0:11

>> Welcome to the very first of the
speaker series planned in conjunction with the exhibition, History
is Rarely Black or White,

0:19

at the Agnes Etherington Art
Centre in Kingston, Ontario.

0:25

My name is Jason Cyrus. I’m the curator of the exhibition. Today we are joined by Anne-Marie
Guérin, the conservator and professor,

0:34

and Anna Arabindan-Kesson from
Princeton University, and before we jump

0:41

into a conversation, I want to
give you a bit of an overview of how our conversation today will go.

0:48

Rather than have it be too formalized. we thought we could kick off by
sharing a bit of about our project.

0:56

Anna will share a bit about her
book as well, and then we’ll engage in what I hope will be a lively and somewhat
informal conversation about the synergies

1:07

between these projects and I think their
potential for learning and the takeaways.

1:15

So here, we’re here today to talk about
cotton, and trade, labour and humanity,

1:23

but we cannot talk with any of those things
without talking about land, and it’s very,

1:29

very important to share that Queen’s University
and the land of which the Agnes situated on is

1:36

and has been an additional home of the
Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee nations.

1:42

As an immigrant settler myself
to Canada, I’m Guyanese-Canadian.

1:48

I come from a country that has been
primarily taken care of by the Arawak nation.

1:54

I have a very complicated relationship to land,
and in my own work, and the work that I hope

2:00

to be a part of, projects like this, centres at
its very core, a re-look at history and the ways

2:10

that colonial practice, the very framework of
colonialism, has removed agency and histories

2:19

from many people groups,
indigenous people being one of many. So I hope that this serves as one
small step towards reconciliation,

2:30

and that the conversations we’re
having today can be part of — can be one drop into that larger bucket
where we can take a critical look at many

2:41

of these very, very important topics. This conversation is part of the exhibition
speaker series, and the exhibition sits

2:50

within a wider framework
called Agnes Reimagined, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre is
at an interesting time in its history,

2:59

where we are reimagining
what curatorial practice, and what artistic intervention could look
like, using the wealth of collections

3:10

that we take care of, continuing to
curate and care for community engagement,

3:19

and relationships with communities and
having an honest look at relationships that we have not cared for in the past, as
well as opening up the Agnes to be a place

3:31

of learning and conversation
through engagement with students

3:36

and artists, and communities, as I said. This is part of a new era, and we’re hoping
that you will visit often and whether

3:46

that be digitally or physically, and this
will be part like I said of a new era

3:54

of replacing and restoring story. So what I would like to do first is just
share a bit about the speakers we have today,

4:05

and from there on I will share a
bit about the exhibition itself.

4:14

Okay, so like I said, my name is Jason Cyrus. I am a curator of fashion and textile,
and my work primarily looks at exchanges

4:23

between cultures, across history, as well as
its connections to our contemporary period.

4:29

I use fashion and textile as the lens of doing
so, and I completed a master’s in art history

4:37

at York University, and I’m now in the
middle of a PhD at Warwick in the UK,

4:43

and I have been the Isabel Bader Fellow in
textile conservation research at the Agnes,

4:49

and my work is looks across the fields of
installation, conservation, and curation.

4:58

I’m being joined by the absolutely fabulous
Anne-Marie Guérin, who is the conservator

5:04

who has worked on this project,
and Anne-Marie is a recent —

5:09

is a grad of the master’s program at
Queen’s University, in art conservation,

5:14

and she has worked in several heritage and art
institutions, including the Montreal Museum

5:20

of Fine Arts and the Canadian
Conservation Institute. Her own work shares an interdisciplinary focus,
as well as collaboration across art conservation

5:30

and curation, and we are so fortunate
to have her here today to chat with us.

5:37

I’m very excited to introduce
Anna Arabindan-Kesson whose book,

5:43

amazing trailblazing book, Black Bodies, White
Gold, which please make sure that becomes a part

5:51

of your reading and your
frameworks going forward.

5:57

Anna is an assistant professor of
African-American and black diasporic arts

6:04

at the Department of Art and
Archaeology at Princeton. She was born in Sri Lanka, and she completed
a undergraduate degree in New Zealand

6:13

and Australia, before finishing her PhD in
African-American studies and art history

6:20

at Yale, and very interesting to note that she was also a registered nurse
before moving over to academics.

6:29

So what we will do is I will share a
little bit about the exhibition itself.

6:38

There is a course — there’s a
physical exhibition at the Agnes, but our digital director, Danuta, has created
a fantastic online component that’s accessible

6:49

through the Agnes’s main page, as
well as the digital Agnes platform where you can experience the exhibition and
see its main talking points and main objects,

7:00

but what I thought I would do is just to set
this up so this is our very first series,

7:07

is to just share some installation
shots and to give you a little bit of an overview of what the show is about.

7:16

And I will share screen.

7:33

Just bear with me as I set this up.

7:43

All right. [inaudible] everyone can see it.

7:51

Yes, okay, I got some head nods. All right.

8:01

History’s black or white, primarily looks at
the cotton trade with a focus in the 1800s

8:08

from the late 1700s into the very early 1900s,
but our main focus is the period of the 1800s,

8:18

and we’re looking at cotton garments in
the Agnes collection of Canadian dress,

8:24

that tell the Queen’s and interrogating the
garments from an aspect of scientific testing,

8:31

conservation and the historical cotton trade.

8:36

What you’re looking at here is the first
gallery that sets up the garments on a platform

8:42

in which we are presenting garments
that are a cross-section of the — of society, and each garment you’re
seeing here is either entirely made

8:52

of cotton, or has cotton elements in. Behind you, you’re seeing a world
map in which we are using artworks

9:00

from the Agnes’s collection, both from its
Canadian collection and its European collection,

9:06

that through situating them on the map,
we’re trying to give you a sense of place, whether it be locally within Kingston, or in the
wider cotton supply chain, whether it be ports

9:18

that were important to ships and ships
that transported enslaved people or ships

9:27

that have taken other goods, or whether
that would have been a point of retail

9:33

like a store or anything of the sort. So the on the left — get my directions right —

9:41

on the left you’re seeing a map legend that
guides you through the use of the artworks

9:47

in different places, and the exhibition
has been enlightened, has been subverted,

9:53

and has been entangled by
contemporary art, which is why we’re so excited to talk to Anna tonight. Where the artists Karen Jones, David
Joelle and Gordon Shadrach have each loaned

10:07

and collaborated with us on artworks that
have reusing to really bring the history

10:16

of the cotton trade into the
present and show that the legacies that have taken hold specifically during
this time are still very much with us today

10:25

in the way that we live and
work and are on the land. What we’re seeing here is Karen
Jones’s installation Feed.

10:34

Karen Jones is [inaudible]
artist based in Vancouver, and she created this site-specific work for us.

10:43

This amazing blend of cotton with cotton balls
that she has interspersed with black hair,

10:55

which we will speak to much later on, but
it encircles a beautiful wedding dress

11:01

from 1893 that is entirely cotton.

11:06

This is installation of our conservation story
that Anne-Marie will speak to very shortly in which we’re trying to
really break down the silos

11:14

between conservation, curation, and research. The conservation practice is very — the
conservation field and the work is very central

11:23

to the exhibition, and we have put many of the
processes upfront for folks to come and engage

11:31

with and understand, and that’s
available digitally as well. The next gallery takes you from — so the first
gallery would have done this big overarching

11:42

framework in terms of the cotton supply
chain, where the cotton was coming from,

11:48

what were the ships involved, the
port cities and so on and so forth. The next gallery takes it from this
wider look into a more specific look

11:57

at the humanity involved in this and restoring
the humanity and shedding a more specific light

12:04

on the humanity of the enslaved folks who picked and harvested the raw cotton is the
central focus of this exhibition.

