Fragments Tell a Story of Pain and Pride

PHILADELPHIA — By now the question that frames a new $14 million exhibition opening on Thursday at the National Constitution Center here is one that shouldn’t have to be asked and should have already been fully answered. It comes from the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, to whom the first gallery in this large exhibition is devoted — the only black intellectual or writer to get such attention: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”

This show, which ranges over 13,000 square feet and will continue a 10-city, 4-year tour after it leaves here in May, answers Du Bois with a ringing affirmation of black centrality. It isn’t just that blacks in America have made important contributions to a country that in significant numbers forcibly absorbed African slaves and forcibly resisted absorbing their descendants, but that the history of America and the history of America’s blacks are inseparable. They are so intertwined as to become aspects of a single identity in which neither strand can be considered in isolation. “America,” the exhibition says in its title, “I Am.”

It is astonishing to think that a half-century ago such an idea would have seemed alien to much historical interpretation and would have also been posed with a mixture of anxious aggression. This transformation in historical understanding was one of the most important of the 20th century. Now, it is so mainstream that this show, “America I Am: The African American Imprint,” is actually a commercial enterprise created by the television personality and author Tavis Smiley along with Arts and Exhibitions International (whose last great success was the 2007 touring King Tut exhibition). The Cincinnati Museum Center, with which the show’s executive producer, John Fleming, is associated, was also involved.

This commercial aspect also means that there is some emphasis on spectacle, creating gallery environments to evoke the black experience in the United States, complete with sound effects and lighting. There is much focus too on the overall outline rather than analytic details. That is both the show’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/arts/design/15impr.html?th&emc=th