 Thank you so much for coming out, and welcome. Welcome to everybody who's online. My name's Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research, interpretation, and education, and it is my absolute delight to introduce my wonderful colleague, Alison Boyd, who is going to be speaking tonight about, I can't remember the title of your talk, Art with a Capital A. African Art in the Barnes Collection, a really important topic here. Allie started, Allie is what we call her. You will all get to know her eventually, she's wonderful. She started about six months ago as our first ever director of research and interpretation. She is a specialist in American art and her work also deals with the politics of display. She earned her PhD from Northwestern with a dissertation titled Modernism for America, Negro Art and Primitivism at the Barnes Foundation, 1917 to 1951. So, needless to say, she is very knowledgeable about our history. Before starting at the Barnes, Allie was assistant professor of modern art at Utrecht University, where she oversaw the research master's program. She has held fellowships at the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Max Planck Institute in Florence. You will also find two of her essays in our new book. I guess it's not that new anymore. Came out about six months ago called The Barnes Then and Now, which is for sale in our gift shop. Also, I think there's a QR code on the screen. I don't know if you saw that. Anyway, The Barnes Then and Now, a sort of history of The Barnes, a collection of essays. Allie has two in the book, and I believe that tonight's lecture draws from one of those. So, please join me in welcoming Allie Boyd. All right, thank you so much, Martha. It has been such a joy joining The Barnes Your Team and The Barnes Foundation in general. I also wanna thank all of you so much for being here on what is such an extraordinarily beautiful evening. So thank you so much for coming indoors. I will try to stay on time so that maybe you could have a little bit of light when you leave. And as Martha described, what I'm gonna talk about today is an essay that I wrote for this really wonderful book that Martha edited called The Barnes Then and Now, which is really dedicated to revisiting and to tackling the history and legacy of The Barnes Foundation. And so I wrote for it an essay titled Art with a Capital A. That's a quote coming from the scholar Elaine Locke, which I will talk about more, competing systems of value for Barnes's African sculpture collection in the 1920s and 1930s. But before I really get into the meat of my talk, I wanna actually introduce tonight's event with another event. This is another event about African art that happened at The Barnes Foundation. So we can kind of all collectively get in a time machine together, go back, imagine ourselves back almost exactly 98 years ago to March 26th, 1926. It was an event that was convened by Albert Barnes and it was held first at Columbia University's Women's Faculty Club. And then the same event was reprised for a different audience the following Sunday morning in the main gallery of The Barnes Foundation in Marion. So you can kind of imagine this again as we're imagining our way back in time. You can imagine this is the equivalent of the gallery almost directly above us. And in order to kind of try to take ourselves back in time, I brought in this archival photograph of that gallery from 1928, which I think is really remarkable to see with the lunettes without the Matisse mural in them. And I also brought in a more recent contemporary view from the galleries, but these are the ones in Marion just to orient yourselves. So that week of March 26th, 1926, would have been a busy one for the staff and affiliates of The Barnes Foundation. They organized a multimedia event with lantern slide presentations of the Foundation's African Sculpture Collection, a student choir singing African American Spirituals, a lecture on modern European painting and relationships and its relationship to African sculpture, a reading by a contemporary African American poet, and a reading of translated African folklore at Columbia and this all first happened at Columbia University Women's Faculty Club in New York. And then again, that Sunday at the Foundation. And you can imagine when it was at the Foundation, it was set in that main gallery, which was hung with Albert Burns' by 1926, really already quite massive collection of paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, all these artists that you're quite familiar with. Tending this event in 1926 to talk about and to learn about African sculpture and the collection were some of the people you might expect, kind of usual suspects, the modernist collector. His dealer, Paul Guillaume, a well-known dandy figure who connected Barnes to avant-garde artists in Paris and who had actually just arrived that morning by a steamership just in time to come to the event. Interested white academics, John Dewey and his wife, Alice Dewey, who helped organize the event. So the very famous pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey. Members of the Harlem Renaissance, such as the sociologist Charles Johnson, who would go on to become the first black president of Visc University. At the event were people who you don't usually hear about in these circles. And so people like the choir from, so a student choir from Board and Town Vocational School in New Jersey. And also nine of Barnes's African-American workers who studied art and pragmatism at his factory in Philadelphia and unfortunately I don't have any extant photos of them, so I'm just sort of putting in the factory as a stand-in. And in this small-scale factory, Barnes had shortened the workday by an hour and a half, so the about 20 workers, half of whom were African-American men, the other half white women, could take seminars and he and his colleagues taught on art and pragmatism and had his paintings originally hung on the factory walls. And so he invited and paid the train fare for the African-American workers to come and attend the event in New York. After this event, versions of the talks, the poetry, the African folklore, the modern French art as well as photographs of African sculpture from the Barnes Foundation from the event were then published in the New York-based, very progressive, very kind of cool African-American journal, Opportunity, and the avant-garde French journal, Les Artes Paris. So this event happens and then we can think about the ways in which it circulates out into all of these very different audiences. I wanted to start with this event because it really brings together the three threads of what I wanted to talk about tonight. And so I'll organize this around three parts. So it's thinking about Barnes' African sculpture collection in the context of European, quote-unquote, primitivism in the 1920s and 1930s, the collection in the terms and in the context and its role in the