With these words Weems acknowledges Armstrong's noble aims while indicting him. She flanks the Armstrong portrait with two photos of Native American men. At left, they arrive to begin their studies at Hampton in 1878, wearing traditional dress and long hair. At right, the same guys are photographed two years later, attired in prim suits, with their hair cut short and neatly parted. Is it a sign of progress or a dubious "civilizing"? Too much was lost, Weems's art argues, in their assimilation.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, concerns with personal identity, race, gender, and sexuality (think AIDS) were all the rage in the art world , and a group of black women working this territory, including Weems, Lorna Simpson , and Brookline's Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons , first gained notice. Though these artists continued to produce strong work, the white-hot spotlight of the art world eventually moved elsewhere. But we're in the midst of a reassessment of this socially concerned style now, with retrospectives of Campos-Pons at the Indianapolis Museum of Art , Simpson at New York's Whitney Museum , and Kara Walker at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center . (Walker also has a small show at Andover's Addison Gallery of American Art. ) It seems after 9/11, Iraq, and the drowning of New Orleans, we're ready again to consider old uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and sexuality.
Williams College commissioned Weems in 1996 to create a piece inspired by Armstrong and Hampton, which began educating African-Americans in 1868 and Native Americans a decade later. A particular focus of the project, which debuted in 2000, was a set of photos documenting Hampton that the school commissioned magazine and corporate photographer Frances Benjamin Johnson to shoot in 1899 to promote the institution's accomplishments.
