Acclaimed American writer and 1993 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will be the focus of a “revelatory exhibition” at Princeton University Library opening Feb. 22.
Curated
by Autumn Womack, assistant professor of English and African American Studies, the
exhibition titled Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory is aimed at
“excavating” the creative process of the iconic author, who died in 2019. It
will be the “center of a community-wide exploration of how Morrison’s archive
continues to influence the past, present, and future,” the organizers said in a
release.
The
Toni Morrison Papers archive includes research materials, manuscript drafts, correspondence,
photographs, and other resources that Princeton University acquired in 2014.
Running
until June 4, 2023, the exhibition - at PUL’s Milberg Gallery - will also
“anchor a series of programs” that include several wide-ranging events, such as
an art exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge with
artist Alison Saar, and newly commissioned performances “responding to
Morrison’s work” presented by the McCarter Theatre and Princeton University
Concerts, which stages classical music productions.
In
addition, a three-day symposium will take place March 23-25, gathering some 30
writers and artists “to reflect on Morrison’s relationship to the archive”, with
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat scheduled to deliver the keynote
address; and there will be public tours of Sites of Memory, children’s
programming, a spring lecture series, and undergraduate courses on Morrison’s
work, PUL stated.
“In
imagining this initiative - from exhibition to symposium to partner projects - I
wanted to show the importance of the archive to understanding Morrison’s work
and practice. But I also wanted to show how this archive in particular is a
site that opens up new lines of inquiry and inspires new kinds of
collaboration,” Womack said.
The
exhibition includes some 100 original archival items curated into six
categories, according to PUL. “Beginnings” charts Morrison’s emergence as a
writer, editor, and the author of The Bluest Eye, published in 1970;
“Writing Time” draws from her day planners “to emphasize the process of her
craft, which she often honed in spare moments around her full-time career” as
an editor; and “Thereness-ness” explores the role of place in her work and
presents “rarities” such as drawings of architectural spaces for the famed novels
like Beloved (winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize) and Paradise.
Furthermore,
“Wonderings and Wanderings” stages Morrison’s “creative process from start to
finish" and reveals how her published work holds a "capacious archive” of Black
life; “Genealogies of Black Feminism” uses correspondence between herself and
other Black women to “excavate an alternate account of Black feminist thought
in the 1960s and 1970s”; and “Speculative Futures” spotlights unfinished
projects and "unrealized possibilities that only live in the collection”.
As readers and teachers of Morrison’s work around the world equally recognise her importance and celebrate her literary legacy, some are hoping that Sites of Memory will be a traveling exhibition to make her archives available to a global audience. During her lifetime, she received awards from several countries, including France which bestowed on her one of its highest decorations - the Légion d’honneur - in 2010, two years before then U.S. president Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“She
was always very open to young readers internationally, and very generous,” said
Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika, associate professor of American and Anglophone
Caribbean literature at Université Paris 8 in France.
“I remember when she came to the Louvre and she was asked a question about the reception of her work and her legacy, and she responded that ‘I’ve done my part and I have to let my work go’. I was really impressed by that because sometimes there’s a sense that you can’t engage with the work if you’re outside the culture.”
On the American national level, meanwhile, the United States Postal Service will honour Morrison with a commemorative stamp in 2023, the thirtieth anniversary of her receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Photos: Toni Morrison, courtesy of Princeton University; an early edition of Beloved.
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