Isaac Julien’s new video installation, at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, plays on five double-sided screens in a darkened gallery with mirrored walls. The 30-minute film is visible no matter where you look.
,” a 1925 anthology that immortalized a small group of young writers—Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and others—as America’s first Black literary movement. But, if things had gone differently, he might have left an even deeper mark in the visual arts.
Locke proves an ideal subject for Julien, a recently knighted British artist and filmmaker whom the scholar Rinaldo Walcott has described as “the crown prince of Black queer cinema.” He’s known for his prismatic depictions of historical figures, often in elaborate multiscreen installations that mix archival video and dramatic reënactment. Many of his subjects are Black men—including Matthew Henson, Derek Walcott, and Frantz Fanon—and the aesthetics of Black masculinity are a preoccupation.
The Barnes, which commissioned the exhibition to celebrate its centennial, is pleased to frame it as a celebration of a pioneering interracial partnership. Yet Julien’s film slyly emphasizes the tensions between the two ambitious Philadelphians, particularly the difficulty, for Locke, of being instructed on his heritage by a notoriously self-regarding millionaire. Deflecting Barnes’s assertions with consummate politeness, he lays out his own theory in more solitary scenes.
The woman’s voice, though, does return, as a mysterious curator joins Locke in the museum’s labyrinth. She weaves excerpts from Aimé Césaire, Wole Soyinka, and others in a plaintive monologue expressing the incalculable losses colonialism inflicted on African peoples. Later, she reads from the diary of a British officer present at the 1897 sack of Benin City: “Juju houses to be blown up. Walls and houses to be knocked down. Queen mother’s house to be burnt.
In the nineteen-thirties, many took a dim view of Locke’s Africanism, which was decried as a concession to segregation. Black artists of the next generation, such as Romare Bearden, revolted against the “coddling and patronizing” white benefactors the older man had worked with; by contrast, the New Deal created more neutral sources of funding for Black artists through programs such as the W.P.A.
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