Hutchins Center Art Collection
Selections from the Hutchins Center's Art Collection
The Hutchins Center has a robust art collection consisting of contemporary works and historic objects related to the study and display of African American and Afro-Latin American culture. This collection is managed by Locke Gallery staff and selections are on display in the Hutchins Center office spaces. To learn more about the collection, contact us at lockegallery@fas.harvard.edu. To set up a visit to the Hutchins Center, reach out to hutchinscenter@fas.harvard.edu.
Please note that the Locke Gallery does not provide appraisal, auction, or consignment services.
Dawoud Bey (c. 1953), Young Man, West 127th Street (from Harlem Redux), 2015
Ed. 2/6 archival pigment photograph
40 x 48” (101.6 x 121.9 cm)
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
30 years after the first series, Dawoud Bey revisits his work in Harlem Redux. Dawoud Bey's first Harlem photography series premiered at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Shot entirely in black and white, Bey illustrates the liveliness of the city streets through his delicate portrayal of the residents, their daily habits, their relationships, and how they make Harlem home. In a stunning use of his own artwork for the contribution to visual history, Bey returns to Harlem 30 years later to reprise his original project with Harlem Redux. His photographs chart the effects of general change over time and the more pointed, sociopolitically motivated acts of gentrification inflicted upon the neighborhood of Harlem. This time, he shoots in full digital color. There is empathy for his subjects in his photographic eye, made visible in the way he captures the familiar usage of chain-link fences to sell the contents of one’s wardrobe, or to observe the way construction barriers, containers and keep-out signs barricade a man in his own neighborhood.
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953), Clothes and Bag for Sale (from Harlem Redux), 2016
Archival pigment photograph
40 x 48” (101.6 x 121.9 cm)
Image © Dawoud Bey, Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
"Harlem Redux was my first work in which the human subject became less prominent, but the series’s increased focus on environment was a response to the disruptive changes taking place around those subjects. Gentrification and global capital are transforming the physical and social landscape of the largely black and brown community that has long resided in Harlem. It is now a community that has both subsidized Section 8 housing and ten-million-dollar condominium apartments—sometimes on the same block. I wanted to visualize that tension and transformation—to visualize the erasure of cultural and geographical memory—as it was taking place." - Dawoud Bey
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Sugar/Bittersweet
Originally installed at the Smith Museum of Art in Northampton, MA
Gift of Richard D. Cohen
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Sugar/Bittersweet is a sculptural, atmospheric spatial work comprised of 25 antique spears installed on small stools, decorated with condensed sugar and resin-cast 'donuts'. Created by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons in 2010, it is a deeply introspective work in which the artist explores her connection to the greater Cuban history of sugar processing mills. The work is large, complicated to assemble, and voluminous - it occupies an entire room. The enormity of its presence is directly proportional to the painstaking efforts it took to create; Campos-Pons took inspiration for the sugar 'donuts' from the Cuban 'Panela' brand unrefined, condensed sugar discs. As explained in the image below, these discs are created by boiling and evaporating sugar cane juice to separate it from the sugar granules. To recreate these discs for Sugar/Bittersweet, Campos-Pons employed her signature glassblowing craftsmanship and created a mold from the Panela discs to cast copies in green glass, black glass, and sugar.
Campos-Pons follows the nebulous current of memory through the creation of liminal spaces like Sugar/Bittersweet, in which she contends with the sordid history of the Cuban sugar mill industry and her relationship to it in a childhood spent living in a former sugar mill plantation.
"I have had the pleasure of studying and working with Magda for many, many years and it was an honor to include her installation, Sugar/Bittersweet, in Nine Moments for Now. Magda has a keen sense of history and her work provides incisive commentary on the long-lasting impact of sugar plantations and chattel slavery not only on Cuba but also the world. Her use of materials, color and form leave the viewer with not only beautiful experiences but also with space for reflecting upon the profound ways that colonization has shaped the Americas."
-Dell M. Hamilton, curator
Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2011
Found rugs and mixed media
109 x 32 x 24” (276.86 x 81.28 x 60.96 cm)
Gift of Richard D. Cohen, 2013
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
"The individual body has a memory, and so do collective bodies, retaining a longer and longer list of names — Eric Garner on Staten Island, Michael Brown in Missouri, Trayvon Martin in Florida and so many more innocent black people who have suffered violence and death at the hands of police — within it. But that day in 1992, hurrying back to his studio with a cart full of twigs and setting out to build a sculpture from them, Cave had no idea that the result would be a garment.
“At first, it didn’t occur to me that I could wear it; I wasn’t thinking about it.” When he finally did put it on and moved around, it made a sound. “And that was the beginning,” he says. “The sound was a way of alarming others to my presence. The suit became a suit of armor where I hid my identity. It was something ‘other.’ It was an answer to all of these things I had been thinking about: What do I do to protect my spirit in spite of all that’s happening around me?” Throughout the Soundsuits’ countless iterations, Cave has tinkered with their proportions, thinking about the shapes of power, constructing forms that recall a pope’s miter or the head of a missile. Some of them are 10 feet tall."
