A Deep Dive Into Camp Within Slave Societies
This
year’s hallmark exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute Camp: Notes
on Fashion focuses on the work of high-end American and European
designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, excluding in large part the
tongue-in-cheek self-fashioning of people of African descent. Yet,
examples of black folks relying on campy public personas as forms of
resistance and self-preservation abound. In fact, enslaved
peoples and their descendants were some of the most persistent
purveyors of what would become known as “camp.” In their exclusion from
mainstream white society, they appropriated the trappings of the
dominant class, subverted their meaning, and ultimately stripped them of
their power. I created this mood board to suggest ways of broadening
the scope of Camp and diversifying its content. The mood board
includes the work of artists Kara Walker and Yinka Shonibare, archival
images of holidays, like Negro Election Day, Pinkster, and Mardi Gras,
the poster from Spike Lee’s dark comedy Bamboozled, among other
references.
In his memoir, we learn that freeman Solomon Northrup was subjected to duplicity in upstate New York, kidnapping in Washington D.C., and 12 years of enslavement in Louisiana, much of which is told through the lens of dress. He, for example, describes male slaves’ costumes for the auction block as such: “We were…furnished with a new suit each, cheap, but clean. The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants and shoes; the women frocks of calico, and handkerchiefs to bind about their heads.” It was not unusual for enslaved people to be decked out in fancy dress for the slave market. Costuming was an essential part of the theater of the slave market. However, Northrup is depicted in workaday plantation attire in this engraving from the first edition of “12 Years a Slave.”
Fred Wilson’s “Grey Area (Brown Version)” reinterprets one of the most enduring symbols of beauty in Western world: the 1345 B.C. bust of Nefertiti by the sculptor Thutmose. Wilson took five reproductions of the bust and painted them in colors ranging from fair to deeply melanated. The grey area, or what is ill-defined, is the racial identity of ancient Egyptians. U.S. blacks have long looked to Ancient Egypt to refute racist pseudoscientists’ claims that people of African descent were inherently inferior and to prove that African peoples made a significant contribution to Western civilization. “Grey Area (Brown Version), thus, confronts the contested racial politics of African American’s relationship with Ancient Egypt.
Augusta Savage is one of the most important artists of the Harlem Renaissance, but is not well known today (despite her recent retrospective at the New-York Historical Society). In the great tradition of black female sculptors like Edmonia Lewis, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Catlett, and Simone Leigh, Savage’s creative practice addressed past and present questions of racial and gender inequities. Here she was photographed with her 1938 sculpture Realization, created as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. The piece presents an enslaved woman and man in a moment of abject privation. Savage reversed Western gender conventions by sculpting the female figure on a higher plane with her head turned away from her weaker male companion.
This 1783 painting by Vicente Albán highlights disparities in dress between an enslaved woman and her wealthy criollo (a person of unmixed Spanish descent born in the New World) owner in colonial Ecuador. The enslaved woman is more modestly, if still lavishly, bedecked, yet is depicted barefoot—an almost universal sign of enslaved status. The owner wears exquisite textiles, a string of pearls, gold crucifix, oval reliquary, and an assortment of other lavish jewelry. Scientific analysis has shown that the black flowers on the noblewoman’s skirt were originally painted with silver. Mineral wealth, like an enslaved person, was a symbol of privilege and one of the trappings of elite status in the silver-rich Andes.
Sculptor Daniel Lind Ramos hails from Loíza, arguably the capital of Afro-Puerto Rican identity given its large black population. Much of Lind Ramos’s work tackles the racial and economic disparities resulting from Spanish colonization, American imperialism, and slavery. For example, “María-María” explores Puerto Rican’s fraught relationship with the name María. María is a reference to the Virgin Mary, protector of all Catholics and intercessor to God. It is also the name of a hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, killing over 3,000 American citizens. María is traditionally depicted in a blue robe; Lind Ramos drapes his Marian figure in a blue FEMA tarp scavenged from his community. The head and base of the figure are made with coconuts, which are the fruits of non-native species introduced by Spanish conquistadors. You can see “María-María” at the Whitney Biennial until September 22.
This 1900 photograph by Albert Brichaut depicts four prostitutes languorously lounging in a Parisian brothel. The three women to the right, who appear to be white, were salaciously dressed in loose white nightgowns that match their fair complexions. The fourth, a dark-skinned woman of African descent, stands out from the others for more reasons than the color of her skin. She was styled in what appears to be a colored and corseted satin gown. She is also the only woman who stares the photographer directly into his eyes and meets the gaze of viewer.
This painting by Georg Emanuel Opitz from the early nineteenth century depicts pedestrians in front of the Palais-Royal in Paris. A well-dressed black servant accompanies her white mistress (who is meant to be the focal point of the composition) along with a diverse cross-section of Parisian high society. The perception of Paris as a white bastion of Western civilization belies the city’s longstanding black presence, which dates from the beginning of France’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As this image illustrates, Paris – as well as Bordeaux, Nantes, and other French port cities – historically had (and currently have) substantial black populations.
As I researched in preparation for my trip to Cartagena, I revisited the work of Colombian photographer Ruby Rumié who documented elderly “palenqueras” (itinerant street vendors who are typically of African descent) in her Tejiendo Calle series. Rumié shot them in white gowns, which is traditionally how they dressed before they started wearing multicolored costumes to attract tourists’ photographs in recent years. Her first subject Dominga Torres Tehran (pictured below) was 84 when this photo was taken in 2016. For most of her adult life, Tehran walked the streets of Cartagena, selling the catch of her fisherman husband until she was hit by a bus and disabled in her 70s. Though her dignified and regal bearing is foregrounded in this image, the subtext is that Tehran and other women of race, age, and profession are often marginalized and neglected in Colombian society.
This piece titled “Tignon for Ayda Weddo (or that which a center can not hold” by Firelei Baez
references three loci of Afro-Diasporic sartorial exuberance: southern
Louisiana, Haiti, and Brazil. Tignons were headwraps worn by free and
enslaved women of color in southern Louisiana. Ayda Weddo is a Voodoo
deity of fertility, rainbows, wind, water, fire, and snakes. The piece
also includes an image of a figa, an Afro-Brazilian amulet shaped like a
hand with the thumb between the middle
and index finger. Figas are used to ward off bad energy. As an act of
reclamation, the entire image was painted over the blueprint of an
American sugar refinery, a reminder of the labor-intensive process of
sugar cultivation to which enslaved Africans and their descendants were
subjected throughout the Americas.