Sylvia Hill Williams
Sylvia Louise Hill Williams graduated from Oberlin in 1957[i], likely one of few Black Women to have achieved a BA in Art History from a predominately white institution at that time.[ii] She went on to create a career for herself in museum curation and directorship, within the field of African Arts. Although not much has been written about Williams, her tenure as director of the National Museum of African Arts is often credited with playing a large role in shifting the (“western”) study of African Arts to become less objectifying, anthropological, and “ancient,” and more scholarly, contemporary, and concerned with aesthetics.
In his 1996 “Tribute to Sylvia Williams” delivered at her funeral, African American Art scholar David Driskell said that “she gave meaning to the salient voice for the art of Africa here in a strange land. How I may hear the voice of my ancestors in a strange land.[iii] Driskell ends his Eulogy with “Welcome home. Africa is an eternal beginning. We are no longer strangers heer so long as our art accompanies us on our timeless journey.”[iv] Sylvia Williams is widely regarded as among the most important African Art scholars, yet the implications of her work extended from the realm of African art, unto all realms of African diaspora arts, culture, study, and liberation.
Although there is no evidence that Williams understood her work as being particularly radical or political, I argue that Williams’ work operated within revolutionary frameworks of decolonization. Through speeches, acquisitions, and curation, Williams often hinted towards an epistemologically unique study of African Art, which both challenged the colonial lens through which it was most often viewed at the time, and contributed to the radical and empowering tradition of African diasporic art.
In 1983 Sylvia Williams became the director of the National Museum of African Arts.[v] The Museum had been established in 1964 as a private museum in a single townhouse in Washington DC.[vi] For the first two decades of the museum’s history, it was inseparable from Warren Robbins, the founder and director of the Museum. Robbins was an art collector whose interest in African Art began in his work as a cultural affairs officer for the US Department of State. While this position never brought him to the continent of Africa, while working in Germany Robbins bought many African masks and textiles. The museum was decorated with paintings of jungles and animals to look like “Africa” (where Robbins wouldn’t travel to until 1973) and displayed masks, textiles, paintings, and other objects, curated more around what Robbins saw as aesthetic similarities than scholarly study.[vii] In a speech Williams gave in 1991, she speaks of this type of constructed aesthetic context, “the imposition of our own aesthetic predilections, if not curbed, could bring us dangerously close to promoting a new kind of exoticism that is just as flawed as it was in the 19th century.”[viii]
In the late 1970s Robbins pursued the nationalization of his museum so as to secure funding going forward, and in 1983 it became a Smithsonian museum with Sylvia Hill Williams as its director. Williams oversaw the construction of a $73 million iceberg-like building and with it utterly changed the purpose and presentation of the museum.[ix]
From the very first exhibitions in the new building, Sylvia H. Williams transformed the institution to become much more rigorous and scholarly. The museum debuted with five simultaneous and original shows, built largely not from the 5,000 object catalog which Robbins had built over the years, but rather new acquisitions, and objects on loan from African museums. The shows focused on the intimacy of pre-industrial African utilitarian objects, on the changing aesthetics and meanings of sculptures from Benin, on conceptions of time within African art, and many other subjects.[x]
Where Robbins had presented objects within vibrantly colored jungle painted rooms and speakers playing “African music,” Williams utilized in some ways a more conventional approach to presentation. In some sense Williams’ approach to African Art museum installation was more closely within the archetypes and aesthetics of contemporary Western museum exhibitions. The presentation modes that she used were congruous with many other museums, which thus made the mark of the museum and curator less visible on the work itself. Likewise, by presenting objects within their own display boxes, without murals or music playing, the object exists within its own context, and the viewer is asked to interact more intimately with it.[xi] Williams took art that was largely meant to be experienced in a home, on a dancer’s body, or collectively outside, and brought it inside of a cold, carefully assembled box. This recontextualization, which grapples with the colonial lens rather than employing it in a fetishizing trope, was the beginning of the practice of recontextualization, which has become a major part of African art curation, study, and creation since Williams.[xii][xiii]
Prior to this, African Art had been presented in one of a few ways in the US. There was the Warren Robbins approach; construct an experiential. This employed colonial tropes which have been used to misrepresent Africa is a unicultural, uncivilized, jungle continent, while it is of course impossible to reproduce the contexts of historical ancient objects within the capital of an imperialist and colonialist nation. Cabinets of Curiosities -which Sylvia Williams points out as an important part of the history of Western African art study- were rooms, buildings, or cabinets full of “curiosities” such as fossils, preserved animal fetuses, animal specimens, plants, and non-European art.[xiv] In these cabinets African art was viewed as the creations of a primitive race, and thus its aesthetic values were curiosities in and of themselves, with the same inherent value as a two headed monkey skeleton.
