Reframing Agassiz and Hartt's Collecting in Brazil

In May 2024, the Peabody Museum and Radcliffe Institute hosted a weeklong seminar titled “The Body-territory of the Rainforest: Revisiting the Thayer and Morgan Expedition Collections Through Cosmovisions and the Legacies of Slavery.” Participants included Anita Ekman, artist, independent researcher and curator; Tom Cummins, director of Dumbarton Oaks and Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art; Lisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum; Cristine Takuá, Maxacali, curator and educator, Co-founder of the Museum of Indigenous Culture of São Paulo; Cristiana Barreto, archaeologist, curator and associate professor at Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi; Claudia Mattos Avolese, Senior Lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University; Cristoph Irmscher, director of the Wells Scholar Program and Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University; Carlos Papa, Guarani Mbya spiritual leader and filmmaker; Freg Stokes, historian and geographer, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology; Kleber Amancio, Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia; João Paulo Barreto, Yepamahsã (Tukano), Professor of Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Amazonas; Sergio Burgi, Head Curator of Photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro; Ana Laura Malmaceda, PhD candidate in Romance Languages at Harvard University and Julia Pastreich, Harvard College ’25 and Peabody Museum Curatorial Research Assistant.

The goal of the seminar was to bring together an interdisciplinary group of artists, art historians, curators and scientists to revisit and reframe objects collected by Louis Agassiz and Charles Hartt during the Thayer and Morgan expeditions to Brazil in the 19th century and housed at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. While these collections, which were separated out and distributed at different museums at Harvard – the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Peabody Museum – have been studied to some extent on their own, they have not been considered in relation to each other since their extraction.

Together the participants viewed materials that Louis Agassiz and Charles Hartt collected in Brazil in the mid nineteenth century and are now held in the MCZ’s ichthyology and paleontology departments and the Ernst Mayr Library, in addition to ceramics, photographs and Indigenous belongings housed at the Peabody Museum. The group discussed their work and the collections they viewed to begin the process for creating programming around this project. 

The seminar came about after the Peabody Museum co-sponsored a virtual talk called Race, Representation, and Agassiz’s Brazilian Fantasy with the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University (ALARI) on April 1, 2021. Speakers included Sandra Benites (Guaraní Ñandeva), Adjunct Curator of Brazilian Art, Museum of Art of São Paulo; Anita Ekman, Visual and Performance Artist and independent researcher; Cristoph Irmscher, Director of the Wells Scholar Program and Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, Luciana Namorato, Associate Professor and Director of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. The talk was moderated by Alejandro De La Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University. After the talk, Anita Ekman and Sandre Benites worked with the Peabody Museum to submit a proposal for the Radcliffe Seminar. 
 

Co-curators Ilisa Barbash, Anita Ekman, Cristine Takua and Carlos Papa are now working together online to create a proposal for an exhibition based on ideas generated at the seminar to be installed at the Peabody and hopefully in Brazil.