Absence is a kind of presence, as any lover of ghost tales knows. Unnamed Figures at the American Folk Art Museum applies that principle to art history, scouring more than 100 years’ worth of works for hints, allusions and anonymous Black figures so minuscule they almost disappear. It’s a massive and important task, since people who were all but invisible in their own time later faded even further into oblivion — even as they continue to haunt us.
With the eye of connoisseurs, the tenacity of detectives and the research skills of historians, the exhibition’s curators Emelie Gevalt, RL Watson and Sadé Ayorinde ask who those missing people might have been. They’ve hunted in provincial museums, libraries and historical societies for images containing Black subjects, some of them so small they must be examined with a loupe.
Since the history of Southern slavery has drawn the lion’s share of scrutiny, the curators focused on the North, trawling through census documents, first-person accounts and other archival sources to fill in the threadbare record, detail by seemingly unrelated detail.
Look closely, for instance, at how Rufus Hathaway, an itinerant artist passing through Duxbury, Massachusetts in the mid-1790s, painted the home of the cod-and-mackerel magnate Joshua Winsor. A large black dog warms the doorstep. A hunter shoots at geese as they zip across the sky. Fishing boats flying the American flag bobble in the bay. And over by the front yard fence, the tiny figure of a Black woman trudges away from the viewer, carrying a jug in each hand.
When that painting, which belongs to the Folk Art Museum’s permanent collection, was on view from 2014 to 2017, the accompanying description mentioned the dog and the duck shooter but omitted any reference to the woman. Now, after a decade of cultural and ideological change, she looms in the conversation, standing out as a mark of all we once ignored.
Unfortunately, trying to find out who she was leads down a dead-end trail of crumbs. Census records tell us that one free person of colour lived in the Windsor household in 1790 but provide no details. Slavery had receded in Massachusetts, yet Black servants continued labouring for wealthy white families as household members who were paid and then forgotten. They gained their freedom and lost their identities.
Deduction and speculation have helped fill in some blanks. Take the several renderings that Francis Guy painted of the Gough family’s idyllic Baltimore plantation, Perry Hall, in the mid-1790s. The scene — a house astride rolling pastures, fat cows, good dogs, a white gentleman on a white horse with white children in tow — extols the Goughs’ taste, power and prosperity. In the catalogue, Gevalt notes that the identity of every one of the paintings’ subjects, human and beast, is known — all, that is, except that of the Black groom bringing up the rear of Mr Gough’s retinue.
In another version of the same landscape, a Black nursemaid holds a (white) child’s hand. The maid, so miniaturised that she barely registers, is nameless. Yet, Gevalt writes, “to contemporary eyes, she may be the painting’s most striking feature.” The mere act of noticing her divides the oblivious past from the more conscious present and signals that “all is not peaceful in this ‘peaceful’ scene.” In the museum’s presentation, she has stepped towards centre stage, standing in for all the people whose skin colour ensured they were erased, elided and ignored.
Determined to resurrect this anonymous micro-figure, Gevalt and her colleagues burrowed through paperwork and surfaced with a likely but not definite name: Sib Hall. Facts about her are scant. She was born into slavery in 1788, lived on the plantation, probably served as a nanny, and had two daughters, one of whom, Esther, was emancipated but continued to work for the family as a paid employee.
Suddenly, that little smudge on a canvas has blossomed into a multigenerational family saga. Sib’s granddaughter Sidney Hall Davage moved into the city of Baltimore, raised five children there and, in the early 1890s, sat for a photo portrait that shows her with straight white hair, high cheekbones, and a noble gaze.
Photographs of Davage’s grandchildren (Sib Hall’s great-great-grandchildren) chart the family’s continued upward trajectory. Harry Sythe Cummings, an attorney and Baltimore’s first Black city councilman, appears like a monument in fine wool clothing culminating in a moustache and a self-satisfied smile. His sister Ida R Cummings wears the eyeglasses, pearls and severe hair-do appropriate for the city’s first Black kindergarten teacher. It would be hard to imagine a clearer visual representation of American history than the studio portraits of these giants of the community descended from specks on a slave owner’s estate.
One corner of Unnamed Figures spotlights several Black women who sewed themselves into posterity, embroidering samplers of great beauty and virtuosity. Around 1826, a Connecticut teenager named Sarah Ann Major Harris embroidered her family history in silk thread on a square of linen, creating the only surviving genealogical sampler by a Black girl. In it, we meet her West Indian father and mother of mixed African and Mohegan ancestry. It was a radical gesture for Harris to record her lineage, as if she sprang from an aristocratic clan. Her later choices were even more subversive.
In 1832, she enrolled in Prudence Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Misses in Canterbury, Connecticut. The backlash was brutal and swift. White parents yanked their daughters from the school; Crandall was arrested, tried and convicted; a mob forced the school to shut down, and the legislature passed the infamous “Black Law”, which aimed to keep out-of-state Black students from coming into Connecticut. Eventually, the law was repealed and Crandall’s conviction thrown out. Harris (later Fayerweather) became an active abolitionist and lived to witness the cause’s apotheosis.
Few of those battles and little of the bitterness is evident in the works on display in Unnamed Figures, most of which are deceptively placid. The art speaks anyway, simply by virtue of being there. The show closes with more than 50 photos of Black sitters, commercial studio portraits that smooth over differences in social status, which was part of the medium’s revolutionary point.
“The humbled servant girl . . . may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and court royalty,” Frederick Douglass wrote in 1861. This show ends as it should: with a stirring parade of dark faces staring into a new era when they would not only be seen, but also decide how.
To March 24, folkartmuseum.org
