#  Video: Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Book Launch and Conversation 

 



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- Wendel A. White, Distinguished Professor of Art, Stockton University; 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
- Cheryl Finley, Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective; Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture; Spelman College; Associate Professor, Department of Art & Visual Studies, Cornell University
- Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
- Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
- Conversation moderated by Brenda Tindal, Chief Campus Curator, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Visual artist Wendel A. White photographs material culture, objects, documents, and books held in public collections to explore the complexities of American history, slavery, abolition, concepts of race, and Black life and culture. In this program, marking the launch of his book Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2024), White will engage in a conversation with contributors to the book. They will discuss White’s body of work, the construction of race within the archival imaginary, and the ways in which artifacts, material culture, art, and photography shape historical narratives, memories, and contemporary perspectives on Black life and culture. Cosponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology; the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture; the Office of the Chief Campus Curator, Harvard University; the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative; EDIBA Initiatives at the Office of the Librarian, Harvard University; and ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts.

*Recorded date: September 26, 2024*

## Transcript

**Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Book Launch and Conversation**

\[00:00:03.17\] Good evening. Evening. Thank you for coming. My name is Caroline Jean Fernald. I'm the executive director of Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, a partnership of museums where our mission is to foster curiosity and a spirit of discovery in visitors of all ages, enhancing public understanding of and appreciation for the natural world, science, and human cultures.

\[00:00:26.94\] I am delighted to welcome our in-person, as well as our Zoom audience, to tonight's program, celebrating the launch of Wendel A. White's book, Manifest-- 13 Colonies, published by Radius Books and the Peabody Museum Press. This event is made possible Thanks to the support of the Peabody Museum, Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the Office of the Chief Campus Curator at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, EDIBA initiatives at Harvard's Office of the Librarian, and Arts Thursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts.

\[00:01:03.68\] We are grateful to all of our sponsors, and I would also like to extend a special note of gratitude to our members and donors whose support helps make events like tonight's lecture possible.

\[00:01:14.56\] It is a pleasure to welcome Wendel White-- and it's very nice to see you again-- and the contributors to the book to Harvard, and I look forward to their conversation tonight. The book, Manifest-- 13 Colonies, is a companion to Wendel's photographic exhibition with the same title currently on view at the Peabody Museum.

\[00:01:32.80\] After the program, I invite you to join us upstairs, in the galleries, to see this wonderful exhibition. The book will be available for purchase. And I have some last minute changes to my prepared remarks. We have a cash bar, but for attending in person tonight, we have drink vouchers for you.

\[00:01:47.51\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:01:49.00\] I'm very delighted I get to deliver that news.

\[00:01:51.43\] The museum is free and open to the public until 9:00 PM.

\[00:01:54.74\] To learn more about upcoming events at all of our partner museums, I invite you to visit our website at HMSC.Harvard.edu, or you can also sign up for our newsletter or follow us on social media to stay in the loop on new exhibits and all of the many exciting workshops, lectures, and festivals we host throughout the year.

\[00:02:13.33\] I will now turn it over to Ilisa Barbash, curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, who will introduce the program and our speakers. Thank you.

\[00:02:22.56\] Thank you, Caroline. Thank you all for braving the rain. And those of you at home, watching on Zoom, I hope you enjoy the comfort of your own dry spaces. Welcome.

\[00:02:37.35\] Wendel White is the 14th recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in photography, which was endowed by Robert Gardner, a Harvard graduate, Harvard professor, and distinguished filmmaker and author.

\[00:02:50.52\] Since 2007, the Peabody has awarded this fellowship annually to a photographer to document the human condition anywhere in the world. While most Gardner Fellows have focused on people, Wendel turned his lens on their material possessions, on objects of Black history housed in archives, museums, and libraries, including at the Peabody Museum and other Harvard institutions.

\[00:03:17.22\] Wendel's body of work in the Manifest project has been so rich that he has been able to shape it into a number of different but equally beautiful incarnations. We have an exhibition upstairs. We have a beautiful book edited by Maura Madden with Radius. And we have this wonderful conversation with some of the most important scholars in Black history and the visual arts and most important scholars, period.

\[00:03:44.90\] It is my pleasure to introduce them all this evening. I have abbreviated everyone's biographies because I could take all evening in recounting their various accomplishments.

\[00:03:57.95\] Wendel A. White is a distinguished professor of art at Stockton University in New Jersey. Dr. Cheryl Finley is the inaugural director of the Atlanta University Center Art History & Curatorial Studies Collective. She is a distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College and associate professor of art history at Cornell University.

\[00:04:24.35\] Doctor Leigh Raiford is professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of Berkeley's Black Studies Collaboratory. Doctor Deborah Willis is a university professor and chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. Brenda Tindal, who will be moderating for you this evening, is the chief campus curator for Harvard University's faculty of Arts & Sciences.

