Myth & Memory

McInnis
Photo by Dan Addison

Landscape of Slavery slideshow

Objects and ideas inform both history and contemporary thought and are the basis of the study of material culture. For Maurie McInnis, associate professor of American art and material culture and director of American Studies, understanding the antebellum South in the 19th century encompasses understanding art and objects from the perspective of politics with a capital “P” as well as with a lower-case “p”— class politics, social structures and hierarchies.

McInnis spent the last four years applying that understanding to creating Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, an exhibition on view through April 20 at the University of Virginia Art Museum. The exhibition focuses on themes of race, slavery and the plantation from the 19th century to today.

McInnis, as consulting curator, was involved in all aspects of planning for the exhibit, working with Angela D. Mack, the curator of the traveling show that originated at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C.

“The exhibit is an exhibition about ideas rather than an art history exhibit that traces the development of an artist or a stylistic movement,” McInnis says. The more than 80 artworks in the show portray the landscape of the cultural constructs of memory through the works of artists from the 19th century to the present.

Race, slavery and the plantation do not have a fixed meaning through time, she explained. Working on the exhibit and the companion catalog, McInnis says she was struck by “how much cultural currency the word ‘plantation’ has.”

The mythology of the South as a place of gentility and refinement is still held by many today, McInnis says. She cited as an example the naming of residential communities with such designations as “Plantation Lake,” which is prevalent from the Carolinas to Florida.

For African Americans, however, the meaning revolves around an imbalance of power. “The two are fundamentally different ideas of what ‘plantation’ means. The reality is that beauty and brutality lived beside each other,” McInnis says.

The span of time the exhibit covers reflects these divergent views. “The artifacts explore widely varying ideas of what ‘plantation’ meant then and today.”

The themes of protest, politics, nostalgia and identity run through the artists’ works, which represent a wide variety of viewpoints within these topics. These same ideas are addressed in the catalog, which includes essays by six authors. McInnis’ own essay focuses on the antebellum paintings of George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the ways they were implicated in both anti-slavery and proslavery politics.

To help clarify the ideas for both the exhibit and catalog, McInnis began by using her research to develop courses. That research — coupled with insight from students in her classes, “The ‘Old South’ in Myth and Memory” and “Arts and Cultures of the Slave South,” which she co-teaches with Assistant Professor of Architectural History Louis Nelson — proved invaluable for defining questions about culture and American constructions about race.

“These courses helped me test initial ideas and define and redefine concepts,” McInnis says. The class work, which introduces undergraduate students to primary- and secondary-source research techniques, using primarily documents, now will benefit tremendously from the works in Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art.

“With the Landscape of Slavery show, we can now add objects,” McInnis says. The power of experiencing actual objects as primary research sources to understand the past in an interdisciplinary way provides a huge advantage over seeing a PowerPoint image of the object, she says.

The exhibit includes works by a slave potter named Dave, who worked in Edgefield, S.C., in the 1840s and 1850s. He decorated the large storage vessels he made with poetry and signed them. “His poetry was sometimes funny, spiritual, ironic or obliquely political,” McInnis says. Both the poetry and signing the pots are acts of political protest, since it was unlawful for slaves to read. “Dave is important. His work is an excellent example of an African-American artisan, of which the South was filled, but many are anonymous to us,” McInnis added. His work was integral to the economic foundation of the South and at the same time reveals much about slave life.

Contemporary artist Juan Logan also deals with issues of slavery. His “Foundations,” a sculptural installation, is composed of a series of iron, bricklike structures symbolizing the part African Americans played in building the South. “They not only provided the economic foundation, but also literally built it,” McInnis says, adding that Logan is engaged in an “ongoing conversation and dialogue with the past.”

Both artists show that what is at the heart of understanding the 19th century in the antebellum South is the understanding of race and slavery, she says. Over time we construct “narratives to serve contemporary concerns and change surrounding these topics. Memories and ideas are not fixed, but changing.”

McInnis will explore these shifting constructs of memory in her upcoming book, Remembering the Revolution: Pictures, Politics and Memory. Her interest in the divergent ways in which the North and South remember the American Revolution, especially with the approach of the Civil War, grew directly out of her research for the exhibition. Perceptions of iconic images and representations — such as Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” — have changed over time, in terms of how both the image and the event itself are viewed. That change helps us understand how contemporary cultural politics shaped the evolution of our key American myths, McInnis says.

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Maurie McInnis’ research has focused on the cultural history of American art in the colonial and antebellum South, particularly on the material culture of Charleston, S.C. Her publications in this field include In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740–1860 (University of South Carolina Press for the Gibbes Museum of Art exhibition, 1999) and The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). The Politics of Taste has received such diverse honors as the South Carolina Historical Society’s George C. Rogers Jr. Award for the best book of South Carolina history, the Society of Architectural Historians’ Spiro Kostof Book Award for a work related to architectural history that has made the greatest contribution to understanding of historical development and change, and the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award for the best book on material culture in North America. Her current book project, Remembering the Revolution: Pictures, Politics and Memory, explores the shifting meanings of the American Revolution in the 19th century and the cultural constructions of memory.