LOREM IPSUM
DOLOR SIT AME
CONSECTETUR ADIPISCING ELIT. MORBI BIBENDUM PHARETRA LOREM, ACCUMSAN SAN NULLA.
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DONEC FEUGIAT:
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LOREM IPSUM:
$150,000
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A Wicked Commerce
The US and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Through the Lens of William Earle Williams
Curator: Susanna White, Head of Collections, University Museums
Hours: September 22 - May 5, 2023
Location: Picker Art Gallery, Dana Arts Center, Colgate University
Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University recognizes our collective responsibility to acknowledge our colonial history. Our campus sits on the traditional lands of the Onyota'a:ka, known as the People of the Upright Stone and Oneida Indian Nation of New York. The musuem is actively committed to building relationships with the Oneida people and with other Native American tribes and nations. It is urgent that we consider the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that brings us together in this place.
Philadelphia-area artist William Earle Williams (b. 1950) uses his camera to expose the obscured histories of chattel slavery in the US and transform how everyday places are understood and experienced. His most recent body of work examines this history within a global context and how the development, growth, and malevolent persistence of slavery intersects within Great Britain, the US, and the British West Indies.
A Wicked Commerce presents Williams’s examination of the transatlantic slave trade in forty-three photographs, many exhibited for the first time. Featuring sites in British port cities, Caribbean islands, and the US—south and north—these pictures reveal the infrastructures that fueled the triangular trade and positioned Britain and the US as industrial powers, simultaneously creating an institution that damaged innumerable lives and continues to persist in their physical and social landscapes.
The exhibition is accompanied by a Picker Laboratory for Academic Engagement (PLAE) Space installation, featuring additional photographs from Williams’s Underground Railroad series and examining the triangular trade’s local history.
William Earle Williams is the Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His photographs have been widely exhibited, including group and solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art, Smith College, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His work is represented in many public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Williams has received individual artist fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Special thanks to the artist William Earle Williams and essay contributor Graham Hodges, who have devoted their careers to confronting painful colonial legacies so that others may learn from them.
Thanks also to Nicholas West, Codirector, University Museums, and Curator, Picker Art Gallery, for his support; his commitment to radical includsion invites multiple curatorial voices and perspectives at the Museum. Codirector of University Museums and Curator of Longyear Museum of Anthropology Rebecca Mendelsohn also lent her support to the project.
The exhibitions at Picker Art Gallery come to fruition through the efforts of a dedicated team of museum professionals workiogn at the University Museums in tandem with students and faculty. Thanks to Brian Baker, Assistant Preparator; Njeri Jennings, Assistant Educator; Scott Lewis, Preparator; Kali Steinberg, Curatorial Assistant, Picker Art Gallery; Michelle VanAuken, Administrative Assistant and Academic Coordinator; Angela Wilde, Assistant Registrar; and Deon Ybarra, Security Office.
As always, thanks are due to Colgate's Board of Trustees; President Brian W. Casey' Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Murray W. and Mildred K Finard Professor in Jewish Studies, and Professor of Religion Lesleigh Cushing; and Vice Provost for Administration and Planning Trish St. Leger for their continued support of the exhibition and academic programs at Picker Art Gallery.