Exhibit changes narrative of Black glamour and couture

KYLIE MARSH | THE CHARLOTTE POST

The “A Legacy of Elegance” exhibit at UNC Charlotte Projective Eye Gallery in Center City places costumes designed by fiber artist Margarette Joyner is on display until July 18.

Historical depictions of African Americans, and people throughout the diaspora, tell a story of manual labor, physical hardship, and oppressive poverty.

“A Legacy of Elegance,” an exhibition at UNC Charlotte Center City’s Projective Eye Gallery, seeks to change that.

The exhibition, which opened in April, places costumes designed by fiber artist and playwright Margarette Joyner in conversation with archival photographs of America’s Black aristocracy, curated by historian Kimberly Annece Henderson. The show, arranged by gallery director Adam Justice, highlight the intersection of race, class and identity.

Joyner, an assistant professor of costume design at the UNCC College of Arts and Architecture, has over 10 years of experience in Georgia, Virginia, New York and Florida.

“It's rarely talked about how prominent and wealthy a lot of these African Americans were,” she said. “Whenever people are talking about history, they go straight to slavery. I think that's a deterrent for a lot of our young people. From what I gather teaching at UNCC, they don't think about it, even though it's a part of our history.”

The inspiration

Joyner’s garments are an interplay between traditional African prints and silhouettes and European embellishments inspired by two elites of African descent: Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a goddaughter of England’s Queen Victoria, and Joseph Bologne, a biracial violinist, composer, dancer, soldier and fencer.

Bonetta, originally named “Aina,” was believed to be a princess from the West African Yoruba Nation in 1843. She was held captive and meant to be a human sacrifice to honor the nobility of the kingdom of Dahomey, which benefited handsomely from trafficking Africans.

When England discouraged Dahomey to end the slave trade, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the British Royal Navy negotiated with Dahomey’s King Ghezo to release Aina to his care.

Forbes renamed the girl Sarah Forbes Bonetta after the ship they took back to England and introduced the young princess to Queen Victoria, who sent Bonetta to school in Sierra Leone, where she was an excellent student. Bonetta went on to marry James Pinson Labulo Davies, a Yoruba naval officer and capitalist.

Joseph Bologne was a biracial man born in Guadeloupe. His mother was enslaved to his father, plantation owner Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges. As a child, his prowess in fencing and violin lifted him to high society. He was appointed to Louis XIV’s elite army and was the first man of African descent to be honored in European music, playing and conducting at the Paris Opera.

“[The exhibition] looks at how elegant and how beautiful we have always been,” Joyner said “…We've always been a classy people, but what happens is, socially, we’re portrayed as less than. So, this is a way also to show that we’re more than what [other people] say we are.”

Getting people interested in their own personal histories was a goal of Kimberly Annece Henderson, who rediscovered her own connection to American chattel slavery when researching her family tree. It inspired her project “Emaline and ‘Nem,” named after an enslaved ancestor, on Instagram. She has also published a children’s book, “Dear Yesteryear,” which pairs poetry with similar photographs.

“There’s also a whole other world of Black people that were very wealthy, very well-off, and who are thriving during this time period,” Henderson said of Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War. “For me personally, it's also important that Black people see these photographs, because in essence, they're seeing a bit of themselves in history. They're seeing a different side of themselves in history that they might not be aware of; that they might have never learned that they might have never researched.”

For example, during the Gilded Age, there was a significant population of Black elite and healthy economic life in major metropolitan centers like New York and Philadelphia. She also pointed toward Black Wall Streets, like in Durham and Tulsa, Okla. Henderson says the photos tell this story.

“It's not like today – you’re not going in a store and just buying a dress off the rack. Dresses were made,” she said. “In some of the photographs, women have parasols that match their dresses. To think about the amount of wealth that took: them going to this decorated photo studio and having their portrait taken – and this is early photography – so it’s just really impactful for anybody to be seeing it.

“Thinking about my own experiences, if I was a young student in middle school, high school, whatever, and I saw these photographs, it would just be so inspiring.”

The work

Joyner is still unraveling historical threads behind traditional African wax prints she uses. More recently, she discovered that some prints use Javanese batik, a dyeing technique that originated in Indonesia.

Each print has its own meaning. For example, a brown garment with record disc pattern is of Ghanaian origin that means, "whatever you do, good or bad, can have an impact on those around you.” A blue medieval garment with hanging sleeves represents the back of the tortoise and stands for "resilience and protection."

A gold and brown gentleman's jacket is embellished with a “mudcloth,” of Malian origin and was considered attire for the powerful.

The gallery

UNCC Center City’s Projective Eye Gallery is in the Dubois Center. The Projective Eye Gallery is intended to showcase a range of work, sometimes by faculty or alumni of the college, and more often by artists from other places across the state, country, or even internationally. The exhibition closes July 16.

Comments