\[00:05:02.60\] \[APPLAUSE\]

\[00:05:03.43\] Thank you, oh, so much for everyone that came out tonight. And thank you for the introduction. I'm just going to take a few minutes to provide a little of the background in terms of the work and how I've sort of come about it and place it, actually, in a broader context of some of my other work. So I prepared some things so that I stay on track and we get quickly to the conversation.

\[00:05:30.51\] Manifest-- 13 Colonies is directly connected to work I began more than three decades ago, regarding the narratives of African-American culture and community in the United States. This work has been expressed through various projects, Small Towns, Black Lives, Schools for the Colored, Village of Peace, Seven Steps to Freedom, Red Summer, and Manifest. Each of these portfolios examines Black life in the context of community, landscape, architecture, and artifact.

\[00:06:03.27\] I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend the moment suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space. These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States.

\[00:06:29.40\] The photographs form a reliquary and a survey of the impulse and the motivation to preserve history and memory. The ideas that have occupied my attention are, in retrospect, often part of a singular effort to seek out the ghosts and resonant memories of the material world. I am drawn to the construct that we often identify as race within the surfaces of people, landscape, architecture, and the objects of material culture.

\[00:07:00.20\] Various literary references have influenced my work throughout. In the Schools for the Colored project, this passage, from W.E.B. Du Bois, shaped the actual appearance of the images. The metaphor of the veil became a visual representation in the images.

\[00:07:20.21\] And, quote, "And yet, being the problem is a strange experience, particularly even for one who has never been anything else, save, perhaps, in boyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first burst upon one, all in one day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, way up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds to the sea.

\[00:07:52.23\] In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it in the minds of the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards, $0.10 a package and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others, or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had, thereafter, no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through. I held all beyond it in common contempt and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great, wandering shadows."

\[00:08:39.36\] In his autobiography, the American actor Henry Fonda recalled the lynching of Will Brown in Omaha, Nebraska. It was the first location where I photographed for the Red Summer project.

\[00:08:52.31\] Fonda writes, "My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young Black man dangling at the end of the lamppost, the shots, and the revulsion that I felt."

\[00:09:06.89\] Many ideas are folded into the Manifest portfolio. Several are included in the publication. All of the various portfolios are part of a single set of concerns.

\[00:09:20.63\] And from James Baldwin. "History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it with us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."

\[00:09:54.25\] I am deeply grateful for the contributions that everyone has made to this publication and exhibition, the Robert Gardner Fellowship, everyone at the Peabody Museum, Ilisa Barbash, Maura Madden, everyone at Radius Books, David Chickey, Nick Larson, the support of Stockton University, and, of course, all the libraries and museums that opened their collections for my photography.

\[00:10:22.52\] Most of all, four of the five individuals whose essays and interviews provide the critical foundation for the book will now join me in conversation. Please welcome Deborah Willis, Brenda Tindal, Leigh Raiford, and Cheryl Finley.

\[00:10:38.56\] Wow.

\[00:10:38.92\] \[APPLAUSE\]

\[00:10:40.99\] Can we just give Wendel another round of applause?

\[00:10:43.64\] \[APPLAUSE\]

\[00:10:50.64\] Interesting enough, Wendel and I began this dialogue two years ago, via Zoom conversation. And it was really important for me to be able to hold space for this beautiful tune in person. And so I'm just really delighted that we were able to gather today for a conversation with this august group of scholars and curators.

\[00:11:17.62\] I have to say that I've been sitting with this work for several months, and, in some ways, this tune has become a bit of a prism through which the iconicity and the quotidian contours of Black life and culture have really come into such sharp relief.

\[00:11:34.56\] And I believe both the juxtaposition between Wendel's photography and the beautiful contributions of our panel today really added such a great dimension to the work. But I think it will add such great dimension to this conversation. So shall we begin? Wonderful.

\[00:11:56.45\] So I thought we might-- Wendel did such a beautiful job contextualizing his work. I thought it may be useful, at least for our audience, to really, perhaps-- I'd like to maybe ask our contributors a question or two. I think we should give Wendel his flowers at the start of this conversation.

\[00:12:21.11\] And so my first question is really about, as contributors to Manifest, how has Wendel's work, including Manifest-- 13 Colonies, informed and helped visualize African-American history and culture through the power of photography?

\[00:12:43.60\] Leigh, do you want to start?

\[00:12:44.93\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:12:46.93\] Yes, Dr. Willis. Thank you. Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you, Brenda, for moderating.

\[00:12:55.06\] Of course.

\[00:12:55.18\] Thank you, Wendel, for the occasion of this book, to bring us together.

\[00:13:00.73\] So as I opened my contribution to the book, I first encountered Wendel's work probably a dozen years ago through a curator named Deirdre Visser, who mounted a small exhibition of Wendel's work in San Francisco. And it was the first opportunity I'd really had to be in conversation with a living artist.

