拍品 52

PROPERTY FROM THE JACKIE NAPOLEAN WILSON COLLECTION "My grandfather was born a slave on a plantation in Spartanburg, South Carolina, between 1853 and 1855. He often said he was between ten and twelve years old when the Civil War ended. His father served as a Negro camp cook during the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, under General Stonewall Jackson in the Kershaw's Brigade in the Confederate army. He traveled on to Harper's Ferry, to the great land battles, to the battlefield at Gettysburg, and to the close of the war" (Wilson, viii.) Jackie Napolean Wilson was born in October 1945 in Detroit to a family of twelve children. Although never of great means his mother provided well for them. Toward the end of 1965 he was drafted into the Army and served from 1966 to 1968. With the help of the G.I. Bill he received his B.A. in 1971 and in 1976 his law degree from Drake Law School in Des Moines, Iowa. While working in Iowa in 1978 he met William Sayles Doan who encouraged him to collect photographs of the black experience in America. Jackie recalls, "I have never been able to go into the market place with any semblance of a deep pocket. There were few conventional means of acquiring antique photographs and hardly any at locating black photographs." Yet he was able to seek out extraordinary examples of African-Americans, amassing a collection of both cased images and works on paper. In 1982 Jackie contacted the Detroit Institute of Arts and curator, Ellen Sharp, curator of Graphic Arts, to explore the possibility of opening his collection to the public. In 1983, "The Madonna", the "Zouave" and the "Soldier and Companion" were exhibited in Photographs from Detroit Collections: An Exhibition Inaugurating the Albert and Peggy de Salle Gallery of Photographs at the D.I.A. This was the first time any work from his collection had been exhibited. "It was in 1991 that I decided to share my collection with the public again. I believed that the collection had the power to change not only how whites felt about blacks but that it had the power to affect how blacks felt about themselves." The collection was featured in several local newspapers including a story in the Detroit Free Press Magazine in 1992. After reading about the collection in the Los Angeles Times, Weston Naef, Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, contacted Jackie to view his collection. After their meeting, Mr. Naef invited him to the Getty to make a survey of significant images of African- Americans in its photography collection. The Getty holding and the Wilson collection evolved into the 1995 exhibition "Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography". This landmark exhibition combined forty-four images from the Wilson collection and twenty-two from the Museum's holdings. In 1999 Jackie published a book based on the exhibition, Hidden Witness: African-American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War. The release of the book's second edition is expected in the spring of 2002. In the introduction to the book Mr. Naef describes the unique nature of the Wilson collection: "Considering the potential interest and importance of the subject of African-Americans around the time of the abolition of slavery, we wondered why there had never been an exhibition or book devoted to portraits of black people in the middle of the last century. One reason is that such pictures are very rare to begin with - there were very few African-American photographers and very few black people had the money and time, or freedom for a portrait sitting - and those pictures that do exist are not well documented as to maker, place, subject, or date. Moreoever, they are widely dispersed in local historical societies and private collections, rather than in the major urban museums of art and history. The Getty Museum, for example, holds a collection of some fifteen hundred daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, yet there are only thirty such images, which experts consider a large holding." (Wilson, vii.) As Mr. Naef has observed, the collection Jackie has created is remarkable. With a deep appreciation for the subject and a particular eye for dignified and poignant portraits he selected works which touched him and in turn exemplify the African-American experience between 1845-1865. The forty-four images offered here represent this vision and are a special opportunity for us to view this well conceived and rare collection.

UNKNOWN MAKER

Southern Townhouse

細節

UNKNOWN MAKER
Southern Townhouse
Half-plate ambrotype. Circa 1855. Leather case.

出版

Wilson, Hidden Witness: African-American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War, pp. 16-17.

展覽

Hidden Witness: African-Americans in Early Photography, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, 29 February - 18 June 1995.