm laborers” using African traditions; and
- A section articulating dreams of success in America, ebodying “what might be as well as what is and what was.
A more detailed walkthrough of the exhibit can be found here, but at least a couple of appreciations can be articulated. First, the GMC exhibition was created during a time of great hostility toward “boat people” migrating from the Caribbean. As one researcher wrote at the time, the Reagan administration took a position that while a few Haitians fleeing the murderous Duvalier regime “deserve asylum, the vast majority are economic--not political--refugees.... As such, they do not have a legitimate legal claim to remain in the United States” (Stepick 164). At the time of African Past: Migrant Present Haitians also had been stigmatized as one of four high risk groups for AIDS. The curators affirmed the resilience, adaptation, shared traditions, and artistic skills of farmworkers. It was a story rarely heard amidst the grudging needs of farmers or the xenophobic messaging of politicians. Secondly, an important show was created with minimal funding and few individuals with professional backgrounds in galleries or museums. Without allies committed to a common purpose, and willing to learn beyond their comfort zones, African Past: Migrant Present never would have come to fruition. The importance of a public college's infrastructure can't be overstated, either, whether in terms of its supportive professional staff or simply providing the space in which to exhibit artwork.
African Past: Migrant Present enacted a 300-year journey for gallery visitors patient enough to grasp its scope. American power and wealth had been created through the labor of African slaves and Black sharecroppers. In the South that had taken the form of immense plantations and personal fortunes; in Northern states like New York it capitalized banks, shipping companies, factories, and colleges (Darity and Mullen). At the time of this exhibition, America wielded “Food for Peace” programs as a component of its geopolitical power, selectively withholding aid to starving peoples in nations perceived as Marxist: Nicaragua, Mozambique, Poland, and (most notoriously) Ethiopia. So the often-compelled journey of African migrants received its telling at an appropriate location, amidst fields of potatoes and fruit orchards in Western New York. Issues concerning migrant justice hadn’t simply come from nowhere, any more than the migrants themselves.
Works Consulted
-- Cotter, Holland. “Robert Farris Thompson, ‘Guerrilla Scholar’ of African Art, Dies at 88.” New York Times 12 Dec. 2021. Link here
-- Darity, William, and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020)
-- Morgan, Kelli. "How Can Museums Truly Shake Off Their Colonial Legacy?" Hyperallergic 8 Mar. 2023. Link here
-- Stepick, Alex. “Haitian Boat People: A Study in the Conflicting Forces Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy." Law and Contemporary Problems 45.2 (1982): 163-196. Link here
-- Twining, Mary Arnold, and Sue Roark-Calnek. Exhibition Program. African Past: Migrant Present. Geneseo Migrant Center, 1986. Link here