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Howard Dodson - Making Art at the Schomburg: Africana Archives as Sites of Art Making Southern Spaces

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00:12:22
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southernspaces
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English
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Howard Dodson, former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and current director of Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, delivers the keynote address at the 2014 Callaloo Conference held at Emory University.http://southernspaces.org/2015/africana-archives-making-art-schomburg


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Now I, as an inheritor of both the Schomburg Center
and to some extent now, the Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center, have come to understand something
that I think is very important for the public
to have a different set of sensibilities about.
One of the tendencies is to think
that the archives are the printed materials, the books,
and that kind of thing.
For me, the archive, those things
are simply the containers, the resources that preserve
what is the real archive.
Which are the memories, the knowledge, the behaviors,
the actions of people of African descent.
Said another way, these archives are not
just places where you preserve books or manuscript materials.
These archives are in fact places of sacred memory,
places where ancestors from centuries ago managed
to leave some record of their presence in this land
and in this world with the hope, I
suspect, that some of us coming along after them
would have the benefit of their insight,
their knowledge, their perspectives on life and being.
And so, when I think about these archival institutions, yes,
preserving the physical record, the physical object
is of the utmost importance.
But we preserve that record, and we do it that as a sacred duty,
because we're doing it for those generations and generations
of ancestors who are not here personally to speak
for themselves but who have left whatever record they could
about the experience so that we can connect with them
and come to understand them in a different kind of way.
Now, I say that because this kind of
feeds directly into of the second major point that I want
to make in this presentation.
And that is that those of us who would
tell the stories about our past, those of us who
would write literature about our past, those of us who
would write music and dance and theater dealing with subjects
that come out of that past, have an obligation, in my judgment,
to have a relationship with that past that has been left there.
And I will go so far, and I'll probably reiterate
this a little bit later, our creative folk,
our artists would serve themselves well if they started
to look for an archival partner that's
going to be an African archival partner that's
going to be available to them to both discover stories
worthy of telling, but also to authenticate and give
authentic voice to the life and experiences of those people
who left us those records.
Now, I haven't said that I want to spend a little bit of time
just talking about some of the ways in which the Schomburg
Center as an institution was itself engaged in art-making.
Again, the tendency is to think about these archives
as repositories of historical records.
And all too frequently, the tendency
is to think about Africana archives
in these kind of institutions as passive entities,
places where you collect stuff and put it on shelves,
and people come by every once in a drive
by every once in a while and ask for something and you go in,
you check it out, you read it, and you go off on your way.
That, in a very real sense, was not the tradition
that Mr. Schomburg left us.
The tradition he left us was that,
yes, we gathered the material, but we
have an obligation as an institution
to go out and either bring people in or take material out
to them so that they can have a deeper level of understanding
of who they are, where they've come from,
and what has been their achievements over the course
of their history and heritage.
And so in that tradition, the Schomburg
Center as an institution has been actively involved
in both supporting artists and itself practicing
the art of art-making.
And I will just say a few examples of that
and I need to move on, because this is a little longer than I
thought it might be.
My first formal relationship with the Schomburg Center
actually occurred before I was hired
as its director and chief.
Almost the year earlier, I was contacted by the New York
Public Library to help the Schomburg Center staff create
an exhibit to complement the library's NEH-funded major
exhibition on the theme “Censorship in America.” I took
the job, quite frankly, because I had submitted an application,
and I don't know whether this was part of the test process
or what.
And so, I took the job and eventually worked with
Schomburg Center staff to create the exhibit,
and it was based on the holdings off the Schomburg Collection,
and we entitled it “Censorship in Black America.” But this
exhibit was not a blackface echo of the major theme of the New
York Public Library’s “Censorship in America” show,
which focused on book publishing and censorship of the printed word.
Rather, “Censorship in Black America” explored
the historically documentable thesis that black people
themselves, in all aspects of their presence and being
in America, were a censored people.
Through laws and text and images and publications,
the exhibition documented this fact for broad public audience.
Artistically, though, this was, in fact, my first exhibit,
I took a significant aesthetic risk,
and remember I hadn't been hired.
Against the advice of the Schomburg staff and others,
I painted the gallery walls black.
Images and documents were framed in blonde oak wood
with red and white double mats.
The text panels and captions were
printed in white on black mat backgrounds.
And aesthetically and intellectually, the images,
many of them blown up, were-, basically you came
into an experience of black people experiencing censorship.
Over the years, I came to look at the collections
at the Schomburg Center as resources
is for creating these kinds of, if you will,
artistic productions.
Sometimes they were in the form of the exhibits,
but other times we were doing radio and television
programs and documentary films and other kinds
of things of that nature.
And so, from an institutional stance,
we looked at the collection not simply
as a place where scholars come and do
their new history writing, but as a place where
people, including ourselves, could come and find
both interesting, compelling stories to tell,
and the resources with which to tell
them authentically and authoritatively.
So we took advantage of this.
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01-08-2025 00:00 - 01-08-2025 23:59