Helen Epstein- Editor's comments on Jamaica Kincaid's presentation where she selected a snapshot of her mother to display instead of a famous painting:
I was in my forties and listening to West Indian writer Jamaica
Kincaid speaking at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, when
I suddenly perceived their absence (like Pnina Motzafi-Haller in
her essay about mizrahi women in Israel,I applied the insight of an
African-American woman to my own life).
African-American woman to my own life).
Jamaica Kincaid had done a brilliant and audacious thing: invited to choose her favorite painting at the museum and speak to a large audience about the reasons for her choice, she had beamed an old snapshot of her mother on themuseum’s large screen and talked about it.
All of us in the audience, of course, had been accustomed to viewing
the parade of art history on such a screen – from the Greeks to the
Renaissance masters to the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists .
We were accustomed to oil portraits and elaborately framed photographs.
The effect of Kinkaid’s snapshot was shocking and
made the author’s point more forcefully than her words:
Had we ever seen the image ofan ordinary West Indian woman on the walls of a museum? Had we ever contemplated her face? Her body? Her surroundings? Her life?
How did we ascribe value to this snapshot when it was viewed in a
private photo album, in a newspaper, or here, in the context of other
portraits in the museum? We had all read or at least heard of Ralph
Ellison’s
case, what about an entire sub-culture usually hidden by the majority
African-American minority culture?
Link to introduction
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