\[00:13:33.58\] I mostly write about people who are not living, at least up to that point. But my work, like Cheryl's and Deb's, especially at that moment, was really interested in the question relationship between African-American history and memory and how photography shapes both and the kind of complicated dance that happens between history and memory.

\[00:14:00.01\] And so encountering Wendel's work that is not simply about making lost African-American history manifest in the present, but was really trying to create a new visual language for how we engage and encounter the archival objects and the archival objects as resonant of traces of Black life, and without having to force Black people into doing the work of representing our lives.

\[00:14:40.12\] And so I was really struck by the way the objects are made to dance in the images, the way they're held in this kind of warm light. And it reminds us to have a certain reverence for the past and for history.

\[00:15:03.19\] I will leave it there. I've had some--

\[00:15:07.00\] Yeah.

\[00:15:07.37\] It was exciting to come back to it, but we can talk more about that.

\[00:15:11.27\] But I like the idea that you're using the word trace, tracing these histories, and how Wendel has been able to help us reimagine the lives of some of the people. I want to show some slides of images that I'd love to explore, like, why 13 colonies?

\[00:15:37.02\] So we think about fashion and how important it is for us to consider ways of how people dressed and how they made it through the day, how they made it through the night, but also, the whole aspect of emancipation and freedom. So we're going to flip through.

\[00:15:57.64\] How did you find this? Where is this, this shoe, and what does it mean?

\[00:16:05.17\] \[LAUGHS\] So this is at the North Carolina History Museum. And in particular, I had such a wide range of experiences at different collections. This was a particularly good one. I spent a couple of days there, and they were really enthusiastic about continuing to bring out things, certainly, that I had discovered in their online finding aids.

\[00:16:34.32\] But then they also brought out other objects that I didn't know about in the finding aids, and that was often one of the things that was most remarkable about the adventure of connecting with collections, which was to have conversations with the staff and the archivists about things that I may have missed or things that maybe were not indicated.

\[00:16:55.71\] And this is one of those objects. They brought out a number of clothing objects, and this as well. And this one was not-- it's associated very accurately with the Civil War, not necessarily with a known connection between Black and white individuals. And it's situated in North Carolina. So it could be, certainly, either.

\[00:17:17.70\] And one of the things that has been interesting to me, in all of the work, is the degree to which it's not really-- the work, along the way, has not really just been about Black life, but how Black life is defined by virtue of whiteness.

\[00:17:33.25\] Yeah. To me, it's so important to see the way that you place this on the page as well, working with the designer. Because I feel a step, and I feel like I'm in movement. But also, when I think about the Black Civil War soldiers, when they were enlisted, when they were allowed to fight, how important it was when they picked up their shoes, when there were so many people who were enslaved who didn't have the opportunity to wear the right size shoe.

\[00:18:04.57\] So I think that when we think about this aspect of step, work, protection, beauty--

\[00:18:10.44\] Emancipation.

\[00:18:11.11\] Yeah. This whole aspect of that is really significant.

\[00:18:15.41\] Well, I also just-- I don't know if this is in this slide or not, but just also, their little pieces of-- I don't know what it is that-- it looks like--

\[00:18:26.17\] Well, the sole is wooden, actually. So--

\[00:18:28.41\] Oh.

\[00:18:28.71\] Yeah. Yeah.

\[00:18:29.58\] Yeah.

\[00:18:30.42\] But how--

\[00:18:31.43\] The splinters.

\[00:18:32.38\] Splinters. Yeah.

\[00:18:33.31\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:18:33.84\] But you see that, too. You see those material traces in the image.

\[00:18:39.33\] And I'll have some others going back and forth. But this image. How did you-- why was this important?

\[00:18:51.01\] So, I mean, one of the things I should say about this particular collection-- this, also, is from the North Carolina History Museum-- is that that's the home place for my family. My great-grandfather ran-- and that's why I say, knowing Black and white, my great grandfather ran away from being enslaved and joined the Union Army in North Carolina. So he became a soldier in North Carolina. So all of that--

\[00:19:18.19\] That's why I say--

\[00:19:19.02\] And North Carolina is one of those places where it's hard to know, very much, where that history overlaps.

\[00:19:26.69\] This was my only opportunity to photograph clothing that had been handmade by enslaved people.

\[00:19:33.72\] Wow.

\[00:19:33.74\] And so there was so much that came with that.

\[00:19:37.64\] And that's why I selected just the idea of fashion identity, how it's structured in the way that you-- I feel they're alive. And I feel that they were sending a message to this 20th century, 21st century audience to think about the lives that they endured. But, then, this is a tintype, correct?

\[00:20:04.64\] Yes. Tintype. Yep.

