Director’s Foreword

Fogelman, Peggy

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Director’s Foreword

Peggy Fogelman

Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent

~I am proud to introduce this catalogue of Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, exploring the story of two men, model and artist, black and white against the background of a city and a country undergoing profound social upheaval at that time. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew them both. She, and the drawings Sargent gave her,...

Author

Peggy Fogelman

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21899

Director’s Foreword

I am proud to introduce this catalogue of Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, exploring the story of two men, model and artist, black and white against the background of a city and a country undergoing profound social upheaval at that time. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew them both. She, and the drawings Sargent gave her, link our museum to this previously overlooked episode of local history and the relationship forged in the artist’s studio that yielded two of the Boston-area’s civic monuments, the murals in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard’s Widener Library.

Thomas Eugene McKeller moved to Boston in the first decade of the twentieth century and found work in the city’s service industry, as did many of his contemporaries. His departure from Wilmington came several years after the ratification of North Carolina’s first Jim Crow laws in 1899.1North Carolina Jim Crow Laws 1899–1919, created by the Digital Humanities History and Methods course, UNC-Chapel Hill. This project served as a pilot for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance which “aims to create a corpus of over 100 years of NC session laws and to discover Jim Crow laws using text analysis.” He left behind not only the legislation of racial segregation that permeated every facet of daily life but also an increasingly dangerous environment that posed the constant threat of brutal and unprovoked violence against young black men.

The traces that McKeller left of his life in Boston are scarce. Our team of authors, to whom I am deeply grateful, has scoured the archives, pressing the limits of what the documentary record may reveal of a person’s life. Such difficult and creative work aspires to that of Saidiya Hartman, whose magnificently researched and beautifully written Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval explores the experiences of black women living at the margins of convention in early twentieth century New York and Philadelphia. Like theirs, much is missing from McKeller’s story. Our authors have drawn on many sources—including institutional archives, family histories, and interviews—to try to imagine the richness of his experiences, from artist’s model to veteran, to lover, and beyond.

This exhibition inaugurates a new chapter in the history of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It is the first to focus on images of a black man and the first to address the history of African American experience in Boston. We believe that we have a responsibility to explore our complex past to shed light on our equally complex present, inclusive of marginalized individuals whose voices have not been reflected in traditional histories. I am pleased to engage with these difficult and delicate subjects. We thank our community partners, both within the city and beyond, who have helped us to shape multiple narratives. This project raises questions of race and identity as relevant to Gilded Age Boston as they are today. Artists Adam Pendleton and Lorraine O’Grady offered contemporary responses with their thoughtful installations in the Fenway Gallery and on the Museum’s Façade. I thank them both for their remarkable contributions and willingness to participate in the accompanying public programs.

This exhibition would not have been possible without our institutional lenders. Above all my thanks go to the Museum of Fine Arts and its director Matthew Teitelbaum who has supported us from the beginning. Thanks are also due to the former director of the Boston Athenaeum Elizabeth Barker and its current management for their ongoing commitment to the exhibition. Finally I would like to thank Nathaniel Silver, who conceived the exhibition and publication and carefully brought them both into being over three years in collaboration with Education staff and in ongoing dialogue with our community partners.

We are most grateful to the lead funders of this exhibition Amy and David Abrams, Bank of America, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, Chauncey & Marion D. McCormick Family Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Peggy Fogelman
Norma Jean Calderwood Director

1 North Carolina Jim Crow Laws 1899–1919, created by the Digital Humanities History and Methods course, UNC-Chapel Hill. This project served as a pilot for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance which “aims to create a corpus of over 100 years of NC session laws and to discover Jim Crow laws using text analysis.” »

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