EVENT PREVIEW
The Atlanta History Center and Wells Fargo present: “The Kinsey Collection: Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey — Where Art and History Intersect”
Opening day: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; 2 p.m. talk with collectors Bernard and Shirley Kinsey in the Woodruff Auditorium; Saturday, April 5
10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Mondays-Saturdays; noon to 5:30 p.m., Sundays
$16.50 adults; $13 seniors; $11 children 4-12 years old
April 19 & 20; May 17 & 18; June 21 & 22; free admission
130 W. Paces Ferry Road N.W., Atlanta, 404-814-4000 or www.atlantahistorycenter.com
About 25 years ago, long after Bernard Kinsey had established himself as an executive at the Xerox Corp., and as an advocate for talented, ambitious minorities within the company, a colleague approached him with a dilemma.
The colleague, who was white, wanted to give a document to Kinsey, but he was reticent about it. He wouldn’t discuss its contents other than to say it was historic and insisted on mailing it to Kinsey, who is African-American. Kinsey assented, and within a couple of weeks he received a package in the mail at his home.
The colleague had written a letter to say that he’d found the enclosed document as he was cleaning out his great-aunt’s attic. He was ashamed of it but hadn’t wanted to destroy it. He wanted it in the hands of someone who would, in some measure, appreciate its worth and protect it. It was an 1832 bill of sale for an enslaved African-American that had once belonged to the man’s ancestors. The male slave was purchased for $500.
Holding the handwritten bill of sale “felt like he was holding this person in his hands,” said Kinsey’s son, Khalil. That yellowed, creased sheet of paper was the beginning of what is now a 400-piece collection of African-American art, memorabilia, documents and other ephemera spanning four centuries. Beginning April 5, about 140 pieces from that collection will be on view at the Atlanta History Center as a part of “The Kinsey Collection: Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey — Where Art and History Intersect.” The show runs through July 13.
The bill of sale is in this show. And while there are dozens of works of art by painters such as Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden, John Biggers and sculptors such as Elizabeth Catlett, it is the cache of documents that provide searing reminders of the nation’s more difficult, if not ugly, periods. There is an original, 19th century, first-edition copy of “12 Years A Slave,” a tiny pair of shackles meant for the delicate wrists of a female slave, an order to “kill and destroy” two escaped slaves.
“When you look at the 1859 slave insurance policy, you forget that some owners took out insurance on their slaves because they were property,” Khalil Kinsey said.
Kinsey’s parents, Bernard and Shirley, both grew up in Florida and attended Florida A&M University, where they prepared for careers in business. It wasn’t until they moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s that they began collecting art and objects during their travels. Year by year, work of artist friends was added to the mix, but it wasn’t until Bernard Kinsey got that seminal document that the couple’s focus began to shift toward the historical record.
“My dad is a natural historian, though that’s not his training officially,” Khalil Kinsey said. “For him and my mother, it just became this quest in telling the African-American story from as many points of view as they could find.”
That vision came to include hand-colored tintypes of prosperous, pre-Civil War blacks and contemporary photographs by Gordon Parks; letters from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Zora Neale Hurston; etchings by Henry O. Tanner and watercolors by William H. Johnson. By 2007, the collection had grown so robust that the family began to loan the collection for national tours, focusing mainly on institutions dedicated to the African-American experience, such as the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.
For an institution such as the Atlanta History Center that has been actively trying to broaden its appeal beyond its traditional patron base, the show presents an opportunity. As recent national studies on the future of museums have found, as the country shifts demographically to one that is increasingly brown and black, institutions must find ways to entice new audiences.
“Through their collection, art is not presented separate from history, but used as another prism from which you can view history,” Atlanta History Center President and CEO Sheffield Hale wrote in an email interview. “The family’s personal vision, and the lens through which they see history, adds a distinct, and unique, perspective – one perhaps different from the curatorial view or presentation that an art, or history, museum might typically present.”
The argument the Kinsey Collection makes, however, is that while it is a comprehensive overview of black history, at its core the history presented is no less American history. And for every physical embodiment of a harsh past, there are others in the collection that speak of progress and mutual experience. A viewer of any race could find joy in “Landscape, Autumn,” a saturated 1865 oil by African-American artist Robert Scott Duncanson. In it he celebrates a simple, universal experience: the freedom to travel unencumbered down a rural path with a glorious view.