Harlem Renaissance during this period, and the collection in relationship and in the context of Africa and the broader African diaspora. And just moving before I really get into this topic, I do wanna give a historical caveat. We'll be focusing on writing by white African-American and African diasporic critics, collectors, and intellectuals from the 1920s and 1930s. And they used the now dated, the now anachronistic term, negro, to describe African and African diasporic people and art. And so we'll be looking at a lot of material from what was called at the time the new negro movement and what we would now term the Harlem Renaissance. And I'll certainly explore some of the complex ways that this term worked. But I just wanted to position from the outset that you'll see this term quite a bit in quotes as a period term that refers to African art and for African-Americans and that in the period it was being used as a positive term in the context of the new negro movement as opposed to a derogatory term. So I'm guessing that many of you might be quite familiar with the Barnes Foundation Galleries. As probably I'm guessing many of you or all of you know, they were frozen into place at the time of Barnes's death in 1951. And I think as a result of that, they can appear really sort of timeless, entirely fixed in place. However, what I wanna talk about tonight is how African sculpture came into the collection in the 1920s in this moment of really profound changing categories for African objects and all of these different debates about what it meant and what it meant to different people. When Barnes formed the collection, one primary access along which he related objects were the European categories of quote unquote primitive art and modern art. For example, in Barnes's talk for the event, he directly connected what he believed to be ancient African sculpture to modern French art. Formally, he argued that the convex and concave planes, the surface patterns and especially the abstracting treatment of the human body in African sculpture were important precedents and perhaps more importantly for him spiritual inspirations for modern European art. Yeah. Oh, it's not loud. Let me know if this ends up sounding better. Okay. Louder? Okay, great. I will slip over and lead into the mic. So despite the sort of sense of this as fixed in place, from the beginning, viewers structured their own relationships between the works in the collection according to their own visions and agendas. Rather than fix a clear binary between primitive versus modern art, Barnes's collection began a transnational conversation and contestation about art, race and modernism. And what I want to do tonight is to trace some of the threads of where these different thinkers and artists' ideas converged, but also really where they diverged. We can see this especially through the ways that the Barnes Foundation collection's photographs were circulated in this really extraordinarily rich print culture of the Harlem Renaissance as well as that of the French avant-garde and through the Barnes Foundation's own catalog of their African art sculpture from 1926. So Barnes first encountered African sculpture as the, again, quote-unquote primitive correspondent to modern European paintings in Paris in the 1910s through the French art dealer Paul Guillaume. And this pairing of modern European and primitive African art, and again I want to put that in quotes, it really though revolutionized his understanding of art and aesthetics. He made them the two central pillars of his collection in the early 1920s. When the foundation opened in 1925, its original displays consisted primarily of modern European painting in African sculpture. You can see that. So again, if we sort of stay in our time machine mode, if you had walked up the stairs in 1926, you might have seen something like this. These are installation shots from 1927, where you can see the primary objects in the collection in its early stages really were the collections built around African sculpture and modern art, especially modern European art. And Barnes, here's another room, again, you could have seen if you'd walked up the stairs in 1926. And Barnes signaled that African sculpture was fundamental to the very conception of the foundation and to Barnes's hopes for American art by making it the central motif decorating the original building's facade. And again, just to kind of bring us into the present, a similar gesture has been made in the new building by Billy Tien, which you just entered. So you may have walked over at some point today this tile mosaic, which is based on Kenti cloth. And the idea here is that before you even enter into the galleries, before you've seen any of the art in the collection, the importance of African art, the central fundamental importance of it would be announced to you. And so in trying to tackle the question, how and why was African art such an important pillar of what at the time was primarily thought of as a modernist art collection. Today's talk, in a sense, is gonna be more about Euro-American art history than it is about African art. What you find when you go back into these historical documents and into this moment in the United States is that it's a time in which Barnes, especially in conversation with influential African-American intellectuals, was on the forefront of actively working to shift the value of African sculpture in the West from something that would go into an ethnographic museum, into a natural history museum, to what, and he thinks of this as a kind of elevation, although we'll challenge that idea, but this idea that it's becoming art, so that it's an object that would be shifting into going into an art gallery. But even in the 1920s, as Barnes and his interlocutors worked to re-categorize African sculpture in the Western imagination as art, the question still remained open, what kind of art? The 1920s and 1930s are a moment when people are really sort of shifting the categories that they put African sculpture into, so different people give African sculpture vastly different definitions and assign it different values, and as I'll explore over today's talk, you hear it getting turned in all of these different ways, so it gets called an ethnographic specimen, primitive art, it gets compared as being like ancient and classical art, like Greek and Roman art, and it also gets called modern art. These categories and the sets of values associated with them almost always pivoted on two key questions, what and who was African sculpture for? Let's say that although Barnes used these terms primitive and modern as aesthetic terms, these labels were and are deeply ideological. They project and reproduce colonial logics onto these diverse set of sculptures in ways that often obscure their complex histories and networks of meaning. For example, Barnes along with most European modern artists, critics and curators, really insisted that there was an