Presented by Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art
Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair, Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles

Projections of different ideas of innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive” identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated, while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US community in Paris.

More information and YouTube link: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/the-terra-lectures-in-american-art-performing-innocence-primitive-/-incipient