Re-Presenting Slavery: Underserved Questions in Museum Collections

The term underserved implies that something is missing. In relation to museum education, this usually means that an audience or population has unmet needs and that an institution has the ability or resources to meet these needs, yet has not fully realized this ability. In this article, I hope to broaden this definition, to question what and who is really underserved, and to challenge the notion that the deficit or need belongs solely to the audience. Taking the upcoming exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)-provisionally titled Slavery and Portraiture in Atlantic Britain-as a model, I suggest that the notion of underserved can also be productively applied to museum collections and interpretive practice.Issues of race, power, and the legacy of slavery and empire are present within many collections of European and American art. These issues relate to all audiences as they continue to shape history and lived experience. Lonnie Bunch (2010), Founding Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture argued that, "what is missing [in museums] is a new synthesis-a 'new integration'-that encourages visitors to see that exploring issues of race is essential to their understanding of American culture" (pp. 48-49). The YCBA is a museum that reflects a predominantly white cultural legacy while existing within a city that has a large black population. The black figures within the collection are often depicted in marginalized positions of servitude and slavery and reflect 18th-century British attitudes. This must be addressed in order to provide new layers of interpretation, both personal and communal (Barret, 2000). If we are to gain new insights and perspectives on the meaning of objects, we need to begin a dialogue with a broad spectrum of museum visitors.This article focuses on the representation of slavery in 18th-century portraiture as a case study for examining and presenting objects in ways that create new dialogues. Drawing on scholarship from the disciplines of literary theory, postcolonial studies, art history, and art education, the following themes will be explored as strategies for addressing the underserved subjects in our pictures and the underserved questions of our audience: (1 ) unfreezing the past, (2) recognizing scenes of subjection (Hartman, 1997), (3) converting absence to presence, and (4) seeing the flexible history of objects. While these themes are presented in the context of the exhibition, Slavery and Portraiture in Atlantic Britain, they suggest broader implications for engagement between objects and audiences.As both co-curator and educator, I argue that how we research, display, and discuss works of art creates openings for new historical insight and contemporary relevance. Museums are sites of this engagement between object and audience (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011; Falk & Dierking, 2000, 2011; Hooper Greenhill, 1999, 2007; Hein, 1998). Dewey (1934/2005) introduced the notion that works of art-while created in the past-also live in the present each time a viewer engages with them. Responding to works of art is an active process with multiple layers: "Observation is not simply a passive process of absorbing impressions or recording stimuli; instead, it is an activity of selection and interpretation" (Jaggar & Bordo as quoted in Desai, Hamlin, & Mattson, 2010, p. 49). By arranging questions around images as we engage with our audiences, broader themes emerge. Once we consider new ways to approach our collections, we can begin a dialogue with our audiences about how we can be relevant and best serve their underserved needs (Sandell & Nightingale, 2012; Simon, 2010;Trafi-Prats, 2009).As a museum educator at the YCBA, I am in a position to live and work with, teach from, and talk about British art with many audiencesfrom 1st graders to scholars in the field and the broad spectrum in between. The exhibition, Slavery and Portraiture in Atlantic Britain, came about, in part, as a result of observations and interpretations that I have collected from visitors in response to several key objects. …