Homage to Sally Hemings

“Hindsight/Fore-sight: Art for the New Millennium” the University of Virginia, summer 2000
“Hindsight/Fore-sight: Art for the New Millennium” the University of Virginia.

Jill Hartz, University of Virginia Press: SITING JEFFERSON Contemporary Artists Interpret Thomas Jefferson's Legacy Jill Hartz
In the summer of 2000, the University of Virginia Art Museum mounted a site-specific exhibition called "Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium," for which twenty-four artists created public artworks addressing Thomas Jeffersons legacy “What does Jefferson-the man, his writings and actions-offer to new generations of Americans?”

Jill Hartz, University of Virginia Press: SITING JEFFERSON Contemporary Artists Interpret Thomas Jefferson's Legacy Jill Hartz
Artists included Agnes Denes, Ann Hamilton, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Michael Mercil, the Monacan Indian Council, Todd Murphy, Dennis Oppenheim, Lincoln Perry, and Lucio Pozzi;

Jill Hartz, University of Virginia Press: SITING JEFFERSON Contemporary Artists Interpret Thomas Jefferson's Legacy Jill Hartz
among the sites featured were Montpelier, Ash Lawn–Highland, the Monticello Visitors’ Center, area parks and schools, and the University of Virginia. Charlottesville, longtime home of Jefferson and site of the university he founded, served as an ideal location for the exhibition.

Jill Hartz, University of Virginia Press: SITING JEFFERSON Contemporary Artists Interpret Thomas Jefferson's Legacy Jill Hartz
I wanted something simple and poignant to underscore the importance of Sally Hemings. The dress form and the dress became the icon.

Todd Murphy, 2000

INFAMOUS BODIES Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights SAMANTHA PINTO The Romance of Consent

Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery copyright 2009

SITING JEFFERSON
Contemporary Artists Interpret Thomas Jefferson's Legacy
Jill Hartz

University Of Virginia Art Museum
cover Art Homage to Sally Heming's
Todd Murphy

Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery copyright 2009 TODD MURPHY'S MONUMENT TO SALLY HEMINGS SUMMER 2000.jpeg

INFAMOUS BODIES Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights SAMANTHA PINTO The Romance of Consent image page 89
Monument to Sally Hemings, Todd Murphy

“Sally Hemings in Visual Culture: A Radical Act of the Imagination?” Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery , 2009. Routledge
By Sharon Montieth

It has endurance and frailty built into its structure—its story is not one of event but of duration and of the duration of difference in the narration of human genetic material, material structures, built space, and urban design and development.

— Samantha Pinto
links to publications above on images and on source page
In many ways, it is about the difficult history of sexuality that Hemings’s presence brings up—enervating, dangerous, ravishing, ephemeral but also undeniably material.

— Samantha Pinto
links to publications above on images and on source page
Murphy’s piece is then both historical and counter historical. In many ways, it is about the difficult history of sexuality that Hemings’s presence brings up—enervating, dangerous, ravishing, ephemeral but also undeniably material. It has endurance and frailty built into its structure—its story is not one of event but of duration and of the duration of difference in the narration of human genetic material, material structures, built space, and urban design and development.

— Samantha Pinto
links to publications above on images and on source page
Murphy’s piece is then both historical and counter historical.

— Samantha Pinto
links to publications above on images and on source page

Murphy’s fixation on racism and the misuse of science, manifested since early in his career, proved not simply precocious, but prescient: he mirrored the concerns of African American counterparts, one of the few non-Black artists of the time to address the issue, but envisioned those concerns in terms of poetic elision more than documentary narrative.

Peter Frank 2022
Certain themes connected certain series; for instance, Murphy tacitly condemned the historical institution of slavery in America in the billowing white dresses that float through his “Murmurations” (as well as earlier work) – the dresses, already loaded with cultural and metaphorical suggestion, conjure the fate of chatteled African women, and the series both sources and culminates in a monument to Sally Hemings, who “belonged” to Thomas Jefferson (in more ways than one, bearing him several children).

— Peter Frank, 2022
In a subsequent series, “Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Radio,” Murphy looked at the more general racism that inheres to anthropology even as he examined the scientistic tendency to denote, classify, and display. What was supposed to be a stable and logical way of communicating and improving knowledge, Murphy indicates, amplified and perpetuated stereotypes: biology was – and very much remains -- as much a weapon of suppression as a tool of enlightenment.

— Peter Frank, 2022

FULL VIDEO Hindsight/Fore-site Photographed and edited by Richard Herskowitz

Related Art Critical Reviews

Richard Herskowitz film documentation of Hindsight/Fore-sight: Art for the New Millennium” the University of Virginia

64 Magazine, Post-Modernist Style, Southern Gothic Aura, 64 Magazine, by Chris Gilbert, Volume 1, Number 10, November 2000, p. 30-34

Natural Controversy, C-Ville (VA) Weekly, Volume 12, Number 24, C-List, June 13-19, 2000, p. 30.

Natural Histories: New Work by Todd Murphy, by Leah Stoddard, The Second Glance, Volume 12, Number 3/4, Spring/Summer 2000

A New Lady In Town, The Observer, Charlottesville, Va.

University Of Virginia Art Museum. Annual Report 2000-01. University of Virginia Art Museum (Charlottesville) (2000). Cover Image

Natural Histories Announcement Art Work

PRESS RELEASE Natural Histories; New Work By Todd Murphy June 2- August 13, 2000

SELECTIONS FROM THE ART COUNT PROJECT RICHMOND VA. 2003

THE ART COUNT PROJECT 1708 GALLERY ANNOUNCEMENT TODD MURPHY

“A Portrait of an Artist” A by John Lerner, Atlanta Peach, October/ November 2007

Todd references Hemings work 2009, AJC “Daring Artist bridges genres: Murphys Digital photography, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Peter Frank, 2022 The Breadth Of a Poet (retrospective)

Pinto, Samantha: INFAMOUS BODIES Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. “The Romance Of Consent Sally Hemings, Black Women’s Sexuality, And The Fundamental Vulnerability Of Rights” , 2020, LINK to DUKE University Press; INFAMOUS BODIES

Montieth, Sharon. “Sally Hemings in Visual Culture: A Radical Act of the Imagination?” Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery , 2009. Routledge LINK to buy Book

Homage to Sally Hemings

“Hindsight/Fore-sight: Art for the New Millennium” the University of Virginia.

Artists included Agnes Denes, Ann Hamilton, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Michael Mercil, the Monacan Indian Council, Todd Murphy, Dennis Oppenheim, Lincoln Perry, and Lucio Pozzi;

among the sites featured were Montpelier, Ash Lawn–Highland, the Monticello Visitors’ Center, area parks and schools, and the University of Virginia. Charlottesville, longtime home of Jefferson and site of the university he founded, served as an ideal location for the exhibition.

I wanted something simple and poignant to underscore the importance of Sally Hemings. The dress form and the dress became the icon.

It has endurance and frailty built into its structure—its story is not one of event but of duration and of the duration of difference in the narration of human genetic material, material structures, built space, and urban design and development.

In many ways, it is about the difficult history of sexuality that Hemings’s presence brings up—enervating, dangerous, ravishing, ephemeral but also undeniably material.

Murphy’s piece is then both historical and counter historical.