\[00:20:06.30\] And so we know how the access of tintypes and the experience of the readiness of this and this figure was just ready to let you know, let the person know, the person he's giving that photograph to, that there is a message there.

\[00:20:24.14\] So these are the ones, to me, that-- I felt that it was important to share moments of humanity. And that's where I see the work and the stories, that part of what Brenda's question is.

\[00:20:38.69\] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

\[00:20:39.73\] I love that response, because so too often people think about museums and archives as places where things go to be buried. And so this idea of being alive and that your work really makes the Black cultural sort of materiality feel alive and not buried or obscured in the archive does produce a bit of an archival imaginary that I think is quite beautiful.

\[00:21:12.04\] Cheryl, did you want to add anything?

\[00:21:13.79\] Oh, yeah. I mean, I think one of your first questions is, well, how do we encounter your work? And I think that it's just work that I know about from not just the history of photography, because you're here with us, but just in terms of teaching my students in the classroom.

\[00:21:31.60\] And I think more recently, in the last two years, Deb and I co-curated a show that was for the photo-focused biennial of contemporary photography in Cincinnati called Free as They Want To Be-- Artists Committed to Memory. And there was a really wonderful, and, I think, impressive grid-like installation of your work in that exhibition. And I think that's when I became most intimately aware of it.

\[00:22:00.10\] And I love the way we've been talking about the archive and you've asked us about the archive. But the way that you enter the archive, these objects and images and mentioning the North Carolina Historical Society, places like that, have the kinds of material real artifacts that you can say, well, this was a boot that was made out of wood, had a wooden sole.

\[00:22:28.89\] You have family members were there. There's almost a way in which you can reclaim some of those objects as perhaps being related to you beyond just having investigated them in the archive and photographed them.

\[00:22:42.72\] But I think, too, with some of the images that you have shared with us, this way that, as we look at them, sometimes you can read what the words are on the page. And sometimes we know who that is right there. Phillis Wheatley. You can read or you can make the person out, and sometimes you can't. And there's a way in which Leigh used the word "dance," and words come alive.

\[00:23:10.29\] But also, I think there's a sense of sometimes even refusing either the pain or the terror that the archive can sometimes present for certain histories. So I just think your work is phenomenal and amazing and so rich and so, so deep.

\[00:23:31.46\] And for me, the work that I wrote about was centered around a collection of the Atlanta University Center, which is where I often am with my students. And I loved this small collection, especially by the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. And I think we'll come to those images, and I can say something more about it.

\[00:23:54.47\] But the way that we talk about memory and the power of not just photography as a medium, but also the archive to engage us in the present and thinking about how the past can be something that's instrumental in our lives today that can help make manifest or move us forward is another way that I was very easily intoxicated by this body of work.

\[00:24:21.01\] Yeah.

\[00:24:21.97\] Mm-hmm. I want to dig a bit deeper on what you just said, Cheryl. In particular, I've personally been thinking about the rote narrative, the way in which African-American history and culture can be quite rote. There seems to be this really seductive narration of Black culture and life, and it's often through this very narrow contour, from slavery to segregation to civil rights.

\[00:24:54.72\] And that narrative arc, in my personal opinion, really situates Black life and culture within this really overdetermined domain of struggle and plight. And so I'm wondering, how do archives, in particular, African-American material culture in public collections, such as those represented in Manifest-- 13 Colonies-- how do those collections help transform our historical perception and understanding of Black life and culture, so that we're not narrowly charting that course through simply slavery, simply civil rights, or simply segregation, if you will?

\[00:25:41.66\] I think that the letters that Wendel photographed has a lot to do with the meaning of life, when someone sends a love letter and a photograph and the way that it uncovers stories about love, about protection, about respect. And the way that this is framed, it's a tent. It's a home. And so we see ways of the way that he's framing these images or placing them on the page.

\[00:26:19.40\] But here, we see this object here. And it's meaningful for someone who decided to purchase it, but also what it meant to have on display in the home. So I think that that's where the idea-- there's struggle always in life, so those stories are often told. But the stories that are missing in some of these histories is key. That's ownership. It's work.

\[00:26:49.90\] So it has something to do with someone's life that meant that they had responsibility, and that key was also security. And so we often look at these images and these objects and find different ways to tell that story.

\[00:27:07.00\] Cheryl, you just pointed out--

\[00:27:08.36\] Well, I just love the image that just passed by. But I was also going to say, I mean, to your point, I think that the archives can often offer--

\[00:27:17.34\] Is it possible to slow the images down?

\[00:27:19.35\] --an alternative narrative.

\[00:27:21.01\] Can we slow them down a bit? No?

\[00:27:22.16\] So the narrative can be-- it's the way you've done, Wendel. You can disrupt that seemingly rote progression from slavery and so on to, ultimately, civil rights. And here we are, Black Lives Matter, beyond that, actually.