unbridgeable temporal gap between the African sculpture in his collection and his modern European paintings. In Barnes' paradigm, he insisted that, quote unquote, good African sculpture was timeless, that it was ancient, since he believed that contact with Europe was always the moment of its decline. He would say things like, he would call his collection 10,000 years old. Just to be clear, that is definitely not true. More recent studies of the collection show that most of the African sculpture in the collection was in fact made in the mid to late 19th or early 20th century. And I just think this is, you know, I wanna underline that because I think it's extraordinary, the kind of unrecognized irony of this, that it means that the African sculpture is for the most part almost exact contemporaries, actually, to the modern European paintings that they're hung next to. This unravels Barnes' original categories of primitive versus modern, and it can and should reorient our contemporary vision of the ensembles. The African sculpture in the collection was in fact, and the kind of exchanges between African sculpture and a European avant-garde primitivism were in fact often premised on the really quite modern, syncretic spaces that African sculptors were working in this period. In some cases, sculpture in the collection was constructed from materials from international trade or created in response to a European export market. And so I'll just give a couple of very quick examples here. So this mounted head of a coda reliquary sculpture, and this is a work that we'll be looking at quite a bit tonight, is a form that earlier would have been made with local copper, but at the time that this is being made, it was made with imported metals like brass. So this is primarily made of brass, which probably came from somewhere like Birmingham, England. So if we think about this, it's really this nexus where the materials are actually coming first from Europe to Africa, and then the object is going back to, in this case, to Europe. Or if we look at this Jula-Okolanga head mask, which there's a very long history of this form, but by the early 20th century, it had been incorporated into local Islamic practices, as likely used for Karubi dances, which were performed during Ramadan. So it's already sort of occupying this syncretic space. And then this object, like many in the collection, maybe even most objects in the collection, it seems likely may not have been made for a dance or ritual use, but produced possibly for an export tourist market, and that's true of a lot of the objects in the collection. You can see that in many cases, they're slightly unfinished, or you can see signs that they were never actually consecrated, indications that they may have always been intended to be sold to an export market. So much of the sculpture in the collection was therefore created in relationship to new networks and pressures of globalization and modernization in ways that are both similar to and different from the modernist paintings. And I don't have as much time as I wish I did to really go into all of the stories of this, but I would really suggest this wonderful catalog that was edited by the scholar Christa Clark on the African collection, where you can really go into all these really fascinating stories of the objects. What I wanna focus on for this talk, though, is that to contest the meaning and status of the African sculpture in the collection is actually nothing really new. It's in the very fabric of the foundation's own history. Different figures in the 1920s and 1930s, so the white American collector, Albert Barnes, his French art dealer, Paul Guillaume, the African scholars and critics, Charles Johnson and Elaine Locke, the artist, Erin Douglas, the poet, Countee Cullen, and the Senegalese, Sarah, art critic and politician, Leopold Sengor, and the modern South African artist, Ernst Mancaba, all worked to mobilize the African sculpture in the Barnes collection towards sometimes aligned and sometimes conflicting systems of value, and that's what I'll talk about over tonight. And these values both emerged out of that modernist, primitive modern binary, but also from the very beginning, the works of these different people engaging with the collection subverted those terms. Although the relationships between objects in the foundation's art ensembles might, when you first see them seem really firmly fixed into place, I think it's much more useful to see them as always in dynamic tension, as viewers have constantly contested and reinterpreted their meanings and relationships for themselves. So for part one, I will start, where so many stories of modern art start with Picasso. So Barnes started collecting in an art world that often staged African art in what I think we would now find quite troubling ways. It presented it as both a source of fascination, but also terror. And I'm gonna give a very shorthand account of that context using one of the most famous anecdotes. I know I have at least one colleague who's online, who's a Picasso scholar and so I apologize in advance because this is gonna be really a kind of thumbnail sketch of this. But one of the most famous and often repeated events of modern art history is when the artist Pablo Picasso visited the ethnographic museum in Paris, the Trocadero Museum, in 1907, which he described as a dirty flea market. He later recounted his terror of the African sculptures, hostile power. Not, he doesn't talk about, or he's kind of a tricky figure, but he doesn't always talk about what he learned from their formal qualities as the impetus for his extraordinarily famous modernist painting, La Demoiselle d'Avignon, which let me see if I can make the pointer work. I'm not sure if the pointer is working, but you can see very famously two of the figures on the right are portrayed wearing forms of African masks. Like other of the European primitivists, and then he talks about this painting coming out of that experience, seeing African art at the Trocadero. Like other of the European primitivist artists in Burns's collection, and you can think here of a whole range of artists, Gauguin, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso engaged both formally and conceptually with the abstract visual language that he saw when he first saw African and oceanic sculptural forms. He viewed them as a kind of radical other to this problem, the sense that there was an exhausted classical and academic European tradition, and so artists were looking for an alternative to it, and saw African art as providing that. But in doing so, he tended to emphasize the transformative experience of these works out of vistic power, not their sophisticated formal innovations. Crucial to Barnes, and perhaps even more so to the dealer Paul Guillaume, who bought or procured Burns's African sculpture collection, and co-authored its catalog, the Barnes Foundation's catalog. The foundations, the catalog in it was