12:12

Sorry. This gallery we’re seeing here
the songs of the Gullah fashion story

12:19

by artist Damien Joel, who is Jamaican-American
and Damien’s installation here,

12:27

whether it be in film on the garments
themselves, focus on the Gullah Geechee nation that have been — that are settled in the
southern coast of United States all the way

12:36

from North Carolina down to Florida, along
the coastal regions and the Sea Islands,

12:43

and Damien has created an
installation that speaks to their history, their present,
and their future.

12:54

I love these photos. Every time I see them, I smile. We will speak to Damien’s
work later on in our chat.

13:05

So we’ve gone from the water supply chain. We’re now looking — we’ve looked at the
specifics and the humanity of one people group

13:13

that would have been working on the cotton. Now we’re following that trajectory through
the Underground Railroad into Canada,

13:21

and this last gallery looks at its connections
into the way that we live in Canada today,

13:28

and we can say more broadly in North America
today, based on the legacy of slavery.

13:33

We’re seeing here, black-dyed
garments from the Agnes’s collection, a map of the Underground Railroad, artwork
by Toronto-based artist Gordon Shadrach

13:46

who is a portrait artist who paints the
portraits of people and artists themselves,

13:54

or creatives, and we’ve put them in
conversation with some fantastic loans

14:02

from the material archives and Queen’s
University’s Rare Book Library. Here we’re seeing some tintypes of
former enslaved individuals settled

14:12

in what was called Upper Canada, will
be now known as [inaudible] Ontario. The far left is a very generous loan from
[inaudible] who’s a Kingston scholar.

14:22

We’ve paired these tintypes
with firsthand accounts

14:30

of the enslaved as well as allegorical accounts. You’re seeing on the left,
the very first print issues

14:40

of the Underground Railroad
by Harriet Beecher Stowe. These are the first two volumes so they
still include a number of errors that have

14:49

since been corrected as well as the
name of the character that has changed, and we are extremely fortunate to
be able to show these accounts.

14:58

In the middle, you’re looking
at the Voice of the Fugitive, which was the first black newspaper in Canada,
where it was based in Sandwich, Ontario,

15:07

which is now a suburb that has been
amalgamated into Windsor, Ontario,

15:13

just across the river from Detroit. And this newsletter was used in many different
ways to one of which being to communicate

15:25

to the enslaved and the descendants settled
in Ontario, all the folks who had come along

15:30

in the Underground Railroad, and whether to
be a sense of identifying them or being able

15:36

to connect with loved ones or other
folks that you would have known. On the right is A North-Side View of Slavery,

15:43

and while Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an allegorical
account based on the life of Henry Josiah,

15:52

A North-Side View of Slavery is the
actual account of formerly enslaved

15:57

and freed individuals who escaped through
the Underground Railroad, and in Canada. It is separated by town, and we’ve
opened it here to the story of Eric Brant

16:07

who was settled — who, funnily
enough in Sandwich, Ontario, where Voice of the Fugitive was based, and
it’s a little hard to see it from this image,

16:16

but I hope that folks are able to come to the gallery physically,
and go get closer to the case.

16:22

They can actually read Eric’s story, in which
he talks about the actual process of leaving

16:29

and then being settled in Canada, and how
after he was settled here, life was not the bed

16:36

of roses that I think we always
historically look at Canadian history,

16:41

I mean, in relation to American history. There was still a lot of racially fuelled
violence, segregation in many different ways,

16:50

and this is where the exhibition really
starts to pivot, where we look at the legacy

16:57

of the cotton trade that has
produced some beautiful garments within the Agnes’s collection,
and connecting the way

17:04

that these legacies have
been entrenched systemically, and connect to the way that we live now.

17:11

Racism is very much still
a part of our experience.

17:16

Many different intersectional phobias are as
well, and the exhibition really starts to,

17:22

I think, trouble this notion of Canada as a
safe place and start to have a critical look

17:28

at where do a lot of our viewpoints
and ways of seeing come from? Here we’re looking at other tintypes
from the [inaudible] archives

17:37

of formerly enslaved individuals. And Gordon Shadrach’s work powerfully
brings this history to the present.

17:43

Gordon’s portraits are very much
in conversation with the tintypes, and they present a lot of
contemporary individuals.

17:50

Some of them are creatives
themselves, sometimes in historic ways, and sometimes in contemporary ways, and it’s
that difference of seeing people and the way

17:58

that folks look different, and how our
perception of them might be different based on their skin colour or their dress or the way
they’re presented, and what the implications

18:07

for their own lives might be, and their safety. We think of the public death of murder of
George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Briana Taylor,

18:17

so many others whose names you don’t
know, as examples of how dangerous it is

18:29

for the black person, and how your very identity
and the way you are perceived by others,

18:36

and how you dress yourselves could
literally mean life and death. So in this gallery, I hope folks will
spend some time really thinking of the ways

18:45

that the cotton trade and the garments
that we saw previously and the folk, the people who were involved and their own
humanity and their being removed from land,

18:52

how that legacy has led us to a lot of the
ways that we live our lives here today.

18:58

With that, I’ll kick it over to Anne-Marie, who
will share a bit about the conservation story,

19:05

and the scientific testing and how we were able to bring these other lenses
into telling of the story.

19:14

Anne-Marie? >> Okay, so my part of this project was
really to ground and bolster Jason’s story

19:26

that he’s trying to tell through the
exhibition in the materiality of the garments.

19:36

So one of the first questions that Jason asked
me to look at is where the cotton came from,

19:44

and part of the idea of doing that, of
finding evidence of where the cotton came

19:49

from is really just to ground, the collection,
the Agnes’s collection in the global network,

19:55

in the supply chain of cotton, to basically just
bring really strong evidence of the presence

20:02

and the participation of Kingstonites
and Canadians of the 19th century

20:08

in the transatlantic slave trade, and in
the every part of the cotton supply chain.

20:16

So our process was really to look at the Agnes’s
collection, try to see what frame we wanted

20:27

to work within in terms of history,
the history of the garments, really tried to find the moments in
history that we wanted to represent.

20:37

So for example, the use of slavery in
the southern United States really sort

20:44

like it expanded a lot in the late 19th,
and — sorry, late 18th, early 19th century.

20:52

A lot of that had to do with
the Haitian Revolution, and what was happening in the Caribbean.

20:58

And so we wanted to look at what that transition
period was like, when cotton became more —

21:08

when slavery was being used more in the
United States, in the southern United States,

21:14

and then following that, when there
was the abolition of slavery in the UK,

21:21

and how that impacted whether or not the UK was
still importing cotton from the United States,

21:28

where slavery was very much still
happening, and then, because trying to find

21:35

out essentially the trajectory of the cotton
through from the United States to Great Britain,

21:40

and then being imported back into Canada. So essentially, we looked at all the
garments that were cotton that we could find,

21:46

and that involved a lot of microscopy
and other methods of analysis,

21:51

like for your transform infrared
spectroscopy as well, just to make sure that everything we
were actually sampling was cotton,

21:57

and we got in touch with the QFIR, the
Queen’s Facility for Isotope Research,

22:05

which we were really lucky to just find
that it was there because I didn’t know that it even existed before
starting this project,

22:14

and they were really amazing,
immediately on board. Yes, this is an interesting project
and we want to work with you.

22:21

And I think that for me, this collaboration,
this kind of three-way between the stories

22:26

that can be told from by historical garments, or
artworks that can be told from these garments,

22:36

and how we can kind of work in an
interdisciplinary way to bring these stories up, and to really bolster some of the stories
that have already been told for centuries,

22:44

is really part of what this project for
me really was about is being this bridge

22:50

between the storytelling
and the scientific analysis.

22:56

And then this part that we’re looking
at now, which is the conservation story, kind of goes through that entire process.

