When live performances are off, creativity can find another outlet with the museum challenge. For the opera singer and BBC broadcaster, Peter Brathwaite, that meant finding new meaning in black portraiture.
While museums remain closed, they try to keep their patrons’ connection to art alive. As we saw in Closed but Still Connected: Marketing at A Time Of Social Distancing, reaching out through emails is one way to try to deliver some of the museum experience to people who can’t come in person.
Another approach that has become known as the Getty Museum Challenge did not, in fact, originate with that museum. As the folks at Getty admit, they were inspired by the the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which launched an Instagram account called Between Art and Quarantine to showcase the creative results of individuals recreating paintings in the museum’s collection at home.
Seeing how motivated people were to show off what they could do with limited resources at home, the Getty Museum decided to launch its own challenge to participants to use works in its collection. Interesting how very many people use those much sought-after toilet paper rolls in these recreations.
The inspiration for Peter Brathwaite’s launching his own project, Rediscovering Black Portraiture Through the Getty Museum challenge came from seeing a fellow black opera singer cast herself as Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring on Twitter. He now has 50 portrait recreations posted on his site, ranging from the 15th century to the 2018 portrait of President Obama.
The Getty blog on his project selected three out of the 50 portraits. Among them is a painting I saw live when visiting exhibit at the Yale museum a few years ago:
The Paston Treasure, about 1670, unknown Dutch School artist.
Oil on canvas. Norwich Castle Museum. Image: Browne27, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Brathwaite’s recreation gives it a much more modern context, as you can see below:
Recreation by Peter Brathwaite with hair products, Côte d’Ivoire prints, patchwork quilt, Jessye Norman album and family luggage.
The blog also notes that “Brathwaite saw the art recreation challenge as an opportunity to explore his own story and honor his Black ancestors, who hadn’t had the opportunity to sit for a portrait.”
He does have a picture of a white ancestor, and that’s the black and white picture you see in his recreation of The Paston Treasure, as well as in some of his other recreations. Notice that, though his inspiration is a Dutch painting, he inserts the design of the British flag. That fits with what the blog noted further about his goal here:
“Brathwaite pointed out that there’s a misconception in the U.K. that Black history began in England in the 1950s, with Caribbean immigrants known as the Windrush generation. His recreations lay bare the fact that Black people have been a part of the fabric of the U.K., and Europe as a whole, for hundreds of years; but their stories aren’t always told.”