Specters in the Museum
Specters in the Museum
In the 19th century,
Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Schomberg, began a public archive of black history centering the African diaspora and highlighting the counternarratives of those who share this ancestry to provide corrective experiences and share ways in which black histories have significantly contributed to sociopolitical movements for hundreds of years.
In this article, you will find the story of Arturo’s curation of Juan de Pareja’s work and several other Afro-Hispanic artists whose work was preserved during the Golden Age in Spain.
Arturo traveled to Seville to search for black art in the recorded Spanish history. 150 years later, I discover I have the same questions and same longing for representation in histories of the past.
A full circle journey of the initiative of art history centering blackness, the predecessors of this work, and the ancestors who show up in essence in the margins of curated work aimed to erase histories.
Juan De Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter
Enslaved painter Juan de Pareja challenged narratives of biological inferiority and subjectivity of black bodies in the early 1600s at the height of the slave trade. Arturo Schomberg thought, If he could share these narratives and images maybe we could see the multiplicity of black individuals and begin to understand intersetionality.
