UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation evaluates the William Sheppard Collection of African Art at Hampton University. Assembled by Sheppard, a Black missionary to the Congo from 1890 to 1910, this collection comprises the oldest example of Kuba art in the United States and among the oldest intentionally assembled collections of African art outside of that continent. Unlike African artworks that were displayed in predominantly white institutional contexts, the Sheppard Collection is noteworthy for its early acquisition by an institution with a majority Black audience: the campus museum of the Hampton Institute, a historically Black college. The first primary audience for Sheppard’s exceptional collection of African art were students of the Hampton Institute. In that singular context, the works from the Sheppard Collection functioned as object lessons, a type of visual pedagogy that encouraged learning based on observation and experience from direct contact with an object or work of art. This teaching method presupposed a connection between the material world and moral development. Therefore, this dissertation argues that the Sheppard Collection constituted a visible and tangible basis for African Americans to establish a cultural connection to Africa, resonating with the contemporaneous intellectual pursuit of African Americans. Object Lessons: The Hampton University Sheppard Collection of African Art approaches the Sheppard Collection from a diasporic lens. Locating William Sheppard and the Sheppard Collection within African diaspora frameworks, I evaluate the implications of artworks in the Sheppard Collection for the analysis of race and representation in the United States, and the utilization of the Hampton collection in performance and pedagogy.

Through analyses of dramatic performance, collections histories, photography, and the paradigms and protocols of museum display, this dissertation contributes to knowledge of the African diaspora, Atlantic world relations, art at historically Black colleges and the history of modern art and architecture. In the context of a historically Black college, the artworks of the Sheppard Collection took on different meanings from their original contexts. Like the African peoples who were forcibly enslaved and relocated to various places around the Atlantic, these cultural objects carry histories and memories with them. I analyze the Sheppard Collection according to this paradigm and evaluate its artworks as cultural objects that perform diaspora over centuries of Atlantic world relations.