23:01

So this is the some of the analytical of the
microscopy that I was mentioning earlier.

23:07

So this piece was particularly interesting,
because it’s one of the earliest garments that we worked on, from between 1790
to 1820, probably more towards 1820,

23:20

but what was really interesting in the
microscopy was to find that the front of the waistcoat that we’re looking at, all
of the weft, so the fibers that we’re seeing,

23:29

threads that we’re seeing going
from left to right, is cotton, and all of the fibers we’re seeing going
up and down, so the warp, that is all silk,

23:37

so it was really interesting, just from a
material point of view to look at this object,

23:45

and we also found out that
the entire lining is cotton, so we had lots of different cotton
elements to test with this garment.

23:52

There was the lining, there was a
lot the thread was cotton as well, and then parts of the exterior
of the of the waistcoat.

23:59

I just — this slide is kind of — it kind of shows one of the typical
ways that cotton is identifiable,

24:08

and that is by if you see this kind of twist
that’s happening in the fibre, that is really,

24:15

really typical of cotton, and you
don’t always see it because sometimes when cotton is treated a certain way that twist
kind of is lost a little bit and then it can end

24:28

up looking a lot like silk, so that’s when
we ended up combining different methods,

24:33

so microscopy with a TIR
that I mentioned earlier for your transform infrared spectroscopy,

24:41

and then that can help us understand
really what the material is just by combining these different methods.

24:48

Yes, so this is the [inaudible]
that was I was talking about a little bit earlier,
getting in touch with QFIR.

24:54

I didn’t know that it was even possible to
find the origins of cotton until I looked

25:01

into essentially contemporary
analysis of cotton, because I found out that it’s
impossible even or very difficult today

25:09

to trace back the supply chain of
cotton and many other materials. So when companies, fashion brands, for example,
kind of claim an ethical source of their cotton

25:21

or that it was responsibly sourced, it’s really
difficult to be able to claim that and be sure. So these companies that want to market their
cotton that way, or their fashion brand

25:31

that way, will go to isotope
analysis researchers to make sure

25:36

that their cotton didn’t come from a place
where slavery is known to be used today,

25:42

or child labourers, so such as areas
of China and places in Uzbekistan.

25:47

So those are two of the major ones, but
there are many other places as well. So it’s kind of coming — for me, it
kind of comes full circle of this, like,

25:57

trying to source where the cotton
came from, and where the history — not just the history, but the humanity of
the supply chain is because we separate those

26:05

so readily, when in fact, they’re so connected,

26:12

and I think that that’s what
this exhibition is about, it’s about connecting the
humanity with the supply chain.

26:18

So that’s just sampling from the
waistcoat that we just looked at.

26:26

So that’s me sampling, the
thread that runs along. One of the other challenges that we
had is we didn’t know if we would —

26:35

how much material would be needed to get
representative data of isotope analysis,

26:41

so we ended up doing a lot of pilot tests with
contemporary cotton that we just purchased

26:47

in stores, specifically cotton that we know
came from Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia,

26:54

as well as some historical samples of like
extra lace that had been left behind by somebody

27:02

that didn’t, you know, that
comes from the probably the turn of the century, maybe the late 19th century.

27:09

So we ran those through isotope analysis
first to see how much material we needed to get something representative, and we were so
lucky that it ended up being just one milligram

27:19

of material, because if it
was much more than that, it would have been considered
really unethical to take

27:26

that much material out of a historical garment. So then the samples basically are sent to the
lab in these little tubes, where they are washed

27:40

with a — do I have a picture of that? No. They’re washed with a
combination of chloroform and methanol,

27:47

just to make sure that what we’re testing
is really what is in the material, and not anything extra that
was accumulated over time.

27:56

And then it’s run through a GCMS, so
gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

28:02

Basically what happens is, the material is
combusted at a very, very high temperature,

28:08

so that it breaks apart into its multiple
elements and then gets caught into a tube

28:16

that is — that basically
can then measure the mass of each element, so that’s the initial process.

28:22

Then each element, so the elements we
tested is are carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

28:29

So that’s the first part, but then
you, in order to do isotope analysis, you need to break down that even further
so that you can measure each the number

28:39

of isotopes per element, and this is
going to tell you where the garment came

28:45

from because plant materials
and animals and anything organic

28:50

that is living will have accumulated
over its lifetime, a number of analysis

28:55

from these elements based on where they live. So for example, for a cotton plant,
depending on the water cycles around it,

29:03

it will have accumulated a certain level of
each isotope, of each elemental isotopes,

29:10

and then you can it kind of ends
up being a like a fingerprint of that type of plant growing in that region.

29:17

So one of the aspects of this
work that is a bit challenging, especially considering historical
garments, or historical anything,

29:27

is that with environmental changes, these can —
this can change over time, and it depends a lot

29:37

on how much material you’ve accumulated, because
what you need to be able to do is to compare

29:43

that data with other existing material. So the more cotton isotope analysis we
have done, the more specific we can be

29:53

about where the cotton came from. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

29:59

So there is a lot of cotton analysis
that’s been done that is contemporary, so that’s really useful to us, but there
isn’t all that much historical cotton,

30:09

and so I’m kind of curious, as an aside,
I’m kind of curious to see, you know, if there’s this much differentiation, and if
we can do this work on multitudes of garments,

30:21

can we just specify more and
more, the cotton supply chain?

30:27

And I — right now, I’m kind
of thinking about it in this very analytical, very
kind of — not objective.

30:35

That’s not the right word — but like
the thinking about it this way seems

30:41

to remove the humanity from it, and I think
that that’s something that is useful sometimes,

30:50

like in science, for example,
like people tried to do that. I don’t think personally, I don’t
think that it’s really possible,

30:56

but the idea is to really be objective
about the information that you’re getting, but if you’re only looking at it that way,
if you’re only looking at it extrapolated,

31:05

or taken away from the humanity of what that —
of that supply chain, you’re really just looking

31:13

at data, and it’s not going
to be meaningful to anybody,

31:19

and the way that this becomes meaningful,
is through an exhibition, for example,

31:25

or some other art form, some other media where
this information can just bolster the stories

31:31

that have been told, and that are still
being told, so I hope I’m making sense, but this has been kind of my point of view in
this project has been to try to be like a bridge

31:46

between the stories we’re trying to tell, the
ways in which they impact people’s lives today,

31:55

and then also just this very
sciency, kind of, you know,

32:01

removed thing that we always consider
science to be so removed from us, but it can be really a useful tool, if it’s
then kind of put in a context, I suppose,

32:15

and I think that that’s what we’ve done in
this exhibition is put this very sciency thing

32:20

into a context that makes it really meaningful. Anyway, I think that’s — I
hope I didn’t go over time.

32:30

>> Anne-Marie, as you said, what’s important
is that the science gets put into context,

32:35

and we have tested the garments in the
cotton garments that are in the exhibition,

32:42

and we’ve been working with the isotope
lab since I would say, was it early spring?

32:49

[inaudible] summer? >> We contacted them right at
the beginning, like in February. >> In February, right.

32:54

So we — this — so then the testing process
wrapped up, you know, [inaudible] September,

32:59

so the raw data has been generated, and
we are waiting on Dr. Dan Layton-Matthews,

33:07

who is the Associate Professor at
Queen’s University and co-director of the facility for isotope research.

33:14

He’s one of the very few people who
has the expertise to interpret the data and the combinations of isotopic elements
that are is generated in the output,

33:25

who can really interpret this
and be able to tell us based on those findings, where
is the cotton coming from?

33:33

So you are just as on the edge of your seat
as we are, as we are waiting for the results

33:40

to be announced, and we will layer those into the physical exhibition
and put them up online as well.