the idea that African sculpture's primary contribution was to the quote enrichment and stimulation of European modern artists. So Guillaume, Monroe, Barnes, they over and over invoke the language of the senses, stimulation, illumination, energy, and of the market, enrichment and wealth of resources to describe the value of African sculpture. Barnes wrote, for example, in the art of Henri Matisse, quote, the stimulus and illumination with which European artists received a few years ago from the work of African sculptures, long unknown, widened their horizons and brought them new insight and new access of energy. These authors used terms as part of a narrative of rediscovery. Barnes even used the alarming term recapturing of African sculpture in European museums in the early 20th century by modern artists. The transaction in Barnes's artistic economy, however, flowed only one way, African sculpture enriching modern European artists. In a May 1924 article that he wrote for opportunity, Barnes wrote, quote, those artists, and he's referring to Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Brancusi, Clay, et cetera, acknowledged freely the great debt they owe to the black savage of 1,000 and more years ago. In addition to the defensiveness of the terminology of a black savage, the absurdity of this statement is that, of course, knowing can ever actually pay a debt to someone from 1,000 years ago. The one-sidedness of this exchange is made explicit in both Barnes and Guillaume's insistence that good African art is always quote, unquote, pure by which they meant that the moment of contact with the West was always the moment of its decline. Under such imagined conditions, how could Picasso ever actually pay back a debt that he owed to African sculptors? The art value that African sculpture carried in Barnes's particular economy could thus only really be used to the benefit of European and American painting. The art historian, Partha Mitter, has diagnosed what he calls a quote, Picasso-Monquet syndrome in Western art history, whereby when a European artist appropriated African forms, he was deemed a genius, but if an African artist adopted Western forms, he was called inauthentic or belated. This foundation, Barnes's ensembles both replicated, but they also challenged Picasso's narratives. On the one hand, while African sculpture had previously been shown in ethnographic or natural history museums, Barnes was among the very early and first Western collectors to show African sculpture in an art gallery. He was the first to do so as a permanent, and the first to do it as a permanent display. At the same time, primitivism was always remain central to his thinking. In a sense, it could almost be said that Barnes restaged Picasso's Trocadero encounter in gallery 22. Two of Picasso's painted heads from 1907, both of which were studies for Le Demoiselle d'Avignon, hanged next to figures from coda reliquary sculptures, and flanked the central wall vitrine of African sculpture. As the art historian, Joshua Cohen, has shown, Picasso would have seen, I can, well, I'll show this in the next slide. If I go forward, I can't go back, so we'll wait for the next slide. But, well, actually, I think maybe I can risk it. So as art historian, Joshua Cohen, has shown, Picasso would have seen mounted coda reliquary sculptures at the Trocadero, so this is a display from the Trocadero, and they bear similar features to Picasso's new work from that year. Cohen's careful research is a surprisingly recent and key intervention, since establishing what European modernist actually could have seen mitigates against art history's tendency to really talk, to sort of talk in general terms, to avoid African arts influence by shrouding these relationships in vague generalities. Burns himself often did this, and it's unlikely that he would have known exactly what sculpture Picasso actually saw, but when Burns hung the coda works from his collection next to the Picasso's, he did at least ask viewers to actually look carefully at their formal similarities. Picasso's mask-like heads share this color palette of the coda reliquary's statuaries Warm Brown Wood, its copper and brass assemblage. The painted and sculpted faces are similarly geometrically rendered in quadrants with sharply defined, protruding rectangular noses and circles of concentric convex and concave rings to depict the eyes. Burns created displays to show African sculpture's relationship to European avant-garde primitivism, and in doing so, he created a radically different experience for his viewer than the one that Picasso had. I think in a sense it's impossible not to see that Picasso was deeply formally influenced by things like the coda reliquary sculptures when you hang them next to each other like this. And although Burns's vitrines may now appear old-fashioned, he installed his galleries with the intention of having them be a modern antidote to the darkly lit ethnographic displays that Picasso described at the Trocadero. The coda works are isolated, they're hung on wood and they're mounted, they're really hung as though they are paintings. This radically alters them from their original form as reliquaries. So they would have originally been, had sort of fuller-bodied skirts, which would hold human remains as part of funerary rituals. That's clearly very different than mounting on the wall like a painting. Also though, this way of hanging them though also alters them from the dense installation that Picasso talks about being terrifying at the Trocadero. Made over into art in the ensembles, the coda statuary assemblages served a new modernist paradigm that Burns was promoting. In his view, the art values of ancient African art would pave the way for American art. Burns would later expand his quote-unquote primitive collection to include art as geographically diverse and multisensory as Native American textiles, pottery and metalwork as well as Pennsylvania German decorative art. Burns believed that these again quote-unquote primitive arts could provide American artists with both new abstract forms and sources for energy and vitality. Moreover, these diverse forms, starting with African sculpture, would be a way to train viewers, especially American viewers, for how to properly see and appreciate the new developments in modern art. So if Burns and Guillaume initially formed the collection in conversation with contemporary European artistic practices, it soon became a hub for the ongoing American conversation on art, race, and modernity. And here Burns's most important partners were the cultural writers and editors Charles Johnson and Elaine Locke, both influential members of the Harlem Renaissance. Burns and Paul Guillaume argued that African sculpture had been to modern artists in Paris. So they say, you know, African art was to modern artists in Paris where Greek art had been to the Renaissance artists in Italy. Burns extended this idea to argue that through