For the past 10 years or so, the phrase “representation matters” has taken on a life of its own in American cultural criticism. It’s used to explain everything from the significance of Barack Obama’s presidency to the importance of selling Barbie dolls who use mobility aids. But what does representation actually mean? Does it mean only one thing? These questions are at the heart of a new yearlong exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opens March 10.
Organized around a single object—the marble bust Why Born Enslaved! (1868) by French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux—“Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast” is the first exhibition at the Met to examine Western sculpture in relation to the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and empires. More than 35 works drawn from the Met’s holdings and collections in Europe and the United States will offer an in-depth look at portrayals of Black enslavement, emancipation, and personhood, challenging the notion that representation in the wake of abolition constituted a clear moral or political stance. The Carpeaux bust itself has also had an afterlife in pop culture and design–most notably in a 2020 Adidas campaign for Beyonce’s Ivy Park–further complicating what representation means today. Here, Harper’s Bazaar speaks with the exhibit’s cocurator, the cultural critic and writer Wendy S. Walters.
Can you talk a little bit about Why Born Enslaved!, the bust at the center of the exhibit?
The bust was made by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and he was one of the most gifted and visionary sculptors of his time. The original was created in 1868, and then this version [in the exhibition] was created in 1873. And it’s an interesting piece because it was a sculpture that he had designed for another thing.
He was making a sculpture for the Fountain Observatory in the Marco Polo Garden in Paris. And the fountain represented the kind of theme of French imperialism embracing the world. It was this idealistic sculpture of what they called the “Four Parts of the World,” which was an iconography that had been used pretty widely for a couple of centuries actually, representing the four continents [with continents used loosely in that context]: Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Each figure in this fountain sculpture was holding up a part of the globe. And so, the woman who modeled for the bust and the fountain are the same person in the representation of Africa.
Were you able to discover anything about the woman who modeled for this piece?
We haven’t been able to verify this for sure, but what we can say is she might have been a woman named Louise Kuling. She was a free woman from Virginia who came to Paris by 1864. That’s the year when her photograph was taken for an ethnographic portrait series by Jacques-Philippe Potteau.
It’s part of the challenge with this work—that while in one sense Carpeaux was such a master sculptor that the sculpture itself has a very strong sense of presence, we can’t say who that presence was.
One of the things that Elyse Nelson, the cocurator and my partner in this exhibition, and I have been talking about is that it’s clear the model had a really strong impact on Carpeaux. The exhibition has various works in which Carpeaux is developing this sculpture, from sketches to little clay models to figures of her body. What is not entirely clear is whether or not he was trying to represent her.
What do you mean by that?
One of the arguments that the show puts forward is that these are not portraits of people; these are in some ways types of people. And so, this bust figure that is the central piece of the show, which goes under the name Why Born Enslaved!, is a representation of a Black woman who is enslaved.
What’s surprising about this is that this piece was completed at a time when slavery had already been abolished in the U.K., France, and the United States. So one of the central tensions around this work is why [this Black woman] was represented as an enslaved person, as opposed to a person who was not enslaved.
This piece has had a second life in the last few decades, where people have adopted it as an example of Black beauty, as sort of a rallying point, despite the fact that it was originally created to celebrate French imperialism, a force that was hugely destructive for people of African descent who came into contact with it. But now, this bust has popped up in pop culture. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that tension between the desire to read positive representation in this piece versus what it actually was created to symbolize. How do people reconcile those tensions or not?
That is the great contradiction about the piece. It is such an exquisite piece of work that it has its own commanding presence. One of the goals of the show is to look at this intersection of aesthetic influences and political influences, and we’re looking at them kind of simultaneously, because they’re overlapping.
When Carpeaux created this work in the 1860s, he knew that people in France were so excited about abolition and felt that because France had moved more swiftly than the Americas on abolition, that abolition was actually part of French nationalism. So he’s creating it in his studio as a work of fine art, but he also knows that this has marketable value. He created the sculpture with reproduction in mind from the very beginning.
The legacy of the work has always been multiples. It’s ubiquitous in some ways because of that, because of all those different versions of it. There’s even a French candle company today that includes it as one of its historical French figures. And so, there’s lots of mythologies that run around the sculpture because of the multiple sites in which it can be seated.
One of the spaces we mention is Beyoncé’s Ivy Park campaign for Adidas, and there’s one little short of her standing on a plinth, and Why Born Enslaved! is right next to her. And then, there’s a picture of a Nubian queen. And Beyoncé is standing in between the two of them.
Adidas X Ivy Park
Architectural Digest had a version of one of the models, in terra-cotta, in Janet Jackson’s home in 1998. And when I walk through Harlem, I have seen it in a few windows; people have it in their homes.