- An excerpt from the New York Times' The Greats series: Nick Cave
Peter Sacks, Six by Six (Slaver Logbook), 2013
18th and 19th Century European fabrics (linens, shroud materials, prison shirt, fishnet, lacework), African fabrics, manual typewritten Ink, handwritten ink, oil paint, acrylic, archival adhesives
72 x 72” (182.88 x 182.88 cm)
Gift of the artist, 2016
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
At an arresting six by six feet, Slaver Logbook presents layers of history comprised of ephemera of the era. European linens, shroud materials, prison shirts, fishnets, and lacework are permanently fused into another entity entirely by a unifying bright white paint. It becomes a canvas on which Sacks uses manual typewritten ink to copy out inventory lists from 18th century slaver ship logbooks. Working carefully around uplifted crests of hardened lace and permanent wrinkles of prison shirts, the text scrawls across the canvas like a confession. Disparate elements of history are brought sharply to us by tactile representations--the daily accessories of people before us are repurposed by Sacks to make the cruel humanity of the slave trade unignorable.
"As Sacks adds each new layer, he feels the presence of the materials he has buried, as though history itself is pressing upward. Sometimes he sets fire to the topmost layer, singeing its surface and revealing what’s below. His completed paintings, which have been acquired by institutions ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Constitutional Court of South Africa, often have seven or eight layers. Their striated depth, like that of an archeological site, suggests the accretions of civilizations."
- Joshua Rothman, on Peter Sacks
Yinka Shonibare, Food Faerie, 2010
Mixed media: mannikin, Dutch wax
46.47 x 47.25 x 38.13” (118.03 x 120.02 x 96.85 cm)
Gift of Richard Cohen, August 2012
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
The Food Fairy is a winged child wearing a leather strap backpack filled with mangos. The child's hands are curled, palms upward, as if leaping into flight. By dressing the child in a traditional Victorian England and Dutch upper middle class dress using textile pattern designed by Shonibare, the artist alludes to the colonization of West Africa by the English. This sculpture invites us to explore the history of identity as comprised of a combination of capitalist market demand and the mythology & folklore of colonized cultures.
The Cooper Gallery chose to incorporate Food Fairy into its Permanent Collection in large part because of the sculpture's shrewd acknowledgement of the impact that an imperialist market has had on the development of modern culture.
"But actually, the fabrics are not really authentically African the way people think. They prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own. And it’s the fallacy of that signification that I like. It’s the way I view culture – it’s an artificial construct."
- Yinka Shonibare
Ming Smith, Universal Consciousness with Alice Coltrane (Right) 1999 Print, 2016
45 x 72” (114.3 x 182.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
About Universal Consciousness - Have you ever listened to "Universal Consciousness" by Alice Coltrane? For those who are unfamiliar with the series of chaotic interruptions that comprise improvisational jazz, all five minutes of the song will surprise you. Ming Smith combines her introspective photographic style with an expressive array of red, green, white, and black layered paint strokes to capture the simultaneous explosiveness and nuance of Coltrane's work in Universal Consciousness with Alice Coltrane. The choice to print in large scale allows the viewer to enter the surrealist landscape and join the light blue figure of the nude woman in the lower left corner of the work as she wades, knee deep, through the cosmic pool that Smith has summoned for her. The blue woman wanders thoughtfully through her surroundings as we do through Universal Consciousness, guiding us through the reflection on a work which perfectly marries sight and sound on the canvas.
Howard Tangye (b. 1948), Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 2016
Mixed media: oil pastel and graphite on paper
30 x 48” (76.5 x 122 cm)
Courtesy of the artists and Amar Gallery
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Cameroon Grasslands, Man’s Prestige Hat, 20th Century
Woven cotton
8 x 8.75 x 8.75” (20 x 22 x 22 cm)
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Ndebele Apron, 19th Century
Beads, fibers, mixed media
29.5 x 26.5 x 2.75” (74.93 x 67.31 x 6.99 cm)
Courtesy of Florence Ladd
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Women wear Ndebele aprons to denote reaching a particular stage in their adult life. Created traditionally by the mother-in-law, a woman will don her jocolo initially upon marriage and afterwards, only on special occasions. A jocolo is characterized by thousands of small white-and-color seed beads meticulously woven onto animal skin canvas. The five finger-like panels are representative of the hope that she will bear children.
South Africa, Zulu Hat, Ca. 1950s
Fabric, human hair, red pigment
Width: 18” (46 cm)
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Unrecorded artist from the Yaka people, Bicorn headdress, early 20th century
Glass beads, wood, cotton thread applied to a basketry frame
6.5 x 12.5 x 11” (17 x 32 x 28 cm)
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection
Unrecorded Yoruba artist, Beaded Crown, 20th century
Hand-crafted beads
13 x 8 x 8” (33 x 20 x 20 cm)
The Hutchins Center Permanent Collection