“Lessons of the Hour” (2019) is a 10-channel video installation about the life and work of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Julien’s nearly 30-minute video will be featured for the first time at MoMA alongside a select group of historical objects, including pamphlets of Douglass’s speeches, first editions of his memoirs, a facsimile of a rare manuscript laying out his ideas about photography, and photographic portraits of Douglass and his wife Anna Murray Douglass.
Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist who broke free from chattel slavery in 1838. He became one of the most important orators, writers, and international political leaders of the 19th century. The exhibition will open with historical materials that provide further insight into Douglass’s life and career, including a daguerreotype of Douglass by the 19th-century photography studio Southworth & Hawes, as well as several cartes de visite, and a specially designed wallpaper that features additional archival sources, such as newspaper clippings and magazine illustrations. Together, these materials reveal how Douglass’s image and ideas circulated in 19th-century America.
“Lessons of the Hour” is named after a speech that Douglass gave at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC, in 1894, a year before his death. In it, Douglass warned of lynchings and other disenfranchisements that enforced anti-Black racism. Julien alludes to this speech throughout the work. “Lessons of the Hour” also examines Douglass’s profound understanding of the potential of photographic portraiture to challenge racist tropes and advance the freedom and civil rights of Black Americans and subjugated peoples around the world. The work features re-imagined private scenes that depict Douglass and Anna Murray sitting for separate portraits in the studio of the prominent African American photographer J. P. Ball, and of Douglass delivering passages from a speech now known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (Rochester, 1852), as well as his “Lecture on Pictures” (Boston, 1861).
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