\[00:27:40.29\] And I think that if one were to meditate on the spoon, how it was used, or if we think about this beautiful letter collage with the baby booties and what was actually said there, there's a certain way in which you get this connection to the human, to humanity, that's really important on an individual scale that relates to the larger community and larger community histories.

\[00:28:08.79\] And I think that's something that's so incredibly appealing, thinking about, for example, a lock of hair. Or we've seen a tintype, this fan. The kinds of objects that you've selected to photograph tell stories themselves in ways that we, again, break that tradition of thinking only in certain kinds of ways and also realizing the joy and the power and the pleasure of people like Paul Robeson, his voice, but his activism and more.

\[00:28:49.82\] Let's just add-- I mean, I think for those of us who do get to spend time in archives, part of the allure of that is actually being able to touch objects that other hands touched in the past. And Wendel's photographic style holds on and animates that sense of touch in these everyday objects.

\[00:29:26.66\] But the worn book with the broken spine that has been touched, it's been read. These objects have been held, and so many of them are everyday objects.

\[00:29:43.43\] And I love how both Deb and Cheryl-- you're trying to imagine the-- we begin to start to wonder about the lives of the objects and what they spoke to and what they saw.

\[00:30:00.13\] I think, also, just in the structure as well, of the exhibition and of the book, so much of the work, these objects, are not put in a chronological order. They get to sit next to one another across time, across period, across space, which invites other kinds of telling and other kinds of narratives as well.

\[00:30:28.24\] How did you imagine the presentation of this differently from the other presentations?

\[00:30:38.43\] Well, in the book form?

\[00:30:42.10\] Mm-hmm.

\[00:30:42.43\] So the first two things that I discussed with the designer and with the book editor were the idea that I didn't want to impose this artificial-- like, here are the photographs from North Carolina. Here are the photographs from this state or try to think about putting everything in chronological order. And the main reason for that is, that's not how I experienced them.

\[00:31:10.22\] I experienced them as I showed up to places. And this week, I got permission to visit this collection. And then next week, a complete-- so nothing was in a particular order. And so that was partly a way of me reconstituting my own experience of encountering the collections.

\[00:31:31.17\] But in the way that we've talked about, it's also, I think, even within the collection, sitting down in a given collection, I might see objects from such a wide range of different time periods and covering different topics.

\[00:31:49.37\] I was fortunate enough to get access to material from the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And so what they brought out was just really wide ranging and from all over the country.

\[00:32:02.10\] And that's the other thing, is that in a way, not all of these objects are located within the 13 colonies, in terms of their history, but they're all located in the 13 colonies, where they are now sitting in collections. So they now sit in those places, but they may have arrived there from another location at one point or another.

\[00:32:22.34\] The vast majority of these are local collections, and so most of the objects are from their locales. Yeah.

\[00:32:31.03\] One of the tropes that I've heard consistently thus far in our conversation is about encountering archives and encountering material culture. And I will never forget one special encounter that I had in our archive, which was-- I was working-- when I was a graduate student, working on Alice Walker's papers.

\[00:32:53.87\] And in her short hand, on a little sticky note, was a beautiful message that has framed my curatorial approach to date. And she said, in her long hand, "People are known by the records they keep. If it isn't in the record, it will be said that it did not happen. That's what history is, a keeping of record."

\[00:33:17.23\] And in some ways, I see your work as not just simply keeping a record, but even maybe bringing certain parts of African-American culture, life, and history, possibly things that could have been orphaned or obscured in the archive. I think it goes back to what Deb said about bringing it to life.

\[00:33:41.62\] I'm wondering, what isn't recorded? What is missing from the conversation, and what interventions do the archives make in what's missing from our national conversation about Black life and culture?

\[00:34:01.25\] Well, I have to just add one little story for me. And this goes way back to the beginning of the Small Towns, Black Lives project, which was, I encountered-- There. Was a small cemetery near the college where I teach that had four headstones of United States colored troops and in a town that is entirely a white town.

\[00:34:22.08\] And I was intrigued by how they got there. and that was the first moment in which I wound up going to an archive, because somebody said to me, well, if you go to the National Archives, you may find their veterans' folders. And there may be stories, because the local historical society had no information about them. So that was the first moment in which I encountered material for which nobody seemed to know anything about it and had lost the story.

\[00:34:48.81\] Because what I eventually constructed was that the Black settlement that had been there died out in the 1920s, so there was nobody living that remembered any of the people or had any connection to them. And there was no Black community there.

\[00:35:06.23\] And so going to the National Archives-- this was before any of that material was online-- was my way of putting the story together. And that was that first-- I think that was 1990, when I had that encounter. 1989.

\[00:35:24.26\] Were you able to find the stories?