Williams’ decision to present these exhibitions within the aesthetics of the modern museum were thus quite radical. She presented work not as a curiosity, or with a fraught attempt at creating context, but rather as art worth spending time with, and studying. This elevated the pieces within the collection from being understood as amusing remnants of colonized societies to beautiful and inspiring pieces made by master artists.
This elevation was mirrored in Sylvia’s acquisitionship. From her time as associate curator of the Brooklyn Museum -where she had completely reinstalled the museum's African Art component- Williams had been extremely highly regarded for her “eye” for objects.[xv] Williams took acquiring objects to be an art form unto itself, and one which required research, travel, and lots of time. Upon arriving at the NMAfA, Williams found that the museum’s collection of 5,000 objects were largely what she considered to be commercial, even touristic works. The kind which cost $30 a piece (as the first objects which the museum were founded on did). One of the first masterpieces Williams acquired was a $375,000 Yoruba wood carving.[xvi] Prior even to being selected as director, Williams was consulted by the staff about purchasing a carved door from a collector in Manhattan.[xvii] Upon visiting the collectors, she quickly recognized the door as being an object made for tourists, which she believed had no place in a museum. This was an 180 degree turn for an institution whose first collection was purchased by a tourist.
This reconfiguring of the NMAfA turned (from Western eyes) African Art into something worth studying on its own, away from colonialist tropes, and within the tropes, aesthetics, stories, and histories of the specific cultures which objects come from.
Sylvia backed up this new approach to context with a vastly improved research library. An indispensable part of the new building was a library which housed hundreds of thousands of images, as well as ethnographies, journals, and oral histories.[xviii] This was not just a much greater and more thorough library than had been in the previous building but was unparalleled in the West. The library alone made the NMAFA the greatest institution for studying African art and culture outside of the continent itself.
The material conditions of the institution were reflected in her larger vision for museums in a changing world. In a speech delivered at the Critic’s Conference at the National Gallery of Art in 1991 Williams declared that “the world of Academia must change. Non-Western visual traditions must be taught at all levels. There is an urgent need for young art historians and critics to develop a methodological framework… free of jargon and that is built upon the realities of the culture concerned.”[xix]
Building from the realities of the culture concerned, Williams’ curated around the historical specificities of specific tribes and communities, rather than states and regions which were colonial constructs. This decolonial approach affected not just geographic curation, but temporal selections as well. In a speech at the MIT council of Arts in 1993 Williams built off of contemporary African Art scholar Salah M Hassan’s work, and stated that “these divisions [contemporary versus traditional or modern versus traditional] are created by the colonizing structure in Africa, and it is equally rooted in the epistemological roots of African art scholarship which is basically Eurocentric.”[xx] Williams used slides showing African Art objects from the 1920s through 90s to argue that the construction of “modernity” largely comes from European industrial traditions. A small version of these speech was included as part of Williams’ funeral services, securing decolonial work as a central part of her legacy.[xxi]
Williams used curation, presentation, and acquisitions to declare a level of seriousness and rigour which African Art had not yet been afforded in the West. By pairing this with a library, she created an institution unlike any other, which called for the scholarly study (as well as general public’s appreciation) of African Art. Further, to be able to study African Art, within a building solely devoted to African Art, creates more opportunities to understand this art outside of a colonial framework.
In addition to it’s excellent and cutting edge curation and archives, the National Museum of African Art under Williams’ guidance also created programs for the museum to be utilized by more communities outside of the academy. In a 1986 article with Washington Woman, published shortly before the opening of the new NMAfA, Williams describes these programs: “‘we have been changing, experimenting for three years -ever since I’ve come- trying out some innovative programs… sending programs and staff to senior citizens as well as schools, inviting genuine Griots (West African musician/storytellers)... and conducting African craft workshops.”[xxii] At a 1993 seminar delivered at American University, Williams said that the NMAFA as a centrally and uniquely educational institution, in a way different from other museums.[xxiii] At a speech given at the Friends Central School, where Williams attended middle and high school, Williams describes five major “fractures” by which Americans find each other at odds or are marginalized; “regional, color, class, gender, generational.”[xxiv] Educational institutions, according to Williams, are at the frontline of dealing with these fractures. It should be noted that it was not until the 1980s ‘90s that museums in the US generally began to view education as an important role for them to fulfill.[xxv] Williams recognized however that the connection of Black people to African Art has a larger potential than purely educational, as in an interview with the Evening Whirl in 1988 Williams stated that “Obviously, Black Americans have a special historical link with Africa. It’s a patrimony we can’t track or trace, person by person, but we know it’s there. The minute a Black American comes through that door, he or she is thinking about that patrimony.”[xxvi]
This decolonial framework has implications not just for the study of African art, but for African diasporic, and American work as well. In the academic and institutional realms, scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith[xxvii], Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang[xxviii], Nick Estes[xxix], and Vivian May[xxx], as well as others, have proposed and built histories of colonized peoples which build traditions of resistance, intelligence, and success based on sovereign conceptions of success.
