Radical Women, Latin American Art 1960-1985, is one step in the long journey towards historically an

Radical Women, Latin American Art 1960-1985, is one step in the long journey towards historically and presently marginalized artists being given the exposure, appreciation, and crucial scholarship that they so justly deserve. With the recognition being given to such incredible artists, I thought about the millions of women whose lives are unknown, yet still represented. My thinking in showing these lantern slides was to honor women whose identities are lost to history, and were most likely not recorded in the first place. In the case of lantern slides, the women’s likenesses were used as visual evidence in colonialist narratives without their consent. Can we engage in re-envisioning, look as these women to attempt to learn about who they were and respect them as individuals, not as exoticized pawns in curators’ presentations?The Archives houses over 11,000 lantern slides. In the 2000s our Archivists wrote that “many of the series that show aboriginal people’s, such as the America’s, Asia, and Oceania contain images of individuals posed for the camera. These photographs could be considered marginally objectionable or exploitative in nature, even allowing for the times in which they were taken.” It is my personal opinion that the majority of the lantern slides were created and shown in inherently exploitative contexts which have the continued impact through lived historical traumas. Today we see lantern slides as a fragile and cumbersome medium, but lantern slides used to be common place. Their importance is multifold. Firstly, these images were ordered from catalogues or created by people who worked at the Museum nearly a century ago. Curators used these images to try to get an understanding of the cultures whose heritage they were stewarding and used these slides in public presentations. However misguided, ill-formed, or paternalistic their efforts were, their decisions have repercussions today. It can be difficult to understand the extent to which people had a limited world view in centuries prior. Often their exposure to other cultures and what people from different parts of the world looked like were mediated through newspapers, books, magazines, and slide presentations. Today we take for granted the ease with which we learn about other cultures, how we are able to see other people how they want to represent themselves when they geolocate their posts. Our understanding of other cultures has always been mediated by gatekeepers. Today we have the power to contribute to others’ understanding of ourselves. Photography, as a medium, has never told a single truth, but often people were told biased narratives and did not have other avenues to educate themselves to form their own opinions. Through these lantern slides we are fortunate enough to be able see what curators were using as their visual referents. The people whose likenesses were captured in these lantern slides did not give consent for their image to be passed down in perpetuity, to be interpreted, to be used to provide “proof” to back up opinions, or discarded in a weeding project. Many of these lantern slides are flat out racist, and it is sickening to read the captions that accompany some of the slides. But if we don’t keep these reminders of the harmful ways in which settler-colonizers gave their incorrect opinions as facts, we will no longer have the tangible evidence of how we got to where we are today. Brooklyn Museum’s history and the origins of our collections are well documented in our Archives which are open to research by appointment!Posted by J.E. Molly Seegers -- source link

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