\[00:35:25.98\] Yeah. Luckily for me and unfortunately for them, they had a lot of difficulty getting their benefits. And so their folders were thick with affidavits from them, but also from their white neighbors saying, I knew this person before he went to war and he was healthy, and there was nothing wrong with him, and he should get some benefits. So there was a lot of information in those folders, in the form of letters and death certificates and a wide range of things that eventually allowed me to put together a fairly elaborate story of who lived in that settlement at that time.

\[00:36:04.39\] And that's important, those pension records. We see the fight. We never talk about that fight, that the wife, the widow, the daughter had in trying to find justice for their family member who was injured or who died. And so having that opportunity to go into the pension records, to find another story of love, another political story, another story of battle and fight-- so that's why that story is so important. I love this straightening of facts.

\[00:36:42.45\] Straightening.

\[00:36:42.78\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:36:45.27\] Yeah.

\[00:36:46.06\] Yeah.

\[00:36:46.53\] Wendel, you begin the book with an encounter, with, in particular, Frederick Douglass.

\[00:36:54.81\] Right.

\[00:36:55.62\] Can you share that story with us?

\[00:36:58.69\] Sure.

\[00:36:58.83\] Because I thought that that was such a powerful anecdote about your encounter in the archive and how that inspired additional curiosity.

\[00:37:11.39\] Deb mentioning the straightening comb-- I have to say that the first encounter was with this lock of Frederick Douglass's hair, which has-- and hair has been a thread all the way through, right here to the Peabody and looking at Caroline Bond Day's studies and charts of hair.

\[00:37:27.80\] I started out-- I was a visiting faculty member at RIT in Rochester, and I thought I was going to work on a landscape project while I was there, but I knew there was a lot of Frederick Douglass material. And I went to Hope Cemetery and then wound up going to University of Rochester because I knew they had some material, but I didn't know exactly what.

\[00:37:50.82\] And the archivist brought out the first book that he purchased after he became free of slavery and inscribed when he gave it as a gift to his son and also, a lock of his hair. And it just seemed to me-- I mean, I was sort of knocked out by it, and he just appeared on screen. And I was knocked out by the idea that I would encounter a piece of Frederick Douglass's body and that sense of time travel that was involved and also just the idea that this piece of a body was in the archive as well.

\[00:38:23.48\] All of that caused me to abandon what I had planned to do and just turned towards looking, at first, in all of that Upstate New York area, at the different archives that I could find that had material, which were pretty rich with materials.

\[00:38:40.00\] Wow. And I feel like that example illustrates that juxtaposition between the iconicity and the quotidian contours of Black life and culture. So I think so much of the way that we imagine Frederick Douglass. His hair becomes this very interesting part of our public imagination. And to have that kind of intimacy in the archive is just a beautiful story.

\[00:39:10.96\] Right. Thank you.

\[00:39:14.66\] And there's also a lock of Thomas Clarkson's hair--

\[00:39:18.13\] There's a lock of Thomas Clarkson's--

\[00:39:19.25\] --as well.

\[00:39:19.46\] --hair. And even though it's not in the project, I came across more locks of Frederick Douglass's hair in Nebraska, but that's in Nebraska.

\[00:39:29.26\] So that's fascinating. People were really--

\[00:39:32.94\] They wanted his hair.

\[00:39:33.97\] Because of his beauty-- but then they also-- like, today, when people-- don't touch my hair. So that's another story that could-- I'd love to hear more about that.

\[00:39:46.06\] Yeah.

\[00:39:46.62\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:39:48.74\] When we first began our conversation, one of the things that I think Cheryl mentioned was about emancipation. Can you talk about how literacy, the concept of literacy, shows up in Manifest-- 13 Colonies? Because that feels like a really particularly important part of the collection.

\[00:40:11.40\] Mm-hmm. Well, certainly, I came across early editions of books written by African-Americans all throughout the 13 colonies. And in almost every collection, somebody had a book written by somebody from Frederick Douglass to-- we saw Phillis Wheatley and all the different well-known and some not so well-known publications by authors, especially the slave narratives and the various slave narratives that were published, and it just gradually felt like an increasingly important part.

\[00:40:53.77\] Before I started this project, I worked on an earlier project in Florida connected to Zora Neale Hurston, and that led me, eventually, to Yale and the Beinecke and getting a chance to photograph her manuscripts. And so those were included. And then, also, in Atlanta, the James Baldwin manuscript. And so manuscripts and all of the literature and all of the work and temporary as well as early work, the dissertation here, at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois, all of that work felt like it was an intersection that just ran through the geography of these places.

\[00:41:35.89\] And important for me to say that these places are chosen for me because I felt like this was-- as we were coming up on the 250th anniversary, this was an important inflection point to think about yet another time in which we made a significant decision about what race would mean in the United States and opportunity when it could have gone a different way, but yet it didn't.