the influence of Egyptian art, Western art was always already seated with African influences. And in fact, African-American artists and writers had already established a parallel idea for the Harlem Renaissance. For example, just to bring in a Philadelphia artist, in the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia sculptor Medevo Warwick Fuller created works that showed a visual continuity between African, Egyptian, and other classical influences. Burns's campaign to categorize African sculpture as art was of a piece with the concerns of many collectors and critics in the field in the early 1920s. With this new, really sort of sudden, intense interest in African sculpture, many experts were anxious to establish it permanently within the category of art, rather than as simply a passing trend. So Elaine Locke worried, for example, that, quote, having passed however through a period of neglect and disesteem during which it was regarded as crude, bizarre, and primitive, African art is now in danger of another sort of misconstruction. That of being taken up as an exotic fad and a fashionable, amateurish interest. And he says later in the same essay that what he really wants to do is establish African art as art with a capital A. In a moment in which the prices for African sculpture were exponentially rising, the anxiety was that it not be treated within the fluctuating market of commodity fads, but rather the more stable economy of art value. As Locke wrote, again, this idea, he wants it to become art with a capital A, something stable. A 1923 editorial in Opportunity journal of the New Negro, this may have been written by Charles Johnson, although it's unsigned. But the editorial complains, quote, the Museum of Natural History in New York has a collection of African art valued at a half million dollars, the gift of the Belgian government. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington has an equally fine collection which has attracted as little interest. These are tagged and catalogued precisely enough, but meaninglessly. They are curiosities rather than art. Relics of a dead past rather than symbols of the life of a living race. The author here distinguishes how the monetary value of a half a million dollars is meaningless in a natural history museum in comparison to the artistic value, which would be, quote, the symbol of the life of a living race. This editorial depends on two assumptions. One that different types of exhibitions produce value differently. And two, that art value is more important than monetary value. A 1924 editorial in Opportunity that's written about Dr. Barnes, so this is an editorial that's written about Albert Barnes, described the inverse effect of African sculpture in the context of his art gallery. Barnes was and it was the first and is distinctly the last word in primitive African art. And his pieces, the rarest of their kind, exquisite, exotic, distinctive, once casually valued at $50,000, are becoming invaluable. Although the term invaluable implies great value, it also denotes a shift from a market commodity economy where objects are worth $50,000 to a kind of transcendent art economy. In 1924, Barnes described the importance of resting these works away from the anthropologists so that they could inspire art. He wrote, quote, at the critical moment, as Monsieur Paul Guillaume has shown, the treasures of the Negro sculpture were recaptured from the anthropologist and the antiquarian. And from them was derived a new impetus toward creative work in plastic art, in music and in poetry. And what he means specifically there is creative work in plastic art, in music and in poetry for an African-American community. So Barnes, in parallel to the editors of Opportunity, was working to shift the viewer's engagement with a whole range of values that they might attribute to objects and ethnographic displays to the art values that they would see in an art gallery. If these various authors were eager to argue for African sculptures transcendence to the alternative economy of artistic value, they diverged, however, widely on how they thought it should participate in that economy. For Barnes, the art value of African sculpture was established definitively within his scientific theory of aesthetics. In his systematic account of how to see works of art, actually, could you go back one slide? I feel like we should probably be looking at an ensemble while we do this. Thank you so much. So this is how Barnes wants for African art to be established within art value. So he posed his ensemble, for example, in African sculpture, a wrought iron ladle, an oil painting, as all comparable according to principles of light, line, color, and form. And according to this method, seemingly disparate objects became subject to comparison. In this sense, Barnes's gallery space became akin to the capitalist marketplace in which all objects are made commensurate, albeit in Barnes's case by formal properties of analysis rather than monetary currency. These negotiations over art and value are particularly evident in the photography of Barnes's African sculpture collection. In general, Barnes fiercely maintained that it was impossible to understand or appreciate the art in his collection through the medium of his photography. This is something people might know about, but Barnes was incredibly resistant to having his collection photographed. There is one major exception to this, though, which is the African sculpture, which he not only allowed, but also kind of really commissioned and encouraged photography was of. And he actively encourages that these photographs get circulated. The photographs illustrated both Barnes Foundation publications in a range of important African-American and European journals and anthology publications. And paradoxically, this photograph campaign was meant to persuade the public that African sculpture was exactly the kind of hot, important art that should not be photographable in Barnes's logic. As these images were embedded, juxtaposed, and described in different publications, though, they enabled a broad range of interpretations and debates which reflected the Barnes Foundation's own conceptual framing, but also really extended far beyond it. These publications worked as key mechanisms through which authors and artists across the African diaspora, as well as Africa, participated in modernist Europe's engagement with African art, but also remobilized it towards their own, often decolonizing projects and formations of black modernisms. So if we, the standard Barnes collection photographs composition clearly supports this promotion of the kind of high art value of the sculptures. They primarily show the sculptures individually framed against a white background with light coming from the upper corner, and you can see glimpses often of the pedestal that the object has been put on. And these are all conventions established it for photographing European