33:46

But — >> I just want to do a shout out to Evelyn
Nudzig [phonetic] also, who was like the person

33:53

who made everything happen in the
lab, so I just want to mention that. >> Hi, Evelyn, if you’re here.

33:58

We love you, thank you. A very key — a very important component
of the exhibition is not just a combination

34:08

of historical research, but the use of
contemporary art to bring these lenses together

34:14

in conjunction with the science and the
conservation, to be able to tell the story

34:21

of the humanity that is the
foundation of the cotton chain. I cannot tell you how excited
I am to have Anna Kesson share

34:29

about her book Black Bodies White Gold, that
it was so interesting for us to be working

34:36

on our separate projects and then to
realize the synergies that exist within. So Anna, please give us an
overview of the book before we chat

34:45

about the connections that there are. Thank you. >> Thank you, all.

34:51

I’m just going to share my screen. So first of all, I want to say a huge
thank you and congratulations to Jason

35:01

and Anne-Marie for an amazing exhibition. I haven’t seen it, unfortunately,
but I’ve seen it online.

35:09

And, you know, for us academics who are
sort of stuck away from the world at times,

35:18

it’s just amazing to see how, you know, how
your work is in synergy with other professionals

35:27

and with other people who are thinking in
a similar way, and I have to say, you know,

35:33

this is my first book, and it
also just made me feel like oh, I’m not completely crazy, you know?

35:40

Someone else is thinking this way. Because I think in fields
like art history sometimes,

35:46

this sort of transnational transhistorical
framework is sometimes hard to sustain,

35:55

and hard to create just because
of the limitations of disciplines,

36:00

and maybe that’s something
we’ll talk about later. I do also want to acknowledge that I
wrote this book, I researched for it,

36:10

I’m talking to you about it from unceded land. I’m here in Princeton, and I’m sitting on
the unceded territory of the Lenape people,

36:20

and I just want to acknowledge elders past,
present, and future, and I think talking

36:28

about cotton, you know, we have to
start, as Jason said, with land, and with that those processes of genocide,
of clearance, and of transatlantic slavery,

36:40

to really understand the continued implications
of these visual and material histories today.

36:49

And so my work and my book, really,
I think, does what Jason sort

36:57

of ended his presentation with,
by saying, you know, what is it or where do ways of seeing come from?

37:03

And as an art historian, and I think
as, as a former health professional, that’s really what shapes everything
I do, my teaching and my research.

37:12

How is it that we see the way we do? How is it that seeing influences the
way we value and relate to others?

37:24

And how can we dismantle and redesign
those frameworks, and so the book also came

37:35

from the work of contemporary artists,
and I’ll sort of unpack that as I go, but I wanted to start with this work by Hank
Willis Thomas, who I’m sure many of you know.

37:44

He’s based in New York. It’s called Black Hands, White Cotton, and
it I think, visualizes and materializes,

37:53

that those sort of intimate histories that
I’m dealing with, which is the history

37:58

of the cotton trade and the history of the
slave trade, and my, what I really kind of focus

38:04

on is the ways that blackness is visually
constructed the way that blackness is formed,

38:13

and for me, that starting point, in terms of
cotton and slavery is the economic relationship

38:19

between the commodity of cotton and
the commodity, or the commodification

38:26

of enslaved African people who
are brought to the Americas,

38:33

the Caribbean, the US, Canada, too. And so I kind of take that from Frederick
Douglas, who in a lecture to abolitionists

38:43

in London, said when the price of cotton goes
up, so does the value of an enslaved person, and I think Thomas’s image here, really helps
us to visualize that economic logic, right?

38:57

— to also — rather to visualize the ways — the way that an economic relationship
can become a visual framework,

39:05

and I suppose that’s really what I’m trying to do throughout the book is really emphasize
how this sort of economic logic has influenced

39:13

and continues to shape ways of seeing. I think another aspect of this intersection
of economics and visuality in the production

39:26

of blackness through the cotton trade is the
way that cotton connected different people

39:32

in different places, and I think that, you
know, this is something that comes out in sort of global histories or popular advertisements
that cotton is a kind of fabric that connects

39:46

but what I think what is missed
in those histories is often, as Jason and Anne-Marie highlighted, the
humanity, like the lived experiences of people

39:55

who are and continue to be embedded

40:01

in these global exploit systems
of exploitation and oppression.

40:07

And I was particularly — I work in my book
and, you know, this is, — I work with a —

40:13

the artistic oeuvre of Lubaina
Himid, who’s someone I greatly admire

40:21

and has been very generous to me in
kind of helping me frame my research,

40:27

and this is a work called
cotton.com with which she — in which she is exploring materializing
the relationship that cotton created

40:37

between enslaved people in the U.S. South
and cotton factory operatives in Manchester,

40:44

England, and so she creates these
canvases which are in black and white,

40:51

so symbolizing that intersection. They’re on cotton.

40:56

They’re — she’s imitated cotton textile pattern
books from the 19th century, and she’s also kind

41:06

of used them to sort of imagine
a kind of communication, right?

41:11

— between — so cotton as
a form of communication. They’re also referencing letters sent by
Lancashire cotton workers to Abraham Lincoln

41:21

in support of emancipation, so she’s sort
of created — visualizing that network,

41:27

but above the paintings, you will
see a brass plaque, and I think —

41:32

oh, I must have — no, I’m sorry. I took out the text, but it says he said, I
looked like a painting by Mario [phonetic]

41:44

because I was balancing a water jug
on my — a water carrier on my head,

41:50

and so she’s quoting something from a tourist
or a travel narrative of Frederick Elmstead,

41:59

the architect who visited
plantations in the 1850s, where he’s describing seeing a young woman
walking to the cotton fields with water

42:10

for the enslaved cotton workers there, and this woman is describing her
abstraction into an image, right?

42:21

It’s — she’s describing her
aestheticization and so I think what’s wonderful

42:26

about Himid’s work, is she’s showing how
cotton connects, but also visualizing

42:33

that economic relationship of commodification
and objectification that cotton mediated

42:40

in the construction of blackness, and
so using Himid’s work, I look at —

42:46

I talk about the textiles
that were actually used to clothe enslaved people,
textiles that travelled.

42:53

And at the top, you’ll see an image of what
was called negro cloth, cloth that was made

43:00

in Rhode Island, in Massachusetts,
and it was also made in —

43:06

versions of this were made in the UK and sent to
the Caribbean, but these are made in the north

43:13

of the U.S. and sent to the U.S.
South to clothe enslaved people. And then in the bottom, you’ll
see textile samples that were —

43:20

that are striped that were used in the trade in
enslaved people from the west coast of Africa,

43:30

and but were also called fancy cloth,
because they looked — they were brighter.

43:35

They were patterned. And these were often the kinds of textiles
that were used to clothe enslaved people

43:41

on the auction block, and so that
kind of rough coarse cloth used

43:47

on the plantations is really
a kind of regulatory uniform. It’s coarseness and, you know, it was
made to look as coarse and ugly and,

43:56

you know, and uninteresting as possible.

44:01

On the other hand, fancy cloth was sort of
meant to emphasize the value of enslaved people

44:11

on the auction blocks, so they’re doing
these two different things but, you know, they’re connecting different places and
different people, and they’re continuing to do

44:23

that work of, you know, materializing that
kind of economic logic of commodification.

44:30

And in sort of conversation with these
works, I also talk or look at the writings

44:38

of enslaved people in which — this is Harriet
Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,

44:46

you know, and she talks about hating
wearing these clothing, this cloth.