\[00:42:03.14\] I think to support what Leigh said, the broken spine-- that book is hand-me-down to many people, passed down to other people, shared to from family members, to neighbors, as you talked about the neighbors who justified why a person should get the pension.

\[00:42:26.26\] But I love the fact that you read that in that book. And I didn't see that, Leigh, the broken spine and thinking about the use of literacy and use of reading and how important-- and even the spectacle. Here is a book but also the glasses that that person who needed health care had someone create the glasses to help. So all of these links are just fantastic.

\[00:42:59.74\] Can I ask a question?

\[00:43:00.95\] Sure.

\[00:43:02.05\] It's riffing on the same thread of the conversation. So one of the things, to your point, about whether it's the locks of hair, and the worn spine of the book, whether it's a Bible or it's Clarkson's famous history, one of the things that I really loved about working on this piece of writing related to your photographs, but also to the archives and the title of your book, Manifest-- 13 Colonies, is that Clarkson's book and his work-- I know it was sent to each of the 13 colonies. It was there.

\[00:43:42.40\] And so you have-- I don't know how many-- examples of it, but you have quite a few examp--

\[00:43:46.70\] 10 or 12.

\[00:43:47.25\] Yeah.

\[00:43:47.54\] Something like that.

\[00:43:48.06\] Of that same book. And so I was curious to ask, maybe-- and I don't know if you've actually done a calculation, but how many copies of-- and you can name the book. Is it Baldwin? Is it something that Douglass would have written, or Clarkson, or others, or even other similar kinds of things? You said, well, I have others' locks of hair. Did you find-- where do things replicate and why, at a certain time period, was it important to collect the lock of hair?

\[00:44:21.67\] It was important to collect locks of hair in the 19th century and even before then. So that was just a curiosity that I had, even though usually, when you exhibit your work, sometimes we actually see that repetition, too. So yeah.

\[00:44:40.76\] Yeah, I don't know.

\[00:44:42.08\] OK.

\[00:44:42.47\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:44:44.12\] Or maybe it's not about the number. But if that's something that you encountered and observed and made you think about what your choices were for--

\[00:44:54.16\] Oh, absolutely.

\[00:44:54.82\] --photographing--

\[00:44:55.19\] Especially the Clarkson book, because I had encountered that early on, in a previous project called Seven Steps to Freedom in New Jersey, in Salem County, New Jersey. And the Goodwin sisters, who ran the Underground Railroad site in Salem and had numerous letters to other-- it's a well-documented site-- had in their collection a copy of the book that then went to the Historical Society there. And it was the first time I had encountered the actual book, an early edition of the actual book. And it just stuck in my mind.

\[00:45:32.79\] And then, as I began to work on this project, I encountered another one and then another one. And it just became important that I wanted to accumulate them. And so even though things aren't organized around place and time, there are those kinds of organizations, so the Clarkson books are together.

\[00:45:55.60\] And not all the hair, but a lot of the hair gets put in a similar place within the book. The silhouettes of Clarkson, which I think form an interesting relationship, the covers of the Zealy daguerreotypes, again, form another relationship to-- that we don't see the images of the people, for me, form a relationship with all the people that I do show.

\[00:46:25.28\] In mostly images of accomplishment within the Black community, someone is posing and is often dressed for the image, like, the Asbury Park picture. I think that's the one that you responded to is from Asbury Park, New Jersey.

\[00:46:40.98\] Yeah. I want to be mindful of the time and ensure that we have some time for our audience to ask questions. But I do want to ask one question of our panel about the politics of memory. And obviously, America250-- there are a number of major anniversaries coming up, for instance, for the National Museum, which NMAAHC, in DC, is coming up on its 10-year anniversary. The Schomburg Center is coming up on its, I think, 125th anniversary next year or in 2026.

\[00:47:23.52\] There's so much happening. This book comes at such a critical time, a critical cultural moment. And I'm just wondering, how do we reconcile what feels like this clarion call to remember-- this clarion call to even remember parts of our past that we cannot forget. How do we reconcile that memory work with the pushback to telling our stories honestly?

\[00:47:55.77\] I mean, I'm even thinking about the fact that so many institutions, including Harvard, is reckoning with its own history, such as its history of slavery. And so how do we reckon with, again, this clear clarion call for us to memorialize and to remember? And yet there's a clear resistance to that as well. And so just wondering, how do we navigate those parallels in this moment?

\[00:48:25.73\] Cheryl, do you want to start that one?

\[00:48:27.47\] Well, I think we begin by using the-- not using but enlisting and working with people like Wendel and Leigh.

\[00:48:38.42\] People like-- I'm sorry.

\[00:48:39.94\] Wendel.

\[00:48:40.78\] Oh, OK.