So I think that this is kind of the challenge with representation. Representation is fixed, but people aren’t. And representation represents that kind of intersection of the artist’s point of view and understanding of where something is in a given moment of time, but the representation lives on, on its own time. It splits from the original once it’s made, and it has its own timeline, which can get complicated.
There is this tendency for empires for the past, maybe, 100 years or so to use either images of Black people or Black cultural productions to further the idea of empire. One of the ways that these liberal empires are able to replicate and dominate is that, in the representation, they allow space for something like Black cultural production or a Black image. It’s what’s going on when American cultural critics say, “Jazz is American classical music.” It’s not from a particular place or peoples, it’s for all of “us.” Or, now, “Hip-hop is America’s cultural music or America’s cultural dominance.” It’s not coming from this particular community. It’s for everybody, and it’s for all of us, and it represents America writ large. That decision to use the representations of a marginalized people within a nation state to represent the nation’s height of power is so fascinating to me.
Included in the exhibition is this mask by Kara Walker. Kara Walker is obviously an artist who’s very interested and invested in representation. She made an impression of the face of one of the versions of Why Born Enslaved! The piece is essentially the inversion of the Carpeaux bust.
That frames the scope of the exhibition. What’s interesting about the Kara Walker piece is that it really provokes a kind of question: “How do we understand the figure who is being represented in Carpeaux’s work?” There’s an interiority that’s not represented in the bust.
Walker’s efforts to replicate that interiority or to make space for it are also hollow in some ways; it’s a haunting. It’s kind of an effigy of a piece, and one of the challenges of that is how do we reckon with these stories where we don’t have the information to fill in? We just don’t; the information doesn’t exist.
One of the challenges of Why Born Enslaved! is that it has been read as “Oh, Carpeaux was really inclusive. He was being generous in his inclusion of the figure.” But when you look at the work, it’s clear that he was very moved by the subject, but his expression or his representation is not as morally clear.
The Met is really trying to engage with a piece that doesn’t have a completely clear narrative and be open to decipher that and the challenges that come with that.
Were there any pieces that surprised you while putting together this exhibition?
The Edmonia Lewis piece, Forever Free, which is on loan from Howard University, was really a pretty spectacular find. Edmonia Lewis is now on a postage stamp, and a lot of people are talking about her, but seeing this sculpture for me was one of the first times I saw her work in person.
The piece is a man and a woman, both kind of looking like they have come out of something. She’s on her knees praying, and he has his arms raised with a broken shackle at the wrist. There are a few things that are pretty spectacular about that work. It’s just a really beautiful piece, and most people don’t know that Edmonia Lewis did most of her carving in front of an audience.
She carved this piece in front of an audience because there was a lot of doubt as to whether or not she was actually doing her own work. So she did not hire other artists to do her work in the studio like Carpeaux did or many of the other sculptors did during that time. Lewis was producing works entirely on her own. That is one of the reasons why people have talked about her work not being as refined as other sculptors who were doing work at that time.
Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free and Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! … they’re very different takes on what freedom looks like. For the Lewis piece, it’s often been written about as though it shows a married couple or a father and his daughter. One of the things that we’ve tried to do is to challenge some of our presumptions. So we are looking at them as a male and female figure but looking with the possibility of it being a different kind of familial connection. Maybe not biologically familial, but chosen family. There’s a split, perhaps, between the experience of a recently freed Black man and a recently freed Black woman. It’s a pretty pretty incredible piece to see in the context with the Carpeaux.
One of the things we are really exploring is “What is representation?” That’s a big part of what we’re trying to ask people to think about—not just that representation exists, but what is it? And what role do we each play in understanding it? It’s a participatory thing, representing, and it’s not just the artist who creates the representation.
For me, as a writer, I’m really invested in that murky place [where] the fact that something exists doesn’t necessarily dictate how it is valued.
We are at a moment where for many people, representation in and of itself seems like a goal or some sort of power. That sentence that gets repeated over and over again, “Representation is important,” has now sort of become “Representation will equal a certain type of power that will translate into the material world,” which we know, when you think about it for five minutes, is not the case. But it’s very seductive to think so.
Elyse Nelson, who’s been my cocurator, her work for the exhibition catalog really focuses on a kind of capitalism and the way these objects play into capitalistic narratives. And so, it’s not just “Representation creates power,” right?
Possession of objects, possession of goods, possession of fine arts—those displays represent power. So it’s all very tangled up, and I don’t think the show aims to solve some of the dilemmas that come up from that.
But what it does try to do is to make plain some of the ways the history of capital, the history of money and power, are tied to these representations of people for the sake of … I don’t know. I’m stumbling here because I’m thinking there’s a change. When people can no longer be possessed, suddenly the images of people start being possessed, right?
The exhibition is in that really interesting space where the objects have a life. The objects are an embodiment in some ways between the actual life of the person and their interpretation.
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