Rewriting History
Discussion goals
By placing each work in a historical context, and by considering its technique and materials, students will be encouraged to relate it to questions of different historical perspectives and contemporary reinterpretations of historical figures and events.
Objects for Discussion
Titus Kaphar (born 1976, Kalamazoo, MI; active New Haven, CT), To Be Sold, 2018. Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. © Titus Kaphar
On July 31, 1766, the headline “To Be Sold” announced the sale of six African American slaves on the site of Princeton University’s Maclean House, as part of the dispersal of the estate of Samuel Finley, president of the University from 1761 to 1766. Kaphar’s work responds to the archival records of this sale, affixing with nails the tattered strips of a painted enlargement of that advertisement along the contours of a portrait bust of Finley. The contemporary work merges two traditions: honorific oil-portrait busts and Kongo power figures (minkisi). To Be Sold aims to invert the relationship between the entrenched heroic image of a founding father, the typical subject of historical memory, and the enslaved human who remained unseen and unknown.
Conversation prompts
- Kaphar is known for his study of traditional American and European art, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his interest in amending history. How does this work transform the traditional genre of portraiture? What effect does this transformation have on the viewer?
- Which materials and techniques does Kaphar combine? How do they complement (or contrast with) one another?
- Describe the relationship between what is visible and invisible in this work.
A documentary photographer who is best known for his images of East African refugees, Sheikh aims to give visual representation to people who are not represented politically. Although he grew up in New York, Sheikh spent his childhood and adolescent summers living with his father’s relatives in Nairobi, Kenya. He took this photograph in Lamu, Kenya, immediately after his graduation from Princeton. The recipient of a Fulbright grant, he had planned to document that Swahili community, but he quickly became interested in recording the influx of refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia, and—having gained permission from community leaders—he began to photograph inside refugee camps on the country’s northern border. This was the first of many projects in which Sheikh has worked to counter the ignorance and prejudice that are often attached to his subjects.
Conversation prompts
- Describe the cropping effects, angle of vision, and focal points of the composition. How do these elements inform your interaction with the figure?
- What type of relationship would you imagine between the artist and the sitter based on the style of this photograph?
- Does this figure appear to be a marginalized figure in society? Why or why not?
In House/Field/Yard/Kitchen, which is part of the series From Here I Saw What Happened . . . And I Cried (1995–96), Weems looks to the past to better understand the present. A thirty-three-piece photographic installation, this series appropriates nineteenth-century images of slaves as well as other nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs of Africans and African Americans, the originals for which are in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection. Among the source images Weems reworked are those produced in 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy, a well-known portrait photographer from South Carolina. These daguerreotypes were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, the Swiss American biologist, geologist, and polygenicist who believed that each race was created separately and could be classified by particular physical attributes. Denying their subjects any markers of individuality, the Agassiz–Zealy photographs scientifically objectified enslaved Africans, turning them into specimens. As Weems points out, a similar distancing happens with all of the appropriated images, not only the daguerreotypes: “When we’re looking at these images, we’re looking at the ways in which Anglo America—white America—saw itself in relationship to the black subject. I wanted to intervene in that by giving a voice to a subject that historically has had no voice.” By taking such images, toning most of them in a blood-red glow, and inscribing text across the surface of their glass, Weems aims to undermine the dehumanizing effects of historic images of African Americans and to invite subsequent reconsiderations of contemporary perceptions.
Conversation prompts
- What specific stylistic changes did Weems make to the original photograph? What effect do these changes have?
- Weems has described photography as “a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change.” Do Weems’s photographs succeed in granting a voice to those who were previously silenced? Why or why not?
- How does each figure’s gaze influence your reading of the photograph?
The Cameroonian ruler Ibrahim Njoya invented a new genre of secular art—drawing on paper—to depict the history and culture of the Bamum Kingdom. These dessins bamum (Bamum drawings) were created in multiples to allow for wide distribution, and include captions written in German, French, or Shüpamom (the Bamum language, of Njoya’s invention) to better reach different viewers. This drawing presents the royal genealogy of the Bamum kingdom of Cameroon from its 1394 foundation to sometime after 1933. Eighteen Bamum rulers are depicted with distinctive headgear as well as elaborate necklaces, bandoliers, and staffs. The first seventeen pose in front of the geometrically patterned walls of the palace at Foumban; the last is placed against a gray background, indicating that the image was influenced by a much-reproduced studio photograph of that leader. Bamum genealogies affirmed dynastic lineage and promoted official history during a time of internal and external power struggles, including intra-kingdom disputes and European colonialism.
Conversation prompts
- How do dessins bamums combine old and new forms of Bamum art and culture?
- In which language are the captions of this drawing written? Why would the Bamum have wanted to appeal to the speakers of that language in the 1930s, when this drawing was made?