Introduction
By Adam Goodheart
The two and a half centuries of our College’s existence cover almost the exact same span as our country’s. In his remarkable new exhibition, gifted local artist Jason Patterson sheds fresh light on the ways that those two histories have intertwined, and on how the African American experience at Washington College reflects that in the nation as a whole. The works that he has created tell a story of slavery and segregation, but also one of struggle, strength, and achievement.
Some of the images are painful to look at — especially for those of us who love Washington College and have spent decades of our lives here. Others instill pride.
For the past two years, Jason Patterson has been working on this project with the support of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience — first with a Frederick Douglass Fellowship, later through Chesapeake Heartland, an African American humanities project born of a partnership between the Starr Center and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The project awarded a fellowship to him and Tara Gladden, Director and Curator of the Kohl Gallery, to complete this body of work. Patterson worked closely with Jaelon Moaney, a young writer and historian with deep roots in Kent County and Talbot County, Maryland.
The finished exhibition builds on research done at the Starr Center and elsewhere at Washington College over the past two decades, as students, faculty, and staff have explored the rich and complicated African American history at our institution and in our region. That work has gained fresh momentum and urgency throughout the College in recent months, as our nation as a whole has faced a moment of reckoning — reckoning that we hope will lead not just to reconciliation, but to the righting of deep-seated wrongs.
Patterson’s work as a visual artist is fundamentally about frames: literally, the ornate wooden enclosures, deliberately evoking 19th-century formal portraiture, that he spends months painstakingly crafting by hand. There is a powerful metaphor at work here, of course. We, the viewers, are compelled to ask: What images of the past have traditionally been considered “suitable for framing” … and why? Just as important, who does the framing? Frames are often treated as neutral, almost invisible. Yet in many ways, the boundaries that they impose upon an image are the most essential element of that artwork — and a blunt assertion of power by the image’s creator or owner.
In this exhibition, the framing — literal and otherwise — has been done by two people who do not resemble the traditional framers of Washington College’s history. In the hands of a thoughtful young artist of color, collaborating with a talented young historian of color, our institution’s past turns out to look very different.
No doubt each of us who views the exhibition will be tempted to quickly reimpose our own frames upon the history it depicts. Such is human nature. But perhaps we will learn and grow the most — both as individual humans and as an institution — if we resist doing that, and instead pay this art the respect of meeting it on its own terms, in its own frames.
I believe that teaching students to study the past in all its diversity and complexity, its darkness and light, is among the highest callings of the liberal arts. History cannot be changed, but it can be — it must be — framed, reframed, and then framed again. If Washington College is to stay true to its deepest principles, that is essential work. This exhibition by Jason Patterson is an important step on a difficult journey, and I am proud of the role that the Starr Center has played in its creation.