This iteration of Viewpoints features a photographic triptych by Carrie Mae Weems (U.S., born 1953) that was sourced from historic ethnographic photographs of an enslaved woman named Drana. Weems manipulated her source images, which were originally used as mechanisms of racial classification and subjugation, shifting the scale, color, and formatting to create an homage that addresses the dehumanizing history carried in the subject’s body and her image.

The nineteenth-century daguerreotypes that Weems used as source material were taken by Joseph Zealy at the request of Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University professor of Swiss origin, whose research sought to prove the racist belief—now completely discredited by science—that humans were not one species, but several and therefore biologically divisible into a hierarchy. To support his ideas, Aggasiz collected images of enslaved people in South Carolina, not far from the Sea Islands.

This untitled triptych is part of Weem’s Sea Islands series, which explores the African heritage of the Gullah community, who reside along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. By including these historical images of Drana in a series about a contemporary culture, Weems both asserts the continuing importance of the past, and opens history for reconsideration and rectification in the present.

Weems (b. 1953) is among the most celebrated US artists of her generation. Her work explores questions related to structures of power, class, gender, and social relationships, with a particular focus on the lived experience of African Americans. Recipient of numerous accolades nationally and internationally, Weem’s received the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2013. Her work is in museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Tate Modern, London.

Below is the featured commentary by University of Washington faculty that accompanies the installation.

- Megan Ming Francis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

How do we confront the vicious history of institutionally sanctioned racism in the United States? Carrie Mae Weems shows us one way in this triptych.

The durability of slavery and the long period of racial violence that followed were premised on the perceived superiority of the white race. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, race was thought of as a biological concept—rather than the social construction that it is—and academics such as Louis Agassiz deployed scientific visual “evidence” to construct a false story about white racial supremacy and African American inferiority. Photographs of African Americans were used to advance Agassiz’s racist agenda that African Americans were physically different from whites and thus undeserving of equal personhood.

Weems uses the photographs for a different purpose. This is no longer a story about how a mad scientist and the toxic culture he reinforced tried to dehumanize black subjects. In Weems’s masterful hands, this becomes a story about how black women see themselves and our complicity (or silence) in allowing their bodies to be harmed. The two beautiful, monochromatic blue-tinted, round photographs flanking the central image ask viewers: What do we see when we look through a black woman’s eyes? How does our understanding of citizenship, race, and power change when we shift the perspective of the watcher from a white male to a black woman? How do these women on the sides, both profile portraits of Drana, view the woman in the middle? Finally, in the central black and white photograph, Drana is looking at us, instead of we, at her. It feels as if the viewer is responsible for her indecent objectification. It’s not Drana who should feel shame; it’s American society, for allowing this treatment to occur.

For me, this is a piece that probes how art can be a tool of resistance; but ultimately, this is also a piece about the importance of shifting the lens in our understandings of freedom and justice in this country. In modern parlance, Weems is asserting that black women’s lives matter.

Drana, Country Born, Daughter of Jack, Guinea. If we take the label given to her by the photographer commissioned by a paleontologist and a creationist we will only know what the institution of slavery would have us know. Drana, the name stripped of the culture of her father who we know is from Guinea, and who has been named Jack. Country born, as in on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, between the land of her father’s birth and the land in which she was born enslaved. Daughter of Jack, Guinea, but who is her mother? The absence of her mother is another marker of the institution: the inability for enslaved women to mother the children to which they gave birth. Enslaved women who gave birth would be expected to wet nurse their white charges and otherwise continue to be as productive as they were prior to their enslavement.

Carrie Mae Weems has us look at her again:

The One with eyes that look back at your looking, not asking to be recognized as human but owning the fact of her humanity. She, a woman of African descent who must look back at a gaze that wishes to dehumanize. She, who in each decade to come would have another name, another photograph, another stereotype, another meme. The One, whose image proliferates without her consent and its story, without her signature. The One, whose gaze refracts that of your desires, even your desire for distance from her condition. Drana, for what did she call herself?

Untitled: this non-title already speaks volumes. The woman whose gaze confronts us remains unnamed; this is not a conventional portrait. But it does have a distinctive structure. It is a triptych—a three-panel composition common in religious paintings from the European Renaissance (c. 1400–1600), a period long associated with ideas of artistic “rebirth.” Weems thus reframes tiny, objectifying daguerreotypes of an enslaved African American woman into a monumental, implicitly sacred work of art. The way the background lightens around the woman even begins to resemble a halo or aura.

Look further at the work’s highly deliberated structure. Why are the outer wings roundels? They recall Renaissance tondos, round devotional paintings sometimes associated with childbirth. The woman’s connection with the sacred is thus rendered more intimate and feminine. But it thereby becomes more complicated, for even a privileged woman in the pre-modern world found her identity powerfully delimited by her gender and role in childbearing. Meanwhile, for the enslaved woman, the pseudo-science that demanded her photographic objectification compelled her to strip, laying bare her enforced role as a bearer of children destined for bondage. But if she has been stripped naked, Weems also reframes her as the triptych’s central icon, implicitly elevating her through associations with religion and art.

Yet if art and religion may inflect dehumanization toward devotion, they do not finally erase the scars that perpetually lay bare our nation’s original sin. And the triptych’s shiny surface captures our reflections. The silvered ground of daguerreotypes reflected beholders as well, but as miniatures. Now our images become life-size—as do the woman’s. Weems reframes our encounter with her so that we are forced to meet one another through art’s reflection of our wounded humanity and history.