Objects of the Month: "Sojourner Truth with Flowers" and "Kin XLVI (Follie)"
Sojourner Truth with Flowers, CdV, 1864, albumen silver print on paper by Unidentified Artist. Museum Purchase, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
It is hard not to compare the gaze of the two women represented in Sojourner Truth with Flowers and Kin XLVI (Follie), currently on view in African/American: Two Centuries of Portraits. While the viewer is arrested by Sojourner Truth’s direct gaze, the woman in Whitfield Lovell’s drawing is unaware of our presence. Lovell’s piece invites the viewer to gaze upon this woman and record her face and history in our memory. Truth’s portrait confronts the viewer, wanting us to participate in an exchange. These works represent women seen and unseen, but both immortalized through photography.
The carte de visite of Sojourner Truth exemplifies self-representation and agency, a feat achieved by few African Americans during the antebellum period. She addresses the viewer with a steady gaze and confident posture while she knits, participating in an activity associated with genteel society. Truth’s constructed representation is memorialized through the photograph. The carte de visite makes it clear that Sojourner Truth’s likeness belongs to her alone, marking each card with the quote, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” By copyrighting her carte de visite, a symbolic representation of her personhood, she supported her abolitionist and suffragist efforts, two that deeply impacted her lived experience.
In Whitfield Lovell’s drawing we are invited to speculate about the woman’s importance and experience, prompting us to make sense of the past and our present. Using historic photographs produced between the antebellum period and Civil Rights era, Lovell encourages dialogue between the photos of individuals and the found objects fixed beneath each image. Despite not knowing the identity of the woman represented, we create our own history based on her profile and the shooting gallery target found below. Our interpretation of this drawing is colored by the history we already know, our twenty-first century worldview, and our everchanging perspectives. These factors act together to derive meaning between the found objects in each of Lovell’s drawings.
Kin XLVI (Follie) is a recent acquisition chosen by the Collectors’ Collaborative, a group of Bowdoin alumni that support the purchase of contemporary artwork for the Museum.
Kin XLVI (Follie), 2011, Conté crayon drawing on paper, shooting gallery target by Whitfield Lovell. Museum Purchase, Greenacres Acquisition Fund and Collectors' Collaborative. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Elizabeth Humphrey
Curatorial Assistant and Manager of Student Programs
Bowdoin College Museum of Art