Effluvia: Tracking "Black" in the Mediterranean "Blue"

In an elegantly frescoed salon at New York University's Florence estate, Villa La Pietra, stands an artifact of beauty. Her light brown tunic is adorned with brushes of gold fig leaves, a golden collar, with buttons and boots to match. An expansive smile is etched onto her ebony face as her body strikes a semi-genuflecting pose. Her outstretched arms beckon visitors with an invitation to be served: "give me your gloves, your scarves, your coats," they seem to say. A similar sculpture but male, is positioned across the room from her. He is made in the likeness of an 18th century page. With the stem of a horn or trumpet tucked under his right shoulder, this African-looking boy, resplendent in rich curls, and brown and gold heraldry, is perched on a descending platform in a posture of obeisance to observers. These figures constitute a broad genre of Western European decorative art—furniture, sculptures, paintings, and tapestries—that portray African bodies in service, as domestic workers, soldiers, porters, and custodians of palatial properties. Known in common parlance as "Blackamoors," models of this tradition in the Villa's art collections date mostly from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Our own era is peppered with the resurrections of "Blackamoor" figures across a variety of media and spaces—from private homes, hotels, and museums, to aspirational fashion and jewelry. The presence of these images pervades contemporary Florence and Venice (among other locales) to an astonishing degree. Yet their very normativeness renders them unexceptional, even invisible to those who look at them, but do not see. They allude simultaneously to the omnipresence and erasure of Black Africans in foundational histories of Europeaness. If we care to see, what might we make of the intriguing but disturbing beauty of these relics that bridge the ages in the Acton Collection at New York University's Villa La Pietra? Who made them and why? What traditions of decorative art production and collection do they represent? What venues do they adorn? What material histories and cultural meanings do they encode? Incorporated into fixed narratives of places where they are exhibited, yet torn from the historical contexts of their production, and separated from the histories of the people they portray, they have emerged as sites of contested gazes.

How might contemporary artists and scholars interpret these contested gazes from diverse disciplinary perspectives? How do artists in our own time re-make these meanings through contemporary conventions of artistic practice at the intersection of different times, places, and generations? These questions assume particular interest in light of current debates over the restitution and return of art works from the so-called Global South to their lands of origin from more affluent national and private museums and collections in Europe and North America. Wealthy custodians of such works sometimes claim that they acquired them as "gifts" and that these will languish in neglect if returned to their African homes. The art works are instead, incorporated into colonial epistemologies that while seeking to ennoble them through association with Europeanness, end up objectifying them and the people who created them, of turning them into effluvia of dominant discourses. It is from such fixed and flattened notions of being and belonging that many interpreters in our own time have sought to rescue and reconstruct the marginalized histories that lie behind the "Blackamoor."

Such acts of reconstruction involve an exercise in bricolage—of deconstructing and reassembling signifiers that defined black bodies in European decorative art—so as to reframe Africans as subjects and makers of history. The exhibition titled ReSignifications, embodied this curatorial vision of decoding, making, and remaking on a transcontinental scale. It opened in Florence, Italy in the summer of 2015, in conjunction with the conference, Black Portraitures: Imaging the Black Body, Re-staging Histories. It moved on to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2018, before migrating back to Italy the same year. In Sicily, it collaborated with the Manifesta Biennale as a collateral event hosted by the Palermo Capital of Culture initiative led by Mayor Leoluca Orlando.