“Re/Presenting” The Mead’s Collections

On Saturday, Nov. 16, the Mead Art Museum opened the first half of its newest exhibition: “Re/Presenting: Art Beyond the Color Line.” The show aims to critically engage with portrayals of race in the Mead’s collection, broadening their representation of different cultures and encouraging visitors, especially children, to explore their own race in art.

The exhibition begins with warped circular mirrors on the wall, as well as activity booklets for any children visiting. The books invite younger guests to draw themselves and those they love, as well as any art they see that might inspire them. Many of the artworks feature perspective labels, where Mead staff and members of the Amherst community share their own experiences of individual works, to deepen the perspectives one might gain from viewing them.

The exhibition covers six rooms, with diverging paths for a wandering visitor to get lost in. A middle room features a loom for visitors to participate in: They grab a piece of pantyhose from a box that matches their skin tone and weave it into the loom, creating a collective representation of “Re/Presenting’s” visitors.

One path through the exhibition ends in a reading lounge, outfitted with comfy chairs and children’s books, poetry, and novels. Upon entering the lounge, visitors are greeted with a quote from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye:” “Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

The other path leads to a drawing section, where visitors can take inspiration from the exhibition to represent themselves. The visitor can draw themself from memory on one half of a paper, and, after viewing themselves in the mirror, draw themself on the other half. Hanging on the wall are all the self-portraits of those who have visited the exhibit before.

The exhibition relied on the Mead’s student interns, Mel Arthur ’25 and Angie Camarena ’25E. They worked under the supervision of Andrew W. Mellon Head of Education and Curator of Academic Programs Emily Potter-Ndiaye.

When I asked them to name the artwork that was most impactful to them, both Camarena and Arthur struggled to select a single work from the exhibit’s many impressive pieces. Nonetheless, Camarena settled on Gordon Parks’ “First Aid” (1943), which shows two boys of different races sitting together at a children’s camp, the Black child bandaging the finger of the white child. “I think it just describes the intimacy that I kind of wanted people to have with the artworks in this space. Like that photo kind of embodies love and care, and that’s something that we want to constantly perpetuate to people even as they walk in,” she said.

After much deliberation, Arthur also chose a photograph: Kwame Brathwaite’s “Untitled (Grandassa models in studio)” (1972). In the photo, six Black women and girls pose in Nigerian textiles with neutral expressions, showcasing a range of clothing on people across a range of ages. “That’s also one of the new acquisitions that we got,” Arthur said. “So I’m really excited about it. And in part two, there's another Kwame Brathwaite piece that is just so gorgeous, and it's a lot about beauty and challenging European beauty standards.”

Within the exhibit itself, the artwork is categorized around words with double meanings relating both to art and to race, such as “value,” “contrast,” and “representation.” For example, “value” had four definitions for visitors to consider as they walked through the exhibition: First, in terms of something or someone having meaning; second, in terms of principles of a group; third, something’s monetary worth; and finally, lightness within art. These contrasts permeate the exhibition, leaving visitors to wonder where art is right now, where art has been, and where art may go.

My personal favorite contrast is located in the Spiritual Bodies portion of the exhibition. The section explores color within religious artifacts to examine how the artists presented race, particularly in Hindu and Christian works. On the right side of the section, two portrayals of Madonna and Child work together to create a contrasting image.

But perhaps it is wrong to call them contradictory. Their subjects are nearly the same, with their positions mirrored, but the compositions are completely different. The right image, “Madonna and Child with Saint Ambrose” (1549) by Girolamo da Santacroce, is painted in a traditional Renaissance style, with saturated dyes ornamenting the clothes of the Virgin Mary and the saint. Its partner painting, “The Birth of Jesus” (1964) by Azaria Mbatha, is completely black-and-white. Mary and Jesus are depicted as Black, while da Santacroce painted them and Saint Ambrose as white. Mbatha’s work also positions them in a triangular pattern, surrounded by animals and foliage. It hints at one of the core themes of the exhibition: diverse mediums and diverse subjects.

The exhibition was inspired by EmbraceRace, an organization that aims to “support parents, guardians, educators, and other caregivers working to raise children who are thoughtful, informed and brave about race,” according to Melissa Giraud, one of the founders, who spoke at Saturday’s opening. The organization holds workshops that, among other things, invite children to examine their own features and understand what it’s like to really draw yourself in “Drawing Differences.”

The opening featured a few speakers, beginning with Siddhartha V. Shah, director of the Mead, who explained the importance of the exhibit, reflecting on the lack of representation he saw growing up. Afterward, Camarena spoke about her Latina identity and how, in her hometown of Miami, people often divorce their Blackness from that identity. Giraud spoke about EmbraceRace’s connection with the exhibition, and Arthur ended the reception by reading an original poem about their hair and friendships.

Camarena began working on the exhibition after attending one of these workshops at Jones Library. “I thought of my own experience in art classes where I wasn’t super confident in how I could depict myself … I didn’t know how to use the crayons that were available to me to make skin tones. So oftentimes it would probably be a peach color, because that was the only one in the packet. And so, when I saw these kids learning how to lay out their skin tones [and] blend these different colors in a way so that they make their specific shade of brown, I was really inspired by that. And I was like, ‘Dang, I wish I had this as a kid.’”

Arthur joined the project during their time as an intern this summer, once Camarena and Potter-Ndiaye were already in the process of curating the exhibit. Their portion of the project focused primarily on the educational aspect of the exhibit: “[We were] thinking about broader things of, ‘How is this exhibition that’s education-focused going to be in a space? How do we want to engage people, especially children, with these difficult topics that we're talking about? How do we want the collaboration with EmbraceRace to come to be, and show in the space?’”

The second half of “Re/Presenting” will open in the spring semester, and the exhibition will be on display until July 6, 2025.