Arts Commentary: On Racism and World’s Fairs in the Harvard Art Museums

By Harvey Blume

I’m glad the Harvard Art Museums have re-opened. I’d been looking forward to it. The institutions had been closed too long. One of the allures was a chance to see a Rebecca Horn exhibit. Last I time I’d taken in her work was at a one-woman show at the Guggenheim in New York. Those were kinetic pieces; I remember them as mobile, vaguely insectile, in any case large, twitchy and disturbing. The work displayed at the Harvard Art Museums was earlier — mostly videos of the performance pieces that preceded and led to the kinetic work in which Horn replaces her own body with strange mechanisms.

African Pigmies on display  in an American World's Fair at the turn-of-the-century.

Untitled (Group of men and youth including Negritos from the Philippine Exhibit, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis.)

Just past her show I came to another sort of performance art, though it was hardly known as such at the time, and it was not necessarily voluntary. There is a display of photographs from World’s Fairs, principally the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the St. Louis Fair of 1904. (“Meet me in St. Louis Louis, meet me at the Fair.”)

The captions credit Harvard University for assisting in the new science — the science of anthropology, as it was then called — on view in Chicago and in St. Louis. One photo shows Iggorotes, natives of the Philippines, brought over after the United States put down the Philippine revolt against our troops. Mark Twain called the conduct of American forces in suppressing that revolt for Philippine independence, from both Spain and the United States, nothing less than that of “Christian butchers.” Twain was a crusty old satirist at that point. He called it as he saw it.

There are also some African pygmies in that photo. How they came to St. Louis has everything to do with Barnum, with freak shows, with unreconstructed racism — with King Leopold of Belgium’s imperial reign over the Congo, which has been termed genocidal. Twain wrote against Leopold, too. And his crusty outburst influenced many, here and abroad, including president Theodore Roosevelt.

For the Harvard Art Museums to ignore this history, this enormously rich context, and to unconditionally praise Harvard’s role in the presentation of the new “science” — the performance art — of anthropology, as it was then known, is shameful.

I learned that Harvard professors of anthropology convene their classes in front of these photos. I’d love to know what they say. Do they praise Harvard for its contribution to anthropology, anthropology as racist freak show? Or do they catch up with contemporary scholarship in critiquing it?

You’d never know from what’s on display. You’d never know from the captions.

6 Comments

  1. Evelyn Rosenthal on December 9, 2014 at 11:15 am

    I haven’t seen this show or the captions, but the main text (in the online link you posted) does say the fairs were shaped by social class, ethnicity, race, colonialism, imperialism, etc. The professor for whose class this show was organized is a specialist in African art (not anthropology), though the photos are, I’m sure, from the Harvard Peabody anthropological museum. I have no doubt she will be discussing just the questions you raise with students in front of the works on view. It does sound like the wall texts could use more historical context, though. I’ll have to check it out when I’m there next.

  2. Harvey Blume on December 9, 2014 at 8:03 pm

    Evelyn

    Hi. Thanks for your response.

    I do, in fact, trust that Harvard professors these days do not parrot the social Darwinism that lay behind the “anthropology” department at St. Louis, by far the most popular element of that fair, according to comments left by visitors. Still it is troubling to find nothing in the captions to qualify the idea that progress was the driving theme of the fair and anthropology, as then construed, a fitting part of it.

    (One of the pygmies on view in St. Louis was two years later, in 1906, displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with Dohung the orangutan.)

    Seems to me that whatever goes on in the privacy of Harvard classes, so far as the public is concerned Harvard turned its back on a wonderful teaching moment.

  3. Suzanne Preston Blier on December 12, 2014 at 8:35 am

    The actual wall text for the larger exhibition reads (in part) “…the United States worlds fair that had the largest draw was the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago in which Harvard University had a central role particularly with respect to the new academic disciplines of archaeology and anthropology.” In short this reference to Harvard’s role specifies the 1893 exposition in Chicago not the 1904 fair in St. Louis. Indeed Frederick W. Putnam of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, an early follower of the evolutionist Louis Agassiz played a seminal role at the 1893 Chicago fair in both the original organization of the Midway and the exhibitions in the Anthropology building. While Putnam (and other Harvard scholars) seem not to have been involved in shaping the 1904 St. Louis Fair, at this time Social Darwinism and other race theories also remained very much in play. These factors were important in later fairs as well. World fairs clearly were central to constructing and reifying issues of race, gender, class, colonial interests (a key factor at the Saint Louis fair), and other social issues. This is why fairs are so important to study in the classroom. This Harvard Art Museum exhibition was one I helped put together for my spring term class on Worlds Fairs and these and other issues will figure centrally in it.

  4. Suzanne Preston Blier on December 12, 2014 at 11:38 am

    Let me add that each student will be assigned one of the works on view to research. Among the issues in this specific work is the question of who is shown here. There were African Americans among the American troops that went to the Philippines. The 1904 fair also is known for its problematic display of “pigmies” (including the now famous Ota Benga) and other populations. This was a feature of several other earlier and later fairs as well. One of the class assignments is for students to write several 150 word labels for the works in the exhibition – not an easy task by any means considering the array of issues that can be raised. This also will engage them in key issues of museological practice.

  5. Harvey Blume on December 12, 2014 at 5:40 pm

    > World fairs clearly were central to constructing and reifying issues of race, gender, class, colonial interests (a key factor at the Saint Louis fair), and other social issues. This is why fairs are so important to study in the classroom.

    I never doubted that Harvard students dealing with world’s fairs would be treated to a thorough study of “reifying issues of race, gender, class, colonial interests” at the St. Louis Fair and after. I should have been clearer in stressing that some of that context might have been have shared with the public.

    As for the “now famous Ota Benga” I hope it is not over the top to note that I wrote a book about him — Ota Benga: The Pygmy At The Zoo (1992) — tracing his career, if that word can be used for it, from his origins in the Congo (as notoriously misruled Leopold II of Belgium), through the St. Louis Fair, his time in the Bronx Zoo (when displayed with Dohung the orangutan), and his last days in Lynchburg, VA.

    Learning about Ota taught me about fairs and leads to my conviction that Harvard might have done a little more to inform visitors. And it’s not too late.

    • Harvey Blume on December 13, 2014 at 3:32 pm

      > One of the class assignments is for students to write several 150 word labels for the works in the exhibition – not an easy task by any means considering the array of issues that can be raised.

      This is such a good idea. It occurred to me that putting some of these labels on display might serve to enrich the experience of museum-goers.

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