classical art. The individualization and the clarity of the photographs works to visually remove the stigma of objects associated with the clutter of old curiosity cabinets or the more recent ethnographic museums, as described by Picasso and the Trocadero. And what I find just really kind of interesting and important here is that photography serves this important role as in a sense sort of translating and remaking, but you could also argue in a sense kind of appropriating African sculpture into the context of modern European art. It kind of reframes how you see it to look as a kin to the rest of the Western tradition, even though these are objects that would have been used very differently and had very different lives. And as time went on, the position of many members of the Harlem Renaissance diverged from Barnes's. The May 1924 African art edition of Opportunity was the first publication to feature photographs of Barnes's African sculpture collection. And it opens with an editorial that casts the value of these sculptures quite differently than Barnes. An editor possibly, again, Charles Johnson, described the importance of Barnes's collection. Oh, sorry, back a slide. Great. He writes, soon primitive Negro art will invade this country as it has invaded Europe. It is inevitable and there will come with it a new valuation of the contribution of Negroes past and yet possible to American life and culture. And this term invade really jumped out of me when I first saw it. The author's evocation of African art that invades the United States poses the sculptures as active agents rather than as passive objects that are discovered or recaptured by European artists and collectors. The author from Opportunity forecasts a new non-monetary type of value for African sculpture. And yet he's very specific that this value is to provide contemporary African Americans with a kind of cultural capital rather than incur an unpayable debt from white artists. Elaine Locke, like Barnes and Guillaume, argued for a common set of aesthetic principles by which objects could be compared. For Elaine Locke, however, this was so that African sculpture in and of itself could be valued. Locke wrote, quote, meanwhile, as a product of African civilization, Negro art is a particularly precious thing. It is one of the few common elements between such highly divergent types of culture as the African and European and offers a rare medium for their fair comparison. In this passage, Locke mobilized the language of the marketplace as used terms like products and fair comparison. Locke's cultural marketplace, however, is one of exchange in contrast to Barnes and Guillaume's construction of it as a site for enrichment of Western artists. Locke continued to shift towards recognizing the particularity of African art and calling for its more active role in African American cultural life. In a 1926 essay surrounded by photographs of the Barnes Foundation's sculptures, Locke described the modernist, quote, unquote, discovery of African sculpture in Europe. I'm hoping you can see this here. If you look at the middle of the paragraph, Locke, however, uses kind of the ironic quotes around discovered. And he does that to provide a subtle but savvy intervention against Barnes's emphasis on the genius of European modern artists and collectors who, again, quote, unquote, discovered African art. Locke instead shifted his focus to the cultural and artistic value of the sculpture that it offered to Africans, or more often to an African diasporic community. Locke famously wrote that African sculpture, quote, can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants than upon those white European modernists who inherit by tradition only. Locke, like Barnes, used an essentializing logic when he argued for African sculpture's special influence on its, quote, unquote, blood descendants, by which he means African Americans. However, he did so to reroute the value of African sculpture from primarily serving contemporary European and American artistic genius, which at the time was often coded as white, to being a generative cultural and artistic inheritance specifically for African Americans. Both Barnes and Locke promoted African sculpture but two different purposes. And I'm going to kind of skip through this a little bit because I wanna make sure that there's time for question and answer, so I'm gonna speed up a little. But I'll just say very briefly that there ends up becoming a kind of clash between Locke and Barnes. When Locke makes plans, they fail, unfortunately, because he starts them at the beginning of 1929. And as you can imagine, the Great Depression gets in the way, but he wants to start his own collection of African art in Harlem. But for him, he really values, what he really emphasizes is the crafts and the possibility to sort of engage with African culture and history and artisanal history through a craft collection. And Barnes very much comes out against this. So Barnes's teacher, Thomas Monroe, argued that Locke's, he has an initial traveling exhibition, was of handicrafts and, quote, deserved neither the word primitive nor African nor art, end quote. And Locke's reply was his most striking rebuff of the Barnes Foundation. And this was after years of actually very close collaboration between Locke and Barnes. But at this point, they diverge. And so Locke says, he accuses him, Monroe's arbitrary distinction between art, sorry, let me get the quote. So he says, Mr. Monroe's arbitrary distinction between art and handicraft is a vicious misinterpretation of African art. The distinction did not exist in the culture itself. And recognition of that fact is basic in the competent study of appreciation of African art. And he continued, certainly it is at least as legitimate a modern use of African art to promote it as key to African culture and as a stimulus to the development of Negro art as to promote it as a side exhibit to modernist painting and to use it as a stalking horse for a particular school of aesthetics. So what Locke is saying here is he's accusing Barnes of instrumentalizing his African art collection to use it in the service of promoting his modern art and his aesthetic method rather than appreciating it on its own terms. Importantly, Locke introduced the new possibility of modern cultural uses and meanings for African art rather than kind of keeping it cordoned off as always art buried in a deep past. Locke's accusation that despite Barnes', all of this work that Barnes had been doing with the Harlem Renaissance, that he was using it as a side exhibit to modernist painting, it certainly hit a nerve for Barnes and for people who are familiar with Barnes. Barnes had a lot of nerves. So after the dispute and amid other ones, Barnes granted fellowships. I mean, he was really kind of like, wanted to kind of reclaim his place, his role within the Harlem Renaissance. So he granted fellowships for the African-American poet Gwendolyn