Outside of the academy, there is a long tradition of Black Americans using museums, galleries, and exhibitions by and for their own community. As Betty Collier-Thomas observes, “Black people in America, from the arrival of the very first black person to the present have sought ways to celebrate and give recognition to their African and Afro-American heritage.”[xxxi] Collier-Thomas goes on to show how in the early 1800s Black churches and schools often exhibited art made by their community, and small fairs exhibiting art, -often about revolutionaries like Nat Turner and Toussaint L'ouverture-needlework, and crafts as well as agricultural products were organized by black people. The art from these fairs and exhibitions, as well as growing Black literary organizations in the late 1800s built the archives of institutions like Howard and Fisk university, which would go on to support many more Black artists.
These two traditions; of decolonial research, and community grown cultural exhibitions and archives build structures of community support, celebration, and radical history-telling. In other words, a potential structure in which colonized and displaced communities are able to materially support themselves, while celebrating explicitly revolutionary people and concepts.
[i] Janet Geli, The Washington Woman “Sylvia Williams: Great Expectations” November 21 1986. Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin OH.
[ii] Ann Sutherland Harris, “Women in Art Departments and Museums” Art Journal, Vol. 3 No. 4 Summer 1973, pp. 417-419.
[iii] David Driskells, “A Tribute to Sylvia Williams.” March 25 1996. Sylvia H. Williams Student File, Box 1 Series I, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin OH, pp. 1.
[iv] Ibid, pp. 5.
[v] Claudia Levy, “Sylvia H Williams Dies at 60,” Washington Post, February 29, 1996.
[vi] Irvin Molotsky, “Washington Talk: Smithsonian Institution; African Art, by Way of Germany”, New York Times, September 2, 1987.
[vii] Joe Holley “Museum of African Art Founder Warren Robbins”, Washington Post, December 5, 2008.
[viii] Sylvia H Williams, “Speech at Critics Conference at the National Gallery of Art”, October 24 1991. Box 4 Series II, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin OH.
[ix] Paul Goldberger, “Architecture View: A Smithsonian Dig Results in Two Museums.” New York Times, September 20 1987.
[x] Geli, “Sylvia Williams: Great Expectations.”
[xi] Sylvia Williams, Speech, “African Art: Responsibilities of Exhibiting and Collecting.” March 3rd 1993, RG 30/359 2003/001, Box, 4 Series VI,Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xii] “The Museum of African Art.” Art Education, Vol. 19, No. 2 Feb 1996, pp.12-16.
[xiii] Ekaterina Golovko, “Ontological Distances, Contemporary Art, African Masks, and Western Museums” Journal of Contemporary African Art, Vol. 44, May 2019.
[xiv] Sylvia H Williams, “Collecting History: Strategies of Developing the Collection of the National Museum of African Art” Speech, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City MO. February 26 1989 Box 4 Series II, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin OH.
[xv] Washington Post, September 28, 1987. Sylvia Williams Student File, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xvi] Paul Richard, “$375,000 For African Carving,” Washington Post, January 17, 1984, RG 30/359 2003/001 Box 1 Series II, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xvii] Charles Blitzer, Letter to Sylvia Williams, September 30 1982. Box I Series II Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio,
[xviii] Sylvia Williams, “Controversies and Conflicts in Education” Speech, American University.
February 1 1998, RG 30/359 2003/001, Box 4 Series VI, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, OH, USA.
[xix] Sylvia H. Williams, “Speech at Critics Conference at the National Gallery of Art,” 1991.
[xx] Sylvia Williams, Speech “Giving Birth to Brightness: African Art in the Post-Colonial World.” 1993, RG 30/359 2003/001, Box, 4 Series VI, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xxi] “Memorial Tribute for Sylvia H. Williams,” March 25 1996, RG 30/359 2003/001, Box 1 Series 1, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, OH.
[xxii] Geli, “Sylvia Williams: Great Expectations.”
[xxiii] Williams, Controversies and Conflicts in Education.
[xxiv] Sylvia Williams, A Conversation Friends’ Central School RG 30/359 2003/001, September 19th, 1992, Box, 4 Series VI, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xxv] Lisa C. Robert From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum. United States: Smithsonian, 2014.
[xxvi] Evening Whirl, St. Louis “A Glance at the Past and Looking into the Future” RG 30/359
2003/001 August 9 1988 Sylvia H Williams Student File, Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin, Ohio, USA.
[xxvii] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, (United Kingdom: Zed Books, 1999.)
[xxviii] Tuck, Eve & Yang, K “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” Decolonization Vol. 1 2012.
[xxix] Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline,
and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, (United Kingdom: Verso, 2019).
[xxx] Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2007).
[xxxi] Bettye Collier-Thomas “An Historical Overview of Black Museums and Institutions with Museum Functions 1800-1980” Negro History Bulletin Vol 44 No. 3 pp. 56-69. Summer 1981.