44:52

She talks about how it hurts and it’s itchy
and there are a lot of different kinds of descriptions like that and so I see those
sorts of interventions by enslaved people

45:05

as a way of refusing that objectification or
refusing the object as Fred Moten describes it,

45:11

and then this is a painting by Edward
Mitchell Bannister, who’s also from Canada,

45:18

and it’s the only work I’ve seen by a
black artist in the 19th century that may,

45:26

may be referencing the cotton trade. One of his patrons was a mill
owner in Rhode Island so, you know,

45:34

he may have been once upon a time
— this is made after the Civil War,

45:40

but it’s quite possible that this family, you
know, owned a mill in which cotton was made that was sent to the South, and here, I
think, you know, there’s a kind of way

45:48

that this painting — we might talk about it
as a way of evoking that memory of slavery

45:55

as it’s embedded in the landscape of the
U.S. North after slavery So again, you know,

46:03

these are just, you know, ways of
trying to disassemble that visual —

46:10

of that visual relationship,
which I call a speculative vision. So what I argue is that cotton frames a way of
seeing blackness that is all about the potential

46:22

for profit as under slavery, and
then after the end of the Civil War,

46:30

it becomes about the potential of black people
to be productive citizens, so in both instances,

46:38

however, what cotton is kind of framing
or mediating is a way of seeing blackness,

46:44

or a way of seeing black people in which black
people continually have to prove their value,

46:50

and I would argue this is
something that continues today and is perhaps most [inaudible] powerfully
highlighted in the phrase, black lives matter,

46:59

whose lives matter, whose lives have to be
continually shown to matter, and so in this,

47:07

these are some other images that are other
works that I look at, so this is photographs

47:13

of African-Americans working with cotton
post — during and after the Civil War,

47:19

and I kind of make the connection
that, you know, cotton here —

47:24

there’s a sense in which following slavery,
formerly enslaved African-Americans have to kind

47:30

of prove how they can become refined into free,
productive citizens, and so there’s a kind of,

47:37

again, that visual relationship is being used
to under — to frame meanings of blackness.

47:44

I think that this relationship
between vision, between labour and value is implicitly also evoked in the work
these kind of canonical works by Winslow Homer

47:58

and Edgar Degas, and I’ve included this small
image of an enslaved person being valued

48:06

on the slave — in an auction,
because I think you can see, right?

48:11

— this similarity in the ways
that cotton is being valued, right? — in Degas’s painting, that classing with the
way an enslaved person is being valued on that,

48:22

and so this is the kind of thing I’m trying to
— that’s the kind of material relationship, but I think that’s another — I think there’s an
ideological relationship there that I’m trying

48:35

to kind of just talk about and visualize, right? — through my research, and so I think, what
I do here is also talk about how we might see

48:50

in these white artists’ paintings, right? — they are also asking their viewers to
visually assess their work, and this —

48:59

we can take this further because both Homer and Degas were painting these works
specifically for cotton merchants, right?

49:09

They wanted this work to sell. They needed to make money. We don’t often want to talk about
that in art history but, you know,

49:17

these were works that they were — they understood that these were
works — these were commodities.

49:23

Their labour was also being commodified in a
certain way, and so I think it’s interesting

49:29

that they use cotton, and the implicit
or explicit relationship between cotton

49:35

and blackness to also kind of mediate
their own anxieties as white men,

49:41

white artists in the Reconstruction era. And then, kind of again, to sort of try to
highlight another way of valuing labour,

49:56

another way of valuing blackness, I talk very
briefly about several artists who returned

50:04

to the plantation not as a site of this
kind of commodification or this kind

50:13

of speculative vision, but they create another
kind of speculative vision in which, you know,

50:21

black labour, black life becomes
a site of community formation.

50:27

It becomes a site of kinship, and so this is a
work by Clementine Hunter, a self-taught artists

50:33

from New Orleans who, you
know, lived and grew up on — was born and grew up on a cotton plantation, and
her paintings really focussed on her experiences

50:44

and her family’s experiences
of working on the plantation. And then I kind of end with the work of Ynka
Shonibare and the ways in which West Africa

50:57

or Africa in general kind of becomes a new kind
of plantation for the — in the minds of the —

51:04

of U.S. and British manufacturers at the
end of the 19th and early 20th century.

51:10

When I say a new kind of plantation, I mean,
there’s a renewed interest in growing cotton

51:16

in plantations in West Africa, and there’s also
a renewed interest in West African consumerism,

51:24

so West African communities as new markets
for American and British cotton production,

51:32

and what I kind of try and do is use Ynka
Shonibare’s work in, you know, where he’s —

51:40

this is called Scramble for Africa, you
know, in which he’s sort of really punning on

51:45

and I think materializing the speculative
project of colonialism but also allowing us

51:53

to speculate on other kinds
of intimacies, right? — that cotton might have created between
West African consumers and the South

52:02

and Southeast Asian — many Southeast Asian
traders that they were working with, you know,

52:09

that they — and so the ways that, you know,
cotton might help us imagine other kinds

52:16

of alliances and intimacies that
are perhaps, that are also embedded

52:22

in these colonial networks, and this is Agostino
Brunias’s painting of a market scene in Dominica

52:27

in the late 18th century that I think is an
interesting correlation to Shonibare’s work,

52:34

in terms of the movement of cotton and
the kinds of connections it creates. And then I, you know, I think, again, as Jason
and Anne-Marie have highlighted, you know,

52:46

this work is not — it’s not just about the
history, it’s about its continued implications, and this is a — when I was — as I was writing
the book, I heard about this man at Yale

52:58

who worked in the dining room, dining hall,
have one of the colleges that I actually used

53:04

to be a fellow at, and he smashed a stained
glass window of these two cotton pickers,

53:13

and I think that what, you
know, you can read about it. We can talk about it later.

53:18

But what Corey Menafee did, I think, was
such an important act of decolonization,

53:25

of disassembling that I think
we’re trying to do here, right?

53:30

But he’s — but one of the
things he said was, he did that, because he didn’t think it was right, that
anyone could had to come to work every day,

53:38

and see these pictures, see these images and
work under them, and so I think, you know,

53:45

for me, I think that’s really what I want to do. Sort of, you know, in this — and I think that’s
what these artists are asking us to do, right?

53:54

— to disassemble, to break down these visual
frameworks in order to reassemble new futures

54:05

of care and collaboration and inequality.

54:13

>> Well, thank you. I selfishly want to just hear you
talk for the rest of the time,

54:22

but I know that wouldn’t be fair. What I think I’m so impacted by as you’ve
chatted, and as you’ve spoken, Anne-Marie too,

54:31

as you’ve shared your own
thoughts is how we keep coming back to the humanity that’s the
core of the cotton trade.

54:39

A very basic question I think was posed to
me quite recently was, why is that important?

54:45

And why is it important to connect cotton to the way we live now, and
what relevance does it have?

54:53

And I’d like to pose that to both of
you but I can say for my own self,

54:58

just looking at our the way that in a sense
working across conservation, curation,

55:05

art historical research and teaching
as well, the way that the three

55:11

of us normally our fields are very siloed. We’re — they’re kept quite separate.

55:17

As somebody who studies fashion history
and dress history, the history of textiles

55:23

and trade, that focus on the materiality
of garments, their constructions,

55:29

the raw materials, the importance of a
garment to its wearer, whether, you know,

55:35

it would have been something worn at a wedding, or it would have been something
used as a trade item.

55:41

There’s so much emphasis on that aspect of
things, and yet to somebody who is racialized,

55:50

I know how important the study of slavery
and the study of enslavement, and extraction

55:57

and land and indigenous history is
also incredibly important to the way

56:05

that the other history that’s come about,
but very rarely they’re brought together,

56:10

and one of the and why I think we wanted to
have a focus on this exhibition is to break

56:15

down the silos and share in a way that
we can collaborate across together, and have a way of relooking again at the
humanity and reason why humanity is important,

56:26

because we cannot understand who we are
now, unless you understand where we’ve come.

