Logo design by Khepera Lyons-Clark

Representation @ 250

Milstein Center Exhibition | Barnard College

Introduction

On the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Barnard Library and the Milstein Exhibitions gallery invited artists to explore the concept of representation.

Ratified by Congress on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence asserted that governments are instituted among Men [i.e.people], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...” and formalized the determination of the colonies of the United States to be free from the tyranny of a monarch oversees.

The United States Constitution (1786) and The Bill of Rights (1789) were developed in part to resolve the question of how a tenuous union of states could be governed across differences. The question of representation was in the forefront, as the founders debated who would be counted in the legislative process. While the founding documents provided a framework for democracy, they were penned by colonists who had also participated in the violent removal of indigenous people from the land, and the enslavement, trafficking, and disenfranchisement of people of African descent. It would take decades of struggle to extend constitutional protections and the rights it guarantees—including the right to vote, to women, Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants. 

When we interrogate the promises and perils of representative democracy, as defined by the US Constitution, the question arises—who is and has been represented by the phrase “the people,” and who is excluded? Who is considered an “American”—and who gets to decide?

“Representation” is also about the production of culture—the process by which groups of people share ideas, knowledge, and meaning. Language, performance, and other forms of expression form a shared code that enable us to connect our subjective experience to the world beyond ourselves. Representation can be an act of self-expression, a demand, a call to be seen and heard. The artists in this exhibition are expanding the objects of representation to include: territories, constituencies, histories, facts, belonging, citizenship, imagination, and futurities. They challenge the notion of being represented as a form of social presence that has the potential to deliver freedom, inclusion, agency and power. What escapes representation, and what can or cannot be truthfully represented with the physical and material tools at hand? How do we as audience help to shape the story?