Is Repair Possible in the University Museum?

Inside the white-walled, vitrine-filled museum, it is easy to assume that the objects within it neutrally represent history’s many turns. Conservation shapes how those objects are preserved, displayed, and interpreted. From putting back together shards of a pot after excavation to using a solution to remove acid from paper, the field’s practices are aimed at allowing access to historical materials. I worked in conservation for several years, and was initially drawn to the field because of the ethics of keeping extant objects of history accessible to researchers. However, until I was asked to repair a few cracks in a life-size painted plaster bust at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, I did not realize how fraught the decision to preserve can be. Although the discipline of conservation has an ethos of care, many of the objects that make up the museum instead conspicuously mark its anti-humanist foundations. Conservation can mask the museum’s colonial and imperial origins.

We need to interrogate the linguistic relationship of conservation, preservation, and repair not only in the context of the physical integrity of the historical object, but also in terms of the institutions that house them. I ask here if it is possible to repair the museum. We should not engage with the objects in the museum as if they are specimens of a distant and permanent past. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay instead suggests the people working within the museum should use its objects to “unlearn” their imperial and colonial roots. Azoulay writes: “Unlearning means not engaging with those relegated to the ‘past’ as ‘primary sources’ but rather potential companions” (16). How conservation might give us the means to interpret historical objects as potential companions and frame the possibilities of repair is the subject of this essay.  

The painted plaster bust I was asked to repair at the Peabody Museum was of a Black man from the nineteenth century. I noticed that his eyes were closed and his lips parted. When I started to write the report on the bust's physical state, I saw that he had a prominent bulge on his neck, as if a rope had been tied. The bust was only labeled in the collection record as a “Cast of Sturmann’s head” and described as a death mask. On the Peabody Museum’s website, Sturmann’s head is currently listed as restricted media, likely due to the museum’s internal ongoing work to address the legacies of racism and slavery. 

Death masks are intimate records of someone who once existed. Because of how the death mask is made, it is similar to a photograph. It is not a creative rendition of the body based on observation, like sculpture. To make a death mask, a person applies layers of plaster - known as a positive - on top of a deceased person’s face, with a greasy barrier between the plaster and the person’s body. As the plaster hardens, it records the cartography of the face. That greasy barrier between the body of the person and the plaster allows the positive to be removed. The positive later gets used as a mold. 

Given the circumstances in which death masks are created and the bulge on Sturmann’s neck, I wanted to find more information about his life. Much had been written already about Sturmann, whose name is most likely not Sturmann, as suggested in the collection record, but Steaurma Jantjes according to Jarrett Martin Drake, whose remarkable essay traces the acquisition history of the bust. A few years before the death mask was made, an unknown group of people stole Jantjes from the southwestern cape of Africa. P.T. Barnum, among many other individuals, inhumanely coerced Jantjes into exhibition in the Boston Aquarial [sic] and Zoological Gardens in New York City in 1860. The Boston Courier reported that in an attempt to avoid display, Jantjes died by suicide. In an act of horrific violation, Jeffries Wyman, a Harvard professor of Anatomy and curator at the Peabody, made a plaster mold of Jantjes’ head and neck immediately after his death. Wyman dissected and removed Jantjes’ skeleton, later displayed throughout Boston. Jantjes’ skeleton was acquired and accessioned as a museum object by the Boston Society of Natural History. In a harsh echo of his initial capture, Jantjes’ corporeal form continued to circulate without his consent after his death.

Wyman was commissioned by the infamous Harvard racial scientist Louis Agassiz to assemble empirical evidence of racial difference. In particular, Agassiz used the bust to test the fallacious theory of polygenesis. Polygenesis is the racist belief, staged in scientific rigor, that skin tone classifies distinct lineages between Black and white peoples. Even in the face of mounting scientific opposition, such as the publication of On the Origin of Species, Agassiz insisted that Black and white peoples were separated by biological difference.

Although I wish it were otherwise, I filled the cracks in Jantjes’ death mask. At the time, I knew that in doing so I contributed to the protection and preservation of Agassiz and Wyman’s archive, their violent voyeurism, and a distorted application of science. I was not preserving Jantjes’ life. I did not act benevolently or with an ethics of care as I anticipated, inclusive of many peoples and their right to remember.  

I later learned that Agassiz’s violent use of Jantjes is not singular or exceptional. Jantjes’ bust is in Harvard’s museum alongside the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia, the first known photographs of Black people in the United States, found in a filing cabinet in the 1970s. Agassiz commissioned Renty and Delia’s images to manufacture evidence of racial difference. Joseph T. Zealy took the photographs in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850, the same year that Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. There was a vested interest in constructing narratives reconcilable with keeping Black people enslaved. Zealy posed Renty and Delia in front of his camera and stripped them of their clothes without dignity, consent, or compensation. When Agassiz received the images, he asserted that the photographs of Renty and Delia’s were his property. He later bequeathed them to Harvard.

While I was employed at the museum, Harvard did not consider the arguments of Tamara Lanier, a descendant of Renty and Delia, who requested that ownership of the photographs be returned to her family. Lanier sued Harvard in 2019, arguing “Slavery was abolished 156 years ago, but Renty and Delia remain enslaved in Cambridge Massachusetts. Their images, like their bodies before, remain subject to control and appropriation by the powerful, and their familial identities are denied them” (147). The university still gains copyright revenue from Renty and Delia’s images. When I was tasked with preserving Jantjes’ mask, I recognized that his story evidenced his desire to be freed from display, just as Lanier argues for her ancestors to be returned to her family. 

What if we did not just think of Jantjes’ death mask and the photographs of Renty and Delia as data for historians but as signs of life horrifically curtailed and violated? 

Lanier's lawsuit is a model for unlearning the museum’s imperial history, to make institutions accountable. This unlearning involves recognizing that objects are not just materials to be accumulated, categorized, and dusted. They are signs of people’s lives. We should not accept with neutrality what was brought into the museum hundreds of years ago and interrogate who should be safeguarding the objects in the museum and how. We should all be engaged in asking the ethical question of what we should remember and how to disentangle the museum’s violent ontologies, particularly in the context of objects that showcase slavery’s past and afterlife.