56:33

The ways that we see each other and
the way that blackness is policed now,

56:39

and the way that there’s so
much systemic oppression, is connected to the very cotton trade during
the — I mean, slavery was happening, obviously,

56:47

before the 1800s, but it’s that period
where slavery and the colonial project,

56:53

and the inventions with the cotton
gin and roller printing machine, and the political things of the abolition of
slavery, and the Civil War, and many other —

57:04

and as you mentioned, like this whole
parallel histories, the Caribbean. Its Southeast Asia.

57:10

It’s The States. A lot of the what’s happening during that
time joins the commercial element of things,

57:18

and it becomes now part of a capitalist push that therefore then economically entrenches
the systemic oppressions that you’re seeing,

57:30

but they actually therefore
them become systemic. That’s when you see wealth
concentrating down much more in the UK.

57:37

The Anthropocene obviously, then
becomes a part of this conversation, because the mills are pumping
lead into the atmosphere.

57:46

You’re looking at coal being taken
from the earth and, you know, in ways that’s environmentally detrimental.

57:53

There’s so many ways that you can layer this
on but, you know, also the largest amount of black — of Africans are being trafficked
across the ocean during this time as well,

58:02

and it becomes part of economic system, in
addition to cultural and a political one,

58:10

and that way of seeing blackness as something
to be policed as an economic cog as something

58:16

that is just, as Anna, as you
just shared in those images. You know, you’re evaluating the black body,
the way that you’re looking at the quality

58:24

of the cotton fibre, in the way
that you are evaluating a ship, and the way that it should be
enlarged to take more people and goods.

58:32

That way of seeing has not left us
because it becomes entrenched economically

58:38

and in our structure, socially, that has
led us to this system of seeing blackness

58:44

and marginalization as something
to be controlled, which leads us to a long
history of incarceration.

58:53

And what I think is so important about restoring
the humanity, is that this this allow us

58:59

to break down these silos but allows us
to ask highly personal questions, I think.

59:04

I asked, I think it’s important for me
to know when I go through the world, when encounter conversations or whether
I receive reactions, where that’s coming

59:12

from and how they all come together? So Anne-Marie, perhaps I could ask you. I can give Anna [inaudible] catch her breath
as well, but in what ways is it important

59:22

for you to, you know, bring the
conservation, the science together with restoring the humanity in your own field?

59:29

>> Oh, well, I mean, at the risk of sounding
really basic, I feel like it’s just —

59:36

if we’re not doing that, then what are we doing? Like what’s the point? And I know that you’re asking kind of more
specifically but if we’re not here to make —

59:49

I guess, to understand ourselves, and
to understand where, like for myself,

59:55

my own colonial mindset comes
from and my own interactions and like all the things that
make me feel uncomfortable.

1:00:02

If I’m not here to try to understand that,
then what am I even — what am I doing? Like, what — what’s the point?

1:00:09

Like so I think that the only way that we can,
I guess, make better systems that work better,

1:00:19

and that make people happier in general
is by looking at where are we now?

1:00:25

Why are we here? Exactly like you were saying, we
— I think that there’s this —

1:00:33

there’s a reason that science
and academia even, and so many —

1:00:41

with all the structures that
we live in, right now, there’s a reason why there
are — they are siloed. There’s a reason that we are taught that we have
this discipline, and that we are experts here,

1:00:54

and that we shouldn’t talk to
that other person over there because that might cause some
discomfort, or, you know,

1:01:02

and I think that’s what’s really
important to break down is to like —

1:01:10

I mean, everything is connected, if we
look at the economy, the supply chain.

1:01:16

You can’t talk about these materials and how
even like, the clothing we’re wearing now, we can’t — we’re not separate
from the materiality.

1:01:24

We’re not separate from the
supply chain, and we’re — yeah, I don’t know if I’m making a lot of
sense but, you know, bringing the humanity

1:01:37

into conservation is — I think that
like, also I was taught in my —

1:01:43

in the way that I was taught about conservation,
that ethics are really, really important.

1:01:49

It’s not just about, you know, like, gluing
things back together, and like, you know,

1:01:55

here we are, here’s the thing,
and it was never broken, ha ha. And we were taught, really, to think about
why this object is even on our desk, you know?

1:02:05

It’s on our desk because it was
collected at some point, in some way.

1:02:11

Sometimes we know how. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes it was in a really
cruel way, and you can’t —

1:02:18

you know, you have to ask yourself
the question, why is this here?

1:02:23

And why am I given the authority to have
any kind of intervention with the subject?

1:02:30

And that, you know, bringing back the humanity
into science, like that’s, well, I mean,

1:02:37

sometimes it’s not there, but anyway,
I think that I kind of made my point,

1:02:45

but I’m sorry, about, like the craziness. >> No, you — no, that’s a huge selling point
to the sense, we have an ethical responsibility

1:02:56

with the content that we care for and
look at, to tell inclusive stories,

1:03:03

to care for that content because we know it
can be used in powerful ways, both to harm

1:03:10

and to heal, and I think you’re doing exactly
that with the conservation and the testing.

1:03:16

Anna, for you, in terms of your
own lens, why would you say — why was the humanity so important
to the lens of his book?

1:03:25

>> Thank you. Well, I mean, I agree with
everything that you all said. I think on a personal level, you know,
as I said in my talk, as a nurse,

1:03:38

I saw actually in very granular
material detail, right?

1:03:43

— how these kinds of these
legacies of slavery, of colonialism,

1:03:48

like how they physically continue to have
an impact on the health and the lives

1:03:56

and the [inaudible] of people as well as just
the way people are treated and have access, and so I think, to me, any kind of
structural sort of analysis that I can do,

1:04:09

and that’s actually why I moved
into the humanities, you know? — why I left nursing, because I wanted to be
able to start thinking on a structural level

1:04:19

to rather than just having, you know, just felt
like the kind of the individual everyday sort

1:04:27

of work I was doing was not — individualized, everyday work I was doing was not actually doing
very much in the end, but I thought any kind

1:04:35

of structural analysis that we do has to have —
has to then have an impact on lived experience,

1:04:47

and I think that, you know, visuality and
how we see, it’s so unconscious, I mean,

1:04:57

in the sense that, you know,
as a sensory experience, right? We need vision all the time, and I
think sometimes that makes us forget

1:05:07

that the way we think and the way we see and
how seeing affects what we do does, you know,

1:05:15

doesn’t have that kind of connection
to broader histories, and so for me,

1:05:20

that’s why I think the story — this
centralizing the material effects

1:05:26

and the materialities of enslaved
communities, of black communities,

1:05:32

of communities who actually say, you know,
oppressed, or who sustain the racial capitalism

1:05:39

that we live in now, is really key, but I
think also just, you know, as an academic,

1:05:46

we really need to make these histories the
centre of the humanities, because, you know,

1:05:53

we all have to learn about, I mean, I don’t know
what — [inaudible] you have to learn about,

1:05:58

you know, their Western canon but — >> Yes. >> — I don’t know — that we don’t necessarily
have to learn about these other histories

1:06:06

that sustained it, unless you’re
doing African-American art or South Asian or black diaspora, right?

1:06:12

So —
>> Exactly, exactly. >> — I think for me, it’s also
about reorientating that framework.

1:06:19

>> That’s such a good point,
and what I think is — has — it’s hard to do often in that work is to find
read material that is in service of that point,

1:06:33

where because this lens is not a normative one.

