Found, On Blacks in the Mediterranean

As arts administrators and curators, we have collaborated on numerous projects related to art, history, fashion, gender and migration over a seven-year period. We found our research to be inextricably linked with religion, family, beauty, and photography. In 2018, we joined forces with two professors working with these themes, Alessandra DiMaio and Awam Amkpa, towards organizing a conference on the significance of the black Mediterranean in history and the present day.

We began with an image of a saint from Ellyn's family history, Saint Benedict, and then started searching for images and statutes of him in Palermo over the course of several trips. Saint Benedict was a patron saint of Palermo and was widely and variously depicted. He is one of very few saints in Catholicism that is of African origin. The veneration of St. Benedict spread from Italy to Spain and Portugal and from there to the colonial Americas and ultimately the United States. He was denoted the patron saint of African Americans, and parishes in his name opened throughout the south, and in cities including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York. One such church was St. Benedict the Moor Church in New York City, founded by Irish Catholic priests for the growing African American community in NYC after the Civil War. Ellyn's grandmother was given up to the church's orphanage, St. Benedict's Home for Destitute Colored Children, where she spent six years prior to being "adopted" by a White family in Massachusetts that put her into service. She eventually returned to New York City where she married and baptized her children at St. Benedict's on West 53rd Street. "The first Catholic church for African Americans in the North," it was reported when the church was being considered for landmark status in 2017.

Our search, particularly for the works of contemporary artists, was framed by, and undergirded with the words of curator Okwui Enwezor: "You can't really look at the future without looking at the past and the present." Central to our discussions about this exploration was a focus on how artists and scholars were using the archive of diverse collections to re-interpret historical and contemporary moments, which led us to artists and scholars, such as, and in particular, Omar Victor Diop, an artist who was grappling with key questions about the diaspora, black masculinity, and the interplay between self-presentation and imposed representation within a global landscape.

The title of the works in Diop's massive archive is Project Diaspora (Self-Portraits, 2014). Beauty is an essential part of Omar Victor Diop's portraiture, as is the history of the African diaspora. Diop infuses his self-portraits with references to art history, contemporary art, the contemporary moment, and activism. His iconic work on Saint Benedict refers to the 18^th century polychrome and giltwood sculpture of Saint Benedict attributed to José Montes de Oca (c. 1675–1750), and replaces the open Bible in Saint Benedict's hand with a soccer ball. Diop's work acknowledges a broader global history that encompasses beauty, media, advertising, fashion, and sports. He also explores iconicity, performance, and photography and the interplay between fact and fiction, identity, and history. "I lived every self-portraiture session like a pilgrimage…" he says. "Inviting these forgotten souls into our present times felt like [I was] turning into a medium, allowing these historical figures to continue a discourse that they started during their lifetime."

Diop mines art museums and their archives in an imaginative way to engage in histories often lost in a global narrative on black people. and thus, what emerges is a portraiture of what is found.

St. Benedict, known in Italy as San Benedetto Il Moro, lived in the sixteenth century and was canonized in 1807. He was born in 1526 near Messina to Cristoforo and Diana Manasseri, who had been brought to Sicily from Africa as slaves in the early 16th century. It is believed that both parents were freed on the death of the noble to whom they were enslaved, and it is unclear whether...