Love for the lost: A small exhibit at the Weisman reimagines a moment of Black history
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Eight portraits hang in a small gallery at the Weisman Art Museum. They are painted in sepia tones, giving them the appearance of an old family photograph.
From their oval gilded frames, the people — children, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers — stare back.
On the surface of the paintings is superimposed text, like from a torn newspaper clipping.
One says, “Buchanan and Martha Child: These two children have not been seen by their mother since 1861. They were sold to some man in North Carolina or South Carolina.”
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Another: “Geo Gardiner desires information in regard to his father Jacob Gardiner, who was a slave belonging to Thomas G. Gardiner.”
Artist Christopher E. Harrison and curator JoJo Bell, both of Minneapolis, stand in the gallery. They say it was important for the paintings to look archival.
“It looks kind of like a scrapbook, which was my intention, to look like something from someone’s actual personal archive of family historical portraits,” Harrison says.
This series is part of the “Seeking for the Lost” exhibition now on view at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. The people in the portraits are based on ads placed in the former St. Paul newspaper The Appeal, which operated from 1885 to 1924. It is one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in Minnesota.
The newspaper ran a column called “Seeking for the Lost,” which printed ads for people from across the country, who were searching for loved ones and family members who had gone missing during slavery through the post-Reconstruction period.
Harrison painted the portraits over the past year. He says it was an emotional process. It brought up an experience from a few years ago.
Harrison visited the plantation in Virginia where his grandmother lived. He recalls the intensity of the trip, but also said it was special.
“It was a connection where I came from, and I hope that as people come in here, they can think about their history and their families and what brought them to this place in time,” Harrison says.
Painting this series is reclaiming the archive, Harrison says.
“This is about imagining these people’s lives, and in that we pay homage to them,” Harrison said. “We’re kind of remembering them and giving them life once again.”
Harrison was brought into the project by the Minneapolis-based curator JoJo Bell who discovered the column while doing research. She says the ads were mostly printed in the 1880s and 1890s.
“I’m usually looking for narratives that are kind of novel regarding Black Minnesota history or things that people hadn’t heard of,” said Bell. “I use The Appeal for research … every time I go to it I come back to this column. Personally, it’s emotional.”
Bell is also the director of the African American Interpretive Center of Minnesota.
“We focus on history, but sometimes art really collides with our work, too, and I thought it’d be great to have someone kind of reimagine the people from the ads as a way of reclaiming their identity,” she says.
The portraits are not of the actual people, Harrison and Bell caution; rather Harrison used Reconstruction-era photos as reference along with his imagination.
“It was really about intuition, what I felt these people could have looked like,” Harrison said. “My goal was to find pictures that had some emotion to them, or you could maybe see something in their eyes.”
Harrison said it was important to show the different roles Black people played in society at the time through their attire. To show “different stations of people. Not just people who worked in the field or people who worked in the kitchen, but there were people who were serving in the army. There were children; there were seniors.”
The exhibition also touches on the movement for literacy in Black communities after slavery was abolished, which newspapers like The Appeal played a role in, Bell says.
“The literacy tie is important because this is printed in a newspaper, right? You had to be able to read to understand what was going on in it,” Bell says. “That becomes really important to Black people in this period.”
Both Bell and Harrison say the project has taught them about the role of family in Black communities.
“After Emancipation and into the post-Reconstruction period, [family] was a center of power for them and a way to kind of reclaim their identity as well,” Bell says.
They also point to the upcoming exhibition at the Weisman, “Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War,” and how these shows can be taken in dialogue with each other.
The Walker exhibition will feature 15 large-scale prints that consider the “experiences of racism and violence against African Americans that were absent or only alluded to in dominant historical presentations of the Civil War.” These will be juxtaposed with engravings by 19th-century American artist Winslow Homer that ran in Harper’s Weekly.
Bell says both exhibitions explore the theme of reimagining Blackness.
“It’s really important too because we don't often associate enslavement with the North, but obviously it impacted us in many different ways,” Bell says.
“Seeking for the Lost” is on view through Feb. 16, 2025. Bell and Harrison will host a “Paint & Listen” event at the museum Oct. 16.
