Willie Cole (American, b. 1955), Stowage, 1997, Woodcut on paper, Alexander and Bonin Publishing, Inc., New York (Printer: Derrière L'Étolie Studios, New York), Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund, M.2006.19, Photograph D. James Dee, New York, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. |
Images of Slave Ships that Have Resonated through History |
Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976), Absolut Power (from the series Branded), 2003, photograph, Duratrans, Plexiglas, light box, Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund, M.2007.5. |
Williams College Unchained Legacies, features two of Williams College Museum of Art’s (WCMA) new contemporary art acquisitions — Stowage (1997) by Willie Cole and Absolut Power (2003) by Hank Willis Thomas — as well as a selection of historical documents related to the Middle Passage from the Chapin Library of rare books at Williams College. Hank Willis Thomas's Absolut Power mines the language of advertising to talk about race, class, and history. Absolut Power employs the popular advertising campaign to remind viewers of economic implications of the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, artist Willie Cole uses the imagery of brands and branding, taking domestic irons and literally scorching the paper on which he worked, leaving behind different patterns that are a double entendre for the branding of animals and slaves. These two contemporary works will be displayed alongside Thomas Jefferson's copy of Thomas Clarkson's The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade, by the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1808), which contains the famous Brookes slave ship diagram that Thomas and Cole visually reference: evidence of the organization of human cargo during transport from Africa, or what has become known as the “Middle Passage.” The exhibition, a collaboration with Chapin Library, provides a historical context for the contemporary use of this much-reproduced image. "Middle Passage" refers to the forced transportation of Africans to the New World from the 15th to the 19th century. It was the middle leg of the triangular trade, where ships from Europe sold or traded their goods for prisoners on the African coast and then sailed to the Americas and the Caribbean, where African people were sold or traded for goods bound for European markets. This exhibition was organized by Vivian Patterson, Curator of Collections, with Leslie Wingard, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at Williams College. Special thanks to Robert L. Volz, Custodian of the Chapin Library, Wayne G. Hammond, Assistant Chapin Librarian, Caton C. Lee, Williams Class of 2009, Jennifer C. Bees, Class of 2008, and Caitlin Higgins, Class of 2008, who helped in organizing this exhibition. |
Map from Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the, Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliment (London, 1808), Newberry Library General Collection. Clarkson (1760-1846) borrowed cartographic imagery to answer this question, offering readers a history of the antislavery movement in a single view. Published to celebrate the legal end of the British and United States external slave trades in 1807, Clarkson’s diagram represents abolitionism as an international movement of writers and groups, a “swelling torrent” of interconnected rivers whose currents could be mapped but not reversed. |
