Library News

Archives & Special Collections' Images Help Create "A Picture Gallery of the Soul" at the University of Minnesota

As mentioned in our National Preservation Week blog post in April, XULA Archives & Special Collections sent photographs from its Arthur P. Bedou Photographs Collection to be featured in "A Picture Gallery of the Soul" at the University of Minnesota's Katherine E. Nash Gallery. Though the exhibition opened in September, photos from the reception were recently released and copies of the similarly titled exhibition catalog are in the process of being added to Xavier University of Louisiana's Archives. There is one month left to see the exhibition in person as it will be closing on December 10, 2022.

“Rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity, are painted.”

Frederick Douglass

The history of American photography and the history of Black American culture and politics are two interconnected histories. From the daguerreotypes made by Jules Lion in New Orleans in 1840 to the Instagram post of the Baltimore Uprising made by Devin Allen in 2015, photography has chronicled Black American life and Black Americans have defined the possibilities of photography. Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person and nationally prominent abolitionist, recognized the quick, easy and inexpensive reproducibility of photography. He presciently developed a theoretical framework for understanding the implications of photography on public discourse in a series of four lectures he delivered during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass was the subject of photographic portraits 160 times; he was the most photographed American of the 19th century.

This Katherine E. Nash Gallery, operated by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, exhibition presents a group of over 100 Black American artists whose work incorporates the photographic medium and samples a range of photographic expressions from traditional photography to mixed media and conceptual art spanning a timeframe that includes the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.  "A Picture Gallery of the Soul" honors, celebrates, investigates, and interprets Black history, culture, and politics in the United States. The exhibition title comes from the Lecture on Pictures, delivered by Frederick Douglass in Boston in 1861.

The exhibition catalog for A Picture Gallery of the Soul, published by Katherine E. Nash Gallery and the University of California Press, provides additional context on the connections between Black American history and culture and the photographic process, from its inception to the present day. The catalog includes a full-page image, caption, statement, and biography for each artist in the exhibition, and essays by Cheryl Finley, crystal am nelson, Seph Rodney, and Deborah Willis.

Generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Kate and Stuart Nielsen, Metropolitan Picture Framing, BluDot and The Givens Foundation for African American Literature, made the project possible.

"A Picture Gallery of the Soul" was organized by independent curator Herman J. Milligan, Jr. and Howard Oransky, Director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. The exhibition includes a display of related historical material curated by University Librarian Deborah Ultan and a program of recorded jazz music curated by Herman J. Milligan, Jr.

"A Picture Gallery of the Soul" is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Department of African American & African Studies, the Department of Art History, the Department of History, the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies Initiative, the Office for Public Engagement, the Imagine Fund, and the University Libraries, including the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African American Literature.