by Tomas Brown
In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam bequeaths £100,000, his library, and art collection to the University of Cambridge, accumulated through the wealth of his slave trading grandfather. This money supports the Fitzwilliam Museum to this day.[1] Later in the nineteenth century, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is constructed around categories such as ‘social evolution’ and the assemblages of colonial collectors flood into Cambridge museums.[2]
As an exhibition, Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, crafts its own histories while navigating carefully between those embedded in the collections it draws from. It highlights its agency without struggling against the inescapable positionality of being a show made possible by very the nature of Cambridge’s collections.
Hung face to face at the entrance, ‘Portrait of the Hon. Richard Fitzwilliam’ and the newly renamed ‘Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit’ confront the visitor with the obvious contrasts of size, lustre and composition without direct comment.[3] Instead, the curatorial label for ‘Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit’ is used to make a finer point about the memory of museum collections, the racialised frameworks of information used by curators and historians, and the far-reaching legacies of these knowledge networks.
Viewers will most immediately recognise the portrait from GCSE History textbooks as abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, whereas curators have now reconsidered this identification and deemed the sitter unknown. The exhibition brings the loaded epistemic cultures inherent in the work of curation into public view, through a careful explanation of catalogue entry design and the marking of colonial collections against its own intervention. The plasterboard, print, and glaze of the exhibition jut against the usual Devon marble of the Fitzwilliam’s interior – a material and spatial delineation between Black Atlantic’s re-examination and the forces that built the museum.
The Guardian’s review by Kadish Morris comments that the exhibition doesn’t get into the ‘painful details’ and isn’t ‘ugly enough’.[4] This is an understandable takeaway; only the first room really confronts the history of Cambridge Museum’s collecting practices and the nature of Fitzwilliam’s founding bequest. The remainder of the show covers so much ground – delving into slavery through the lenses of technology, fashion and natural history – that themes which could be their own exhibitions are covered in single cases. Broadly however, the curatorial decisions are impactful and imaginative. The bell of the De Catharina sugar plantation sits overthrown; Dutch coffee pots are carefully strewn behind glass.
For historians and the public, the show excels at making a finer point about the insipid materials in our collections. The Brazilian woods stretching the canvas of Rembrandt’s ‘Portrait of a Man in Military Costume’ are highlighted, visualising the literal underpinning of the work (sadly it is not hung reversed).[5] Curatorial captions appear from around corners and behind columns, reenforcing the pervasive nature of slavery within these collections.
There are many lessons here for other institutions too. Two chairs which another museum might typically display for their design are instead included for their mahogany, a tropical hard wood felled by enslaved people on British plantations in the Caribbean.[6] Indeed, similar mahogany furniture sits in the V&A’s Susan Weber gallery uncommented upon.
Importantly, a keen facet of the show is the partnership of contemporary black artists such as Keith Piper, Barbra Walker, and Jaqueline Bishop, among others. Their work is carefully positioned as an intervention in the collections rather than a mere response. Walker’s ‘Vanishing Point 17 (Veronese)’, an embossed graphite drawing rendering Black figures in ‘Adoration of the Kings’, is deliberately hung to avoid direct mirroring.[7]
Furthermore, Bishop’s plates, depicting plantation violence framed with Caribbean plants, are not accompanied by the prints they draw imagery from; her poignant process of giving a hanging nude woman her modesty back via the addition of these flowers stands on its own.[8] The broader point for historians and makers alike – that via our work with the archive, we have an opportunity to remake and intervene – is a high-point of the show.
Black Atlantic concludes with a remembrance that ‘more exhibitions are planned’ across 2024-26. The impermanence of exhibitions, and temporary nature of that stark plaster, print and glass poses a question – how will Cambridge Museums continue this work?
Residues of the exhibition useful to researchers in catalogue entries and reference books will persist, for those with the rarefied skills to access them. Broader projects such as the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology stores move, now nearing their conclusion, are an opportunity to improve access to the histories of colonialism and slavery contained in these collections. However, how will this change reach permanent displays and the broader public? What structural shifts will the museum embrace? Will the returns on Fitzwilliam’s bequest still be accepted?
[1] Black Atlantic: People Power Resistance, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 – 7 January 2024, Exhibition.
[2] https://maa.cam.ac.uk/about/museums-history, accessed November 18, 2023.
[3] Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, about 1740-80, oil on canvas, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter. Joseph Wright of Derby, Portrait of the Hon. Richard Fitzwilliam, Future 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745-1816), 1764, oil on canvas, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
[4] Kadish Morris, “Black Atlantic: Power, People Resistance review – a welcome if partial reckoning”, September 24, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/24/black-atlantic-power-people-resistance-fitzwilliam-museum-cambridge-review.
[5] Studio of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Portrait of a Man in Military Costume, 1650, oil on panel made of South American Woods capomo and marmelero, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
[6] Black Atlantic: People Power Resistance, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 – 7 January 2024, Exhibition.
[7] Barbra Walker, Vanishing Point 17 (Veronese), 2020,graphite embossed Somerset Satin paper, private collection.
[8] Jacqueline Bishop, History at the Dinner Table, 18 plate dinner service, first of an edition of three sets, 2021, bone china, print transfers, gold lustre, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Doing History in Public 