The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise
National Museum of African American History and Culture Gallery, National Museum of American History
Washington, DC
January 30, 2009–February 28, 2010
Washington D.C. can be seen as the nexus for national and international politics, art, and culture, but it also has its own local history often overshadowed by this larger stage. On view at the National Museum of American History is the outstanding exhibition “the Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise” that presents a piece of African American history in the nation’s capitol as seen through the photographic lens of Addison Scurlock and his two sons, George and Robert. The Scurlock Studio, throughout most of the 20th century, captured a vibrant and thriving African American community on U Street and its surrounding neighborhoods and created portraits that represented a proud and positive self-image, described in one caption as “urban, urbane, and modern.” The exhibition features over 100 mostly black-and-white photographs by the Scurlock Studio, along with memorabilia from their business, the longest-running black business in Washington – started in 1911 and closed in 1994. There are photographs of families, weddings, meetings, graduations, and businesses; portraits of the working class, middle class, and elite; photographs capturing life at Howard University; and images of W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Muhammad Ali, and Duke Ellington.
To quote from the exhibition, co-curated by Michelle Delaney, Associate Curator of the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History, and Paul Gardullo of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “[t]he Scurlocks depicted the complex world of African Americans in Washington, D.C., a city whose black middle class refused to be defined or held captive by racial segregation and discrimination.” Looking at the photographs, it is possible to forget that during the time the photographs were taken, segregation was in effect and imposed a racial divide in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere across the United States. The only hints at this history are the photographs of a man protesting outside People’s Drugstore to boycott businesses that did not hire black workers in black neighborhoods, the concert of Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a mixed crowd of over 75,000 instead of at Constitution Hall because of the color of her skin, the March on Washington, and in the sequence of images taken of the 1968 riots – photographs of fires and of U.S. Army Jeeps with armed soldiers patrolling U Street – just outside their studio window.
When the new National Museum of African American History and Culture opens along the national Mall in 2015, as the 19th Smithsonian Institution museum, the Scurlock Studio photographs should become a permanent exhibit there. As Arkansas has Disfarmer and Mali has Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, Washington, D.C. has the Scurlocks, a photographic family team that created a lasting historical record of everyday African American life in the nation’s capitol with exquisite technique and sensibility.
Explore the Scurlock Studio Collection at the National Museum of American History online. Also available is the exhibition catalog, The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise, produced by Smithsonian Books.
Originally published in ArtVoices Magazine, November 2009.