nothin Exhibit Driven By Black History Data | New Haven Independent

Exhibit Driven By Black History Data

Maps of the United States in a patchwork of colors. A graph like a coiled spring. A diagram like a bullseye, creased with bright spikes. Hanging on the walls of Artspace’s gallery, they can read immediately as abstract art. They are, in fact, a series of data visualizations — charts, graphs, geographic and population information — that famed Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois and a team of researchers created to convey some of the realities of the Black experience in America over 100 years ago.

In making them into an exhibit, W.E.B. Du Bois, Georgia, and His Data Portraits” — running now at Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown Streets through June 26 — curators Lisa Dent and Simon Ghebreyesus are able to present a moment in history when Black people were on the cusp of a major transformation, and ask questions about how the presentation of data can affect our understanding of that data, and perhaps change our perspective.

Du Bois and his team made the visualizations as part of study intended to document socioeconomic information about Black Georgians, according to such variables as income, property ownership, and marital status, among many others. Dent and Ghebreyesus organize the charts into four categories — migration, property, family, and work — that, along with accompanying notes, help viewers navigate the information.

That begins with a map from 1890 that shows, as the notes put it, a population on the brink of exodus.” The forces that drove the Great Migration in the 20th century, and brought many Black people to New Haven to work in its factories, had not yet realized themselves. But migration out of Georgia had already begun. In the years after Reconstruction, as the curators write, left with nearly no economic options and facing the burgeoning racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan, Southern Blacks gradually began to depart from their post-emancipation locales.” The curators also point out how, in 1890, most of the Black population still lived in rural places — another factor that the Great Migration would fundamentally shift.

The exhibit’s section on Black property ownership has a particular edge to it, as it first documents the fact that, less than 40 years before, almost all Black people in the United States were themselves considered property. It is important that the graphs of proportions of free Black people and enslaved Black people take the timeline they do, of reaching back 100 years into the past. They amply show, in single images, the long, grinding years of slavery, and the sudden, radical transformation that followed emancipation. Subsequent graphs, meanwhile, demonstrate just as quickly that emancipation did not translate to being able to acquire property, even a full generation later.

As the accompanying notes explain, White landowners clinging to the exploitative power they wielded engaged in the practice of sharecropping, which, along with racist laws and other concurrent social barriers, kept formerly enslaved people and their families in a cycle of debt and poverty. Du Bois keenly focused on property ownership as a source of disparity and opportunity for the Black community. Today, these differences persist along racial lines. Since slavery, Black people have been systematically and strategically denied the ability to own property and thus pass wealth down from one generation to another.”

Other insights emerge from the visualizations focused on family. In 1890, the Black population was a young one, with almost three-quarters of people under the age of 30. This seemingly hopeful boom in children following emancipation is balanced by a fact that the curators point out, that over 60 percent of Black women over the age of 65 were widowed.” Part of the reason the population skewed young was that a lot of older men were missing.

The section devoted to work shows that jobs for Black people followed their chances of acquiring property. In 1890, the vast majority worked in agriculture, fisheries, mining, and domestic service — a visibly higher proportion than in the White population.

Nonetheless, as the accompanying notes point out, Du Bois also shed light of often overlooked Black businesspeople — from bankers and pharmacists to grocers and publishers. In doing so, he upheld the history of Black resilience and ingenuity … avoiding telling a unilateral story of subjugation by providing a nuanced narrative of struggle and slowly mounting successes.”

In our current political moment, Du Bois’s academic work reads as particularly vital. It documents just how conditions in post-Reconstruction Georgia set the stage for the Great Migration, and illustrates that many of the specific racial inequities that are in the spotlight today were well in place already by 1890. Two artists — Dana Karwas and Theaster Gates — respond to that vitality by filtering Du Bois’s work through their own art.

Dana Karwas

In a Heartbeat, detail.

Karwas’s installation takes Du Bois’s foray in science fiction as its jumping off point. Until quite recently — and still all too often — focusing on the Black experience is presented as a counternarrative to the traditional telling of American history. Du Bois then, and Karwas, Gates, and numerous others now, argue for a much more holistic approach. What if we could take in, all at once, the totality of the American experience at once? To understand the narratives of everyone as of equal importance, and to grasp the tapestry of history that would create?

Theaster Gates

Light of Progress.

Karwas’s piece doesn’t try to replicate that tapestry. Instead, in the installation, one gets a sense of looking at the tools one might use to perceive it, a telescope that lets us see the universe of the past with clarity. How might that change our understanding of the present? And if Karwas’s piece is the medium, then perhaps Gates’s pieces convey something of the message — the way the light Du Bois shed on the Black experience at the end of the 19th century continues to help us see our current situation for what it is, and see the road ahead a little better as well.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Georgia, and His Data Portraits” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through June 26. Visit Artspace’s website for hours and more information.

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