Bennett and the painter Aaron Douglas. In fact, and I don't have time to go into detail with this, this could be a whole other talk, but Aaron Douglas, who's a really extraordinary painter from the Harlem Renaissance, actually cited survey graphics special issue, which was created between Barnes and Elaine Locke, Harlem Mecca of the New Negro, as you know, seeing it in Topeka, Kansas, where he was living and saying, I have to get to Harlem. I have to become part of this. And during the years leading up to and after his fellowship studying art at the Barnes Foundation, he would produce some of the most iconic and innovative modernist visual depictions of African sculpture. And in some cases, I can't say this definitively, but he did study for a year at the Barnes Foundation. It seems like he may have included direct references to works that he saw at the Barnes Foundation. I show this here. On the other hand, anticipating a later generation of African diasporic artists who often themselves felt limited by Locke's emphasis on African heritage, the poet, County Cullen, asked a startling different question of the Barnes collection. With his famous line, what is Africa to me? So in this poem called Heritage, which is surrounded by photographs of the Barnes Foundation collections, Cullen traced an African, American man's conflicted relationship to a memory of Africa that was always already embedded in Western contexts like Barnes's art galleries or books. Cullen's poem, Questions, you know, it really starts with this, again, this very famous question. You know, what is Africa to me? I'm African-American. And, you know, the poem describes an African man who does not have access to the same heritage as an African man would, simply by virtue of being black. And Cullen's poem, you know, really sets up a kind of ambivalent relationship between the poem itself and the sculptures depicted from the African art collection at the Barnes Foundation. It shows how the context within which he encountered African sculpture had always already been shaped by the goals and values of modernist collectors, poets, and anthropologists. The poem describes an encounter with African art that unsettles Barnes's idea that African-Americans had an unmediated relationship to African sculpture and also Elaine Locke's belief in its direct potential to inspire African-American artists. So Barnes encouraged a range of artists, students, critics, intellectuals to see his galleries. And what I find really interesting and important here is that in doing so, his collection catalyzed social and creative processes and produced values and ideas that contradicted his own. And just to say, and I promise, I know there's five minutes left. This will be very brief, but I do, although this talk has really stayed very close to the Barnes Foundation itself and its immediate circles. The Foundation's 1926 African art catalog and the many Harlem Renaissance publications in fact circulated far beyond it, where they framed and participated in key transnational dialogues, especially in Africa and the broader African diaspora. Through the photographs, especially the debates about what African sculpture could and should mean as art extended to African and African diasporic artists and intellectuals, as the art historian Joshua Cullen has shown, the black South African avant-garde artist Ernst Mancaba described, he has this incredible description where he described as going into a library in Cape Town in I think 19, I don't have it written down, but I think it's 1936, and discovering a copy of the Barnes Foundation African art catalog and seeing that as his impetus to engage with modernism and in fact to move to Paris. After seeing the catalog, he wrote that he wanted, quote, to participate in the great universal debate where Africa, though present by its ancient sculptural masterpieces in the possession of collectors and museums and in the opinion of so many European thinkers and artists, had nobody to speak to it. In perhaps a surprising parallel to Cullen's poem, Mancaba, an urban-based African artist, also described himself as having discovered African art as fragments recontextualized in the Barnes Foundation's book, but saw this as a chance to grapple with his heritage, which he understood as always already entangled with colonial modernity and European modernism. He used the photographs of the collection to inspire new techniques for pattern and abstraction in his sculpture and painting, and also to himself go to Paris to bring his voice into these debates and to engage with indigenous African cultural heritage, while also, and this is a quote from him, ensuring the international currency of his own visual language. And three years later, in 1939, the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and future prime minister of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, described also having this encounter where he discovers the Barnes Foundation African art catalog, and it becomes central to his own very different thinking. Senghor was a key founder of the francophone negritude movement, which developed in dialogue with the Harlem Renaissance and sought to raise black consciousness. And Senghor has been criticized for sharing the book's romantic and racialized construction of African art, but as the scholar Joshua Cohen has argued, he also used the Barnes catalog and the value that it conferred on African sculpture via European modernism to really center Africa's place within global modernity, to create new, oh actually could you go, well here this is good, to create new conversations across the African diaspora and to stand for a pre-colonial African sovereignty that could motivate an African Renaissance. Artists and thinkers as diverse as Locke, Johnson, Cullen, Douglas, Mankaban, Senghor described the quote unquote discovery of African sculpture on either a visit to the Barnes Foundation galleries or on finding one of its related publications, which premised Africa's sculpture's value on the development of European modernism. But they all used that value of that connection towards their own purposes. The Barnes Foundation's walls may appear static, but when you go into the archive, you discover that this collection and its display, both in person and through photographs, produced not a fixed statement by Barnes, but a dynamic conversation that reverberated across the African diaspora through Europe, the United States and Africa. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Allie. So illuminating. We have time for a few questions. So please raise your hands. I'll just please make sure that you're speaking into the mic when you ask your question. This is a comment. I'd like to see the new Afro-American Museum collaborate. Yes, thank you so much for that. No, I mean, I think that is such an extraordinary opportunity for the Barnes Foundation. I think as many of you might know, a sort of new neighbor for the Barnes Foundation will be the African-American History Museum. And I think we are certainly really excited to collaborate with them, especially because, you know, I think the story of African sculpture at the Barnes Foundation, what I was hoping to get out with this talk, it's a story, I mean, the objects themselves have such fascinating and important, I mean, every single one of them should be its own talk. But it's also a really important story about Philadelphia and New York and the African-American community and the ways that these objects were meaningful to them. So just to say, I absolutely agree with you that it's a wonderful opportunity for collaboration. I'd say this will be a very important and major thing that you can do. And this will involve publications, great long-lasting publications, and good publishing. Thank you so much. I just have a question about the collection itself. Are there pieces that are very, very old? So I would say those sort of, in terms of very old, the oldest piece in the collection, there is a work, a Benin bronze, which is old, so that would be 16th century. Almost everything else is 19th century or later, with the vast majority being late 19th and early 20th century. Thank you. Sure. There's a question way over here, so let me have a minute. I was just wondering if you could talk about the African artists. I was struck in your discussion of value, of who was the money actually going to? Yeah, so I think with value, I do think that this, I would wanna say, and this I think even happens in terms of the value in the African diaspora when we think about the sort of value accruing towards an African-American community, I think you are absolutely right that that is still not value that is going towards African artists. A lot of the objects, I would say, possibly even a majority of the objects in the collection or certainly many of the objects would have been made for a tourist or an export market. So that said, when they went to Paris, they would have gone for much, much more money. So I think that in terms of thinking about sort of the concept of appropriation and exploitation, we can think of that in the context of artistic value, but also I think you're quite right that it's also a sort of really important thing to underline just in terms of monetary value. So my question is similar to what you just said. So a lot of the art was acquired during colonialism time. And so the art, a lot of these countries wants to bring that back to their country now that they are in control because they couldn't control the art leaving their country. And so does it travel to Africa? Does it exhibit go other places? And to my understanding, a movement of art being, these countries asking for their art and are they getting it back? The artifacts that they lost that they could not control to keep in their own country. Yeah, no, that's an incredibly important question. I would say in terms of our collection, I mean, something that is new to the collection in general is that there is now more possibility to travel. So those sort of opportunities, this is new for the collection. So those opportunities for exchange are opening up to some degree. And the object in the collection that that has been sort of most discussed in relationship to is there is, there are three Benin bronzes in the collection and one that's a historic Benin bronze. And those, our curator has been in discussion with those because I think those are, that there's certainly like sort of at the center of those conversations. I think something we were also certainly talking about and that for Martha and I has certainly been a priority is for the objects in the collection. Even if in cases in which if they are staying in place to think about how do we bring in more interpretation around them that can reanimate the original lives of the objects. So things like oral histories, music, dance. So bringing in ways to sort of learn more, sort of bring back some of the life of the objects as they originally would have been used and sort of known and sort of thinking about them as sort of living objects in that sense. I just have a question. Yeah. I've found it really fascinating that a lot of these objects were actually made for the tourist market. I don't think I realized that. I knew that they were late 19th century, most of them early 20th, but I don't, that the people making them were actually thinking of the European tourist market. But my question is, so they're making these sort of contemporaneously, but I guess my question is when did this belief that these or this idea that these objects were a thousand years old or whatever, where did that originate? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just sort of, you kind of realize, so I mean, I mean, I similarly think and this also a little bit speaks to the previous question, which is a lot of these were never, for example, there's sort of a lot of examples in which you can see places of where the object would have been consecrated or oils were never rubbed on it or we have sort of evidence for why we would think that actually, it was never actually made or used to be used in a source community. But I think, you know, your question about, yeah, where does it come from? I mean, how could you think a wooden object is 10,000 years old, right? I mean, that doesn't even, I mean, if you just, anyone in this room sits for a minute and thinks about that, you'd think, well, that's crazy that object couldn't have lasted for 10,000 years, if you think about the material. And I think that really is the kind of power of the kind of ideological work of primitivism. I mean, this idea where this is really developing this premise around the idea that there's a huge temporal gap between this art as the source, as something that is more authentic, more ancient, that is somehow separate from the modern world was so crucial to the ways in which African art was taken up, especially by avant-garde artists, that I think, you know, it's sort of maybe some kind of confirmation bias. I mean, that idea is so crucial that people sort of saw, I think, what they wanted to see and slotted it into that category because it was somehow inconceivable that these objects, in fact, were in many ways just as modern and some art historians, I think, have really provocatively argued even many ways more modern than the modernist works because of the ways in which Africa via colonialism was so at the forefront of all of, you know, the worst aspects of modernity, the pressures of globalization and modernity. So thinking about these, in a sense, is hyper-modern objects. But to my mind, I think it is, I mean, to some degree, they didn't, they know so little about it. So I mean, I will say that, that these objects came into the collections and people really didn't know. But also, to me, it feels like really evidence of just the power of ideology. Thank you so much and thank you all for coming. Thank you all so much.