1:06:40

Sometimes you have to get
creative with archives. You have to find, as I mean, as we’re doing
right now, collaborating across different areas,

1:06:49

across different disciplines, and especially,
and I’ll speak from my own experience,

1:06:55

looking into the history of these
enslaved individuals that I can help bring

1:07:01

up so you don’t have to see my mug, again,
just the tintypes here, but in that sense,

1:07:09

so many of their names are unknown. There’s so much unknown that you don’t
— that you would love to know more of

1:07:16

and that art is lost to whether
that be in archival keeping,

1:07:23

whether that be a knowledge
creation, or in oral history stories,

1:07:29

folks who would have kept the knowledge
themselves have since passed on,

1:07:35

and what I love, I think of the way that
I’m just going to show some of the tintypes,

1:07:44

some of the folks, that I’d like to refer to now
is, for me, I know I struggled a lot with trying

1:07:53

to find a way to fill a lot of the gaps within
the archive, and bringing together in a way,

1:08:01

these different histories or I would say,
material that’s sometimes spread apart,

1:08:09

different archives and different collections,
which speaks exactly to the siloing

1:08:15

that we’ve been chatting about where, for
example, the Ontario archives, you know, has this beautiful collection of photographs.

1:08:22

Some stories, we know. Some stories, we don’t know,. Whereas Queen’s University will have the we
have the rare book library, will have, you know,

1:08:31

the North-Side View of Slavery, where we
have the first-hand accounts of folks, and then in terms of specifically to
my own way of seeing, the clothing,

1:08:42

sometimes I wonder why is it we don’t
have the clothing of enslaved people,

1:08:47

formerly enslaved people,
or people who are born free? Archives generally preserve the, you know,
the rarest, most well-constructed, you know,

1:08:57

couture, the clothing that
generally represents white wealth.

1:09:03

Clothing of the working person, of just regular
folks, it’s quite rare and becoming harder

1:09:11

to find, that we thankfully, I think the way of
shifting and collecting has changed and but by

1:09:17

and large when we look at the 1800s, it’s
your — it’s easier to find, you know,

1:09:24

beautiful worth dresses, which were ridiculously
expensive and quite a sign of status,

1:09:31

than it is to find a gown, for
example, that would have been worn

1:09:36

by this woman in the third tintype over here. So what I think sometimes I’ve been trying
to pilot on this exhibition in this way of,

1:09:47

I guess, bringing things together that
are related, but related as this way

1:09:54

of bringing all these stories together and
see if we can [inaudible] like a whole — something that’s more whole or balanced.

1:09:59

So we don’t know her need yet. We don’t know where she’s from yet, but we
know that this photograph was taken in Toronto,

1:10:10

and based on the time that she’d been
settled in Canada, or being in Canada,

1:10:15

she would either have to come
through the Underground Railroad or she would have been born free, but by pairing
it with, or, for example, we have these folks

1:10:29

over here, where, you know, you can
see the garments they’re wearing,

1:10:37

and by pairing that with garments like
these from the Agnes’s collection,

1:10:42

of which we don’t know their history
— these could have been donated.

1:10:47

We’re not sure. But by pairing the garments with the
photographs with the actual accounts of people

1:10:54

in the North-Side View of
Slavery, it’s hopefully I — my wish is that when people walk through
the gallery and you look at the exhibition,

1:11:03

they can in a sense try to imagine what an
archive holding all these stories together would

1:11:10

look like, and at the core of it will be to,
as we keep harping on over and over again,

1:11:16

to restore the humanity of these folks, to
be able to then ask questions of archives

1:11:22

and be able to then do other research to see,
okay, well, where would that clothing have been?

1:11:28

Who would have kept that clothing? Where would it have been? And how can we bring these all together so
that we don’t just stand back and say, well,

1:11:39

we don’t know so much, but we try to use
a combination of research and imagining,

1:11:46

and collaboration, bring these stories together, so we’re starting to see a more full
picture of what these histories are.

1:11:54

Anne-Marie, I’ll put this out to both of you. I don’t want to be too formal, because I don’t
want to run out of time, but and Anna, as well,

1:12:04

was there some way of looking at the archives
that you had to be more creative with

1:12:11

or non-normative with to
be able to tell the story?

1:12:19

>> Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think you’ve — I mean, you’ve
got the main points there perfectly.

1:12:27

Yes, I think that, for me, it was really trying
to find a way of working with what wasn’t —

1:12:35

well, not what wasn’t in the archives, but
what was absent, and I think that sense

1:12:44

of absence is an important place to start from,
so I think you’d mentioned earlier, you know,

1:12:50

the kind of trauma of just seeing
names in a ledger or not even names.

1:12:57

I mean, in my case, it was the
names and measurements, you know, or descriptions of enslaved people
working on plantations, kind of abstracted

1:13:06

down to their job, so a field hand or a hoe or,
you know, because they were out there furrowing.

1:13:14

You know, so I think — and I was
really influenced by Saidiya Hartman,

1:13:20

who talks about working from this space
of loss, without re-traumatizing those —

1:13:28

or without reenacting that trauma. So I was — I think that’s where
contemporary artists really helped me to think

1:13:35

about different ways into that space, not
in order to cover up the space or fill it,

1:13:43

because I don’t think that’s what we’re trying
to do, but actually to speculate to that —

1:13:52

use the archive, you know, to, as you say,
to materialize these other positionalities,

1:14:02

other histories, but also to just, I think, to
sit with that loss and remind ourselves of what

1:14:10

that loss means for us now as well.

1:14:16

>> Anne-Marie, for yourself? [inaudible] >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that that’s one
of the ways in which institutions or systems,

1:14:27

I guess, for lack of a better word, create
barriers for important stories to be told,

1:14:38

especially stories where there is absence,
because one really common, I guess,

1:14:47

thing to say, or to think, as well, we don’t
know so we’re not going to talk about it,

1:14:52

because there just isn’t enough information. And that that comes from a very like — I
mean, I’m sure part of that is like, again,

1:15:03

trying to protect ourselves from places where
we might feel uncomfortable because we have

1:15:09

to confront some things that we’re
not — we don’t like, you know? But I think it’s just this really
easy mechanism of saying, well,

1:15:20

because these things don’t exist, well, we’re
just not — we’re not going to talk about it, so I think it’s really important actually, to —

1:15:31

yeah, like reposition our way
of thinking about these archives that might be lacking in information.

1:15:37

And first of all, you know,
maybe that’s not forever. Maybe it’s just that there hasn’t been a
lot of research done, you know, to like,

1:15:43

find these stories, and secondly, even if there
isn’t the material, the physical material there,

1:15:50

there is a way to tell these stories, and
maybe that is through art, contemporary art,

1:15:55

maybe that is through reimagining the
archive and, you know, even if, for example,

1:16:01

the clothing in the Agnes that you
mentioned, in reference to the tintypes,

1:16:07

even if they were worn by white people,
and we figure that out, at some point, it doesn’t take away from that the show and the
gallery saying why aren’t these things possible?

1:16:17

Like why don’t we — why can’t we
imagine these things as being true?

1:16:23

So I think it’s another opportunity for various
different disciplines to come together and talk

1:16:33

about these gaps in our minds, in our
mindsets, in our ways of thinking about things.

1:16:43

Yeah. >> And I so agree, just especially if
you’re referencing these gaps in archives,

1:16:49

and you’re just trying to
[inaudible] contemporary art. I think one of the beauties of the time we live
in is how artists are so uniquely positioned

1:17:07

to be a wider voice of pain, of
story, of history, of experience,

1:17:18

and in the ways that they can bring us together,
they can divide us, they can challenge us,

1:17:26

they can entangle us, and one of the things
that when I was reading Anna’s book, Anne-Marie

1:17:34

and I were chatting this year as well, that we
loved all the synergies between Black Bodies, White Gold, and History is Rarely Black or White
is the way that the contemporary art featured

1:17:43

in both projects, makes clear the ways that
the structures around the cotton supply chain

1:17:52

and the cotton trade and enslavement, and as
you saw articulately said, framed blackness,

1:17:59

as we really tried to show in the last gallery,
effect the way that we see blackness today,

1:18:05

so I know, I don’t want to
run too much over time. We have but eight minutes left or so, but
I’m wondering, Anna, can you share a bit more

1:18:13

of that — of your colleague at Yale, who
worked in the — is it the dining hall?