\[00:48:41.30\] Leigh, you, Brenda. No. But with artists and also thinking about what these flashpoints are in our history and also, from the archive in the past, how we can make this connection to the past and/or use different pieces of the historical narrative and the historical record, whether it's tangible or oral, passed down, sonic. But to be able to use these pieces to really understand the moment that we're in right now and to understand it in a way that it makes-- I'm going to play again with the word manifest, but makes manifest different possibilities.

\[00:49:32.47\] So it's really seizing upon a moment, seizing upon a historical time frame, or period, or work of art and really understanding its history but also, its relationship to the set of circumstances in which we find ourselves today, in such a way that it can really make a difference for future generations.

\[00:49:53.77\] I think using technology, whether it's technology that's being developed or even technology--

\[00:50:02.26\] I mean, one of the things I love about your work is, there's a way in which I feel like it's very much in sync with what we might think of when we think about the archives themselves. I can smell--

\[00:50:17.52\] When we got on the press comb, I was like, oh. The first time my grandmother took me to get my hair pressed, I remember, I got burnt. I can still smell it. I can smell it. So thinking about those kinds of things and what they might do to one on a sensorial level but also, how they can really connect with communities to enable them to understand themselves, to understand their histories-- because I think there are commonalities within many of the objects that you have selected.

\[00:50:55.53\] And I love the way that some of them-- as I said earlier, you present them to us in such a way that it's like, OK, that's familiar, but I'm not really sure if that's familiar, but I'm used to seeing it a different way. It's a different riff. It's a different take. And it makes us really think more deeply about what your intention is but also, what the meaning of the work is.

\[00:51:23.78\] And that whole aspect of evidence. We are preserving the evidence of our existence.

\[00:51:31.91\] I love the repatriation movement now, where someone knew that these objects were important, and they removed them to put them in museums, to preserve. And then, now, families and other people around the country are saying, we want our pieces back, our memory back. We want this memory to be a part of our memory, not a collective, institutional memory, but an institutional memory based on the community in Tulsa, the community in Philadelphia.

\[00:52:16.30\] But the whole evidence of what happened when they were building the State Office Building or the Federal Building in--

\[00:52:26.10\] New York.

\[00:52:26.43\] --New York with the burial ground, and many of us didn't know it existed and didn't know that the community in Lower Manhattan was strictly a Black community, specifically with Abyssinian Baptist Church, as well as the Negro theater down there.

\[00:52:50.92\] And so all of this is right on NYU's campus. So there's constant stories. The re-remembering is so important for us to imagine. And there are so many lost students because they don't believe that we existed outside of stoop labor or slavery, without the struggle.

\[00:53:15.31\] But there is some beautiful history. And I think this is the evidence that I experienced in looking at this work.

\[00:53:22.65\] That's beautiful. Leigh, did you want to add something?

\[00:53:25.26\] Yeah. Actually, I want to go back to the question you asked about what's missing from the archive. And I think one of the things that's missing from the archive is us, our power to animate, to see. I mean, there's so much richness in many of these collections, and there are things that we will never be able to know. We will never know the full stories of these objects, of the spoon, of what was eaten, all of these things.

\[00:54:05.36\] But what I find so generative about the archive, broadly, and about Wendel's work, is that it is about the spark of being able to imagine different kinds of stories, imagine different kinds of possibilities, seeing things differently than the way that we've been taught or disciplined to see it, even our histories that get enfolded into a consensus memory in a way that we're like, wait, that's not exactly what I was hoping my history, that story would tell, the moral-- the lesson of that.

\[00:54:45.86\] But I think that in our various unfolding crises, there are answers or possibilities in the archive and in these stories that get animated when we engage them and we engage them differently.

\[00:55:03.62\] And again, just to go back to my first comment, I think Wendel is giving us a visual language to imagine potential histories and different possibilities.

\[00:55:16.84\] Wonderful.

\[00:55:17.50\] Great. Thank you.

\[00:55:18.97\] That was beautiful. Thank you. Well, I want to be respectful of everyone's time and extend my deepest, deepest gratitude to our panel for an amazing conversation and for your beautiful contribution to this book. And, of course, Wendel, thank you for offering--

\[00:55:36.55\] Thank you.

\[00:55:36.91\] --Manifest-- 13 Colonies to the world and allowing us to sit at your feet today to learn more about your technique, about your approach and practice, and most of all, about exploring the archival imaginary through this beautiful volume. Thank you so much.

\[00:55:55.00\] Thank you.

\[00:55:55.36\] And I'd like to just personally say thank you to Lisa. And I really want to say thank you for hearing and opening up the door for Wendel to have this opportunity. Thank you.

\[00:56:11.04\] Absolutely. Thank you, everyone.

\[00:56:13.00\] Thank you very much.

\[00:56:13.62\] \[APPLAUSE\]



 



 

 See also:- [ North America ](/region/north-america)
- [ Public Lectures ](/video-type/public-lectures)
- [ History ](/video-type/history)