Shadow and Substance: African-American Images from the Burns Archive
WHAT: Shadow and Substance: African-AmericanImages from the Burns Archive
WHEN: Through May 17 at the Indiana History Museum, Indianapolis
Modupe Labode
A collaboration with the internationally acclaimed Burns Collection of New York brings together dozens of rarely seen photographs of the African-American experience in the United States. Shadow and Substance celebrates "the strengths and accomplishments of African Americans in the face of oppression, subjugation and political disenfranchisement." From early images of slaves to Civil War soldiers to new voters to businessmen and professionals, to political activists, the exhibition is filled with remarkable illustrations of achievement and shocking evidence of intolerance. Indiana-related imagery, such as Hoosier international bicycle champion Major Taylor, is also included.
Modupe Labode, assistant professor of history and museum studies at IUPUI, is serving as guest curator for the exhibit. She has selected work that details all aspects of life: family, work, faith, patriotism, religion, education, art, community and identity. The exhibition will reveal faces of men, women and children and emotionally illustrate "successful people as they wished themselves to be seen".
The Burns Collection is best known as the nation's largest and most comprehensive resource for early medical photography, but it also includes more than 600,000 other images with particular strengths in African American photographs, Judaica, criminology and ethnology. Much of the African-American imagery focuses on the 19th- and early 20th-century African-American middle class; however, it also includes rare photographs of all aspects of African-American history.
