Thinking Archivally: Keep-saving and Black Feminist Futurity

As a powerful current discourse in Black Studies, Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” calls for a necessary speculation on what might have been, imagining alternate historical narratives out of archival lacunae. In twentieth-century art history, we might look at the problem of historical erasure from the perspective of archival capaciousness. As part of the project of reimagining history, black women artists and critics such as Lorraine O’Grady, Camille Billops, Gylbert Coker and Judith Wilson saved, kept, arranged, and sorted scores of paperwork relevant to their own practices and that of their peers. Such actions not only helped ensure the survival of their own creative work, but also shows that their artistic networks were alive and established. In the earlier moment of the 1940s, artist/choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Thelma Johnson Streat created dance performances and paintings out of intensive anthropological research on Caribbean art, culture, ritual, and folklore—a process that could also be seen, from an interpretive standpoint, as an archival practice of retaining and reinterpreting Africanisms. My paper asks how the intellectual and creative labor of archiving as extended by black women makers can inform teaching African American art, by pushing teachers and students to think archivally. To do this would entail seeing archives as not merely a passive reception of the past, but an active ordering of a future one wants to see—a perspective that orients how we can
similarly shape new, ethical narratives of art history.