Andrea Barnwell and Art Institute and African American Art Collection

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Muholi: Risk and Reward at the Cummer Museum

Recently, I left the Spelman Higher Museum of Fine Art—where I had been the director for nearly twenty years—to have the position of manager and CEO of the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens. The Cummer Museum, which was established nearly sixty years ago in Jacksonville, Florida, is one of the cultural gems of the urban center.¹ On my starting time solar day in the office, in January 2021, I learned that the exhibition the museum planned to present in March 2021 had to be postponed. The national tour was delayed due to the global pandemic. Like many institutions effectually the country, the Cummer Museum was charged with the chore of being nimble.

Endless people I met during my earliest days in Jacksonville shared their love of the Cummer's historic gardens. Many others mentioned that their children participated in the Cummer Museum camps, classes, and summer programs. Yet, like many museums in this land, the Cummer Museum was historically perceived as an institution that was but for affluent donors. For this reason, it did not surprise me when some people—primarily Black and Brown people—explained that they take either non customarily visited or never visited the Museum. Over time—just especially in the last several years, due to strategic and concerted efforts to aggrandize its attain—the Museum has become a more welcoming identify.

The opening in the Cummer Museum's exhibition schedule due to the counterfoil of the touring exhibition presented several noteworthy opportunities: serve new residents flocking to Jacksonville during the pandemic; aggrandize museum offerings by adding an exhibition featuring piece of work by an internationally renowned contemporary artist from Africa or the African Diaspora; and further ongoing efforts to expand the museum's achieve and welcome new audiences. This shift in the schedule supported one of my board-approved objectives, which was to pb efforts to go along to contrary historic perceptions.²

I shared the Museum's unexpected exhibition circumstance with Renée Mussai, the senior curator/head of curatorial & collections at Autograph London and a valued and trusted colleague. I asked if she would consider allowing the Cummer Museum to nowadays Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, the powerful exhibition she curated in 2017, which garnered critical and popular acclaim.ⁱⁱⁱ Autograph enthusiastically said yep, and Muholi quickly agreed. The Cummer Museum would be the final venue for this international traveling exhibition.

Zanele Muholi (Due south African, b. 1972) is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their piece of work has been exhibited all over the world. Since the early 2000s, they have documented and historic the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer, and intersex communities. In 2012, Muholi turned the camera on themself and launched the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama, which translates to "Hail the Dark Lioness" from isiZulu, one of the official languages of South Africa. Muholi playfully employs the conventions of classical painting, fashion photography, and the familiar tropes of ethnographic imagery to explore contemporary identity politics. Each blackness-and-white self-portrait asks critical questions about social (in)justice, human rights, and contested representations of the Black body (figs. 1 and two).

Fig. 1. Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama Two, Oslo, 2015. Courtesy Stevenson, Greatcoat Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

Fig. 2. Zanele Muholi, Ntozakhe II, Parktown, 2015. Courtesy Stevenson, Greatcoat Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

I am grateful for the invitation from Jacqueline Francis, PhD, to contribute to this Colloquium and reflect on the affect of this exhibition for ii reasons. Commencement, the resounding yes from Mussai and Muholi allowed the museum to dilate and accelerate its growing focus on equity. I am privileged to acknowledge that the lath of trustees offered its total support. Staff members in every department galvanized resources and shifted gears without missing a trounce in order to realize this project. Mussai and Bindi Vora, the curatorial project manager at Shorthand, were fully engaged despite over-committed schedules.

Second, it allows me to reflect on several overlapping questions, which informed my thinking at that time: knowing that Somnyama Ngonyama differs significantly from other exhibitions in the Cummer Museum'southward history, how would Jacksonville audiences, which take historically been conservative, respond to this work? What would be the best ways to encourage audiences to consider the critical topics that Muholi examines in their piece of work, including hate crimes, equity, homophobia, transphobia, and the deep-seated injustices that have historically been enacted against the Blackness trunk, to name a few. In the spirit of being fully transparent, I must too admit that I questioned what long-term touch on, if any, presenting the work of a queer nonbinary visual activist who identifies with they/them pronouns would have on me—an African American adult female museum professional who had just arrived in Jacksonville. Finally, how would the Museum's core audience and supporters perceive and receive me if Somnyama Ngonyama—which is a significant departure from previous exhibitions—was the first exhibition of my tenure?

Muholi has been illuminating global inequities for decades. Their probing and captivating self-portraits provide a meaningful context to consider and discuss historical inequities, which have come into greater focus in lite of vehement crimes confronting Black people and the civil unrest that ensued. The photographs bring these harsh realities to the foreground through the lone subject within the frame and the stark dissimilarity between Muholi'due south skin, which they darken in post-product, and the vivid whites that they deliberately create. Past incorporating an array of household props, such every bit latex gloves, washing machine hoses, safety pins, and scouring pads, and deliberately omitting context, Muholi requires viewers to decipher the images, read objects, and probe deeply in order to notice meaning.

Fig. 3. Installation photo of Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Night Lioness, an internationally touring exhibition organized by Autograph, London and curated by Renée Mussai. Cummer Museum of Fine art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, April 14–June twenty, 2021

Somnyama Ngonyama has resonated with the Cummer Museum'south audiences in tangible ways (fig. 3). Moreover, it has provided a stunning vehicle through which to open up meaningful and difficult conversations, in many instances with visitors who wouldn't otherwise notice reasons to talk to i some other. The conversations that visitors have had with the visitor experience staff and docents alike are powerful and gripping. The programs—specially the Talk Backs, which are led past customs leaders—take fueled commutation and been the source of deep understanding. I have witnessed people become overwhelmed as they enter the exhibition and flare-up into tears. The interactive station, which invites visitors to answer open up-ended questions, has get a hub of exchange and respect (figs. 4 and v).

Fig. 4. Interactive station in Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, an internationally touring exhibition organized past Autograph, London and curated by Renée Mussai. Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, April xiv–June 20, 2021

Fig. 5. Interactive station in Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens

Despite my initial hesitations about presenting Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness at the Cummer Museum, past and large, responses signaled that viewers were upward to the challenges that this work demands and were willing to grow and stretch. Although Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is a declaration and a call to activeness, each and every self-portrait requires Muholi to be vulnerable. By presenting this exhibition, the museum also took a risk and asked audiences to trust the process and reciprocate. Visitors responded with a resounding yes and were willing to exist vulnerable in render. I am certain that the opportunity to present this exhibition was non mere happenstance. It has underscored that the rewards exceeded the risks past leaps and bounds.

Cite this article: Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, "Muholi: Take a chance and Reward at the Cummer Museum," in "American Art Art History in the Time of Crises" Colloquium, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Fine art seven, no. 1 (Jump 2021), https://doi.org/ten.24926/24716839.11934.

PDF: Brownlee, Muholi Chance and Reward

Notes

Well-nigh the Author(s): Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, PhD, is the George Due west. and Kathleen I. Gibbs Managing director and CEO of the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens

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Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/in-the-time-of-crises/muholi-risk-and-reward/

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