1:18:19

— and just I just was so fascinated by
that story and the stained glass window,

1:18:25

and perhaps Anne-Marie and I could pick
one work from the contemporary art, from the contemporary section and
speak to it, but I selfishly want

1:18:33

to hear about that story a bit more. >> Yeah, sure. I’d love to and actually speaking of
contemporary art, I just want to shout

1:18:39

out Jocelyn Gardner who’s joining us. And I mean, certainly, she’s one of the artists
who, whose work has, again helped me think

1:18:50

about these archives, their absences, but also the ways that enslaved communities were
actively resisting, and reformatting, right?

1:19:01

— ways of seeing, and I think that’s something that I found really powerful
with Corey, with what Corey did.

1:19:06

So Corey was a dining room — dining
hall worker at a college graduate — an undergraduate college at Yale
called — formerly called Calhoun,

1:19:15

named after the plantation owner
and statesman in the South.

1:19:21

Now, it’s called Grace Hopper
College, thankfully. And I was another grad student at Yale.

1:19:27

I was a fellow of this college, so I
would eat in the dining rooms, and I — the stained glass windows are up there, so he
— I’d never noticed it, which is to my shame,

1:19:36

and what he did was like one — I think
one day, he just stood up on a table and smashed the stained glass window with
a broom, and then, you know, he was —

1:19:45

I think he resigned and then he was
reinstated, but it really brought so many

1:19:50

of these questions out, you know, to the
— into the public for Yale community,

1:19:56

for the Yale community and wider community But it was just — you know, he was — I think
what he was saying is like these images, the —

1:20:06

you know, because they’re
not just images, right? They tell stories. They’re telling histories, and they’re telling
us, I mean, they’re telling us worldviews.

1:20:15

They’re telling us ways of seeing, so
he was just really highlighting the kind

1:20:21

of the psychological, physical effects of this
kind of — of these images, of these histories,

1:20:29

because they continue to shape, right? — how people see each other, and
one of my colleagues, Eddie Glaude,

1:20:38

who’s the chair of our department, he
talks about this idea of the value gap,

1:20:43

and essentially, you know, what he’s arguing — and I think it’s absolutely correct is
that in the United States anyway, you know,

1:20:52

certain lives are valued more than others. White lives are valued more
than black lives, and that’s —

1:20:57

and that can be seen in a whole range of
structural processes, and so I think, you know,

1:21:06

that’s, for me, that’s really where —
what Corey’s act highlighted, you know?

1:21:12

How that kind of valuation continues and how it
affects the everyday life of people, but also,

1:21:20

for me, it’s sort of this is why it matters
to look at these histories and untangle them

1:21:25

and deconstruct them, not simply to reiterate
them, but because unless we historicize,

1:21:33

what’s happening now, we’re not going to be able
to, I think, redesign our future, so you know,

1:21:41

redesign the value gap for
a better way of putting it. >> Or smash it to smithereens [inaudible].

1:21:47

>> Exactly. Smash it, smash it all and rebuild it.

1:21:53

Yeah. >> The work you’re — even the core
of what you’re saying recalls to me, I work in the exhibition
called Freed by Karen Jones,

1:22:01

and I’m just going to share it very quickly. This is installation-based, just with cotton
here, and it encircles a wedding dress

1:22:14

from 1893, and just as you were chatting with
Corey, I just immediately Karen’s work came

1:22:21

to mind, and it’s a sense of I mean, like I
said, like I study and look at dress history

1:22:30

so often as part of my vocation and my research,
but what I love that Karen’s work does here,

1:22:36

that it shows that we literally cannot see
the materiality, the beauty of this garment,

1:22:43

and its social and cultural portrait without
acknowledging the raw material and the labour

1:22:48

in the way that she’s layered
the cotton into here together, and to see one, you must see the other.

1:22:56

They are inextricably linked, and we — that’s
so much a part of our lens and in our lens now.

1:23:05

I want to also thank Chris Mariah
[phonetic] — I’m not sure if she’s on this,

1:23:11

on our chat today — for
connecting us, and I and Anne-Marie,

1:23:17

and any final thoughts before we wrap up today?

1:23:22

Anything anyone want to share
that we didn’t get to? It’ll be run through things even
though we’re over time, but.

1:23:30

>> I just wanted to make a
comment about Corey Menafee’s work. I want to call it work, because
it was an intervention, yeah.

1:23:40

It’s an intervention, right? >> Yeah, intervention. Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah, and I just — it really
sparked something in me to hear

1:23:48

that because there’s been a lot of conversation
in conservation circles about what do we do

1:23:55

in instances of intervention like this,
because a lot of the time we’ll be like — we will have bosses whose — who will want to,
you know, fix this stained glass and remake it

1:24:07

and put it back where it was and
pretend like nothing ever happened, and those ideas are being challenged in
conservation, and they have been, I don’t know,

1:24:17

not for very long, but they have been, and
I just wanted to kind of point out this idea

1:24:25

of treating — of like, I guess,
this institution, this conservation,

1:24:32

and how our role is not to bring
things back to the way that they were.

1:24:39

In this instance, Cory Menafee, his
work is about what is going on today.

1:24:47

It’s about feelings, the humanity that is
happening today, and that, conserving that, however that would be that we would.

1:24:54

Well, for example, the way that it
was shown on the slide is all broken.

1:24:59

That is what our role is, like thinking about
what we’re preserving and for what purpose?

1:25:06

And who’s benefiting from that? Who — and, you know, where
are we putting the value?

1:25:14

So anyway, it just made me
think a lot about that, so.

1:25:19

>> Well [inaudible] I agree, absolutely. And actually the — I think now the window as a broken pieces is how it’s
being held in the gallery.

1:25:29

I put a couple of links there,
but no, I think absolutely. That’s exactly what we — that’s the ethics,
I think, in what we do, and I wanted —

1:25:40

another thing I wanted to say is that when
I saw the slide you [inaudible] Anne-Marie, when you were talking about how there’s
a sentence in the wall text, I think,

1:25:51

that was saying something about
cotton has a history or, you know — and I just wanted to say one of the artists
I do talk about, and I didn’t mention

1:26:00

in my presentation is Leonardo Drew,
and he has almost the exact same phrase.

1:26:05

He talks about cotton as a material with
memory, and he made a piece called —

1:26:11

it’s called Untitled #25, and it’s just
six foot bales of cotton stacked together,

1:26:18

and I think that’s, you know,
the way it was amazing to see the way you were literally showing us
these threads, these fibers, because that,

1:26:28

you know, that’s the kind of work I
think, you know, we need to do to,

1:26:35

to bring out these memories which are
embedded in so many materials that, you know,

1:26:43

that we work with and think about every day,
so it was — that was a really, I think, a wonderful metaphor or analogy that you
were, you know, kind of evoking for us so.

1:26:59

>> Well, folks, I know we are way over time,
and we intended to have a little Q&A at the end,

1:27:06

but I want to be respectful of everyone’s time. The exhibition is on until the
— until March 20th at the Agnes.

1:27:13

There’s an exhibition website you can visit. Anna’s book is available
to Duke University Press.

1:27:21

Well, more importantly, I hope this
is a platform for further research,

1:27:26

for further conversation, for further
collaboration, and Anna and Anne-Marie,

1:27:31

t’s been a huge honour to chat with you both. We could do this for so many more hours you
can tell, but thank you so much for chatting

1:27:40

with me today and for sharing of your work.

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