Why do colonial-era portraits of Indigenous Americans resemble ancient Roman statues?
In his British Museum exhibition, artist Hew Locke interrogates the messy, violent shadows of empire. From coins featuring African men in royal coronets to documents treating humans as compensable property, Locke forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths hidden within museum archives.
In the exhibition 'Hew Locke: what have or we here?', the Guyanese-British artist collaborates with British Museum curators to re-examine the institution's colonial holdings. Locke uses museum objects to highlight the dissonance between official institutional narratives and the lived histories of the colonized. His work often places looted artifacts, such as Taíno spirit figures from Jamaica, alongside his own commentary, at one point even referring to these figures as 'Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles' to underscore their cultural erasure.
The exhibition uncovers the chilling mechanics of imperial trade and dehumanization. One particularly visceral artifact is a compensation form used by slave owners following the abolition of slavery. This document allowed individuals to claim payments from the British government for the 'estimated value' of the enslaved people they owned, codifying the horrific reality that, at the time, enslaved people were legally treated as property. Locke also explores the aesthetics of maritime trade, revealing how the grim realities of slave ships were often masked by seemingly benign maritime imagery.
Locke’s investigation extends to the visual distortions of identity used during the colonial era. He points to 18th-century watercolours of Algonquians in present-day North Carolina that strangely mimic the aesthetics of Greek or Roman statuary. He also highlights a 1788 coin minted by a plantation owner in Barbados, which features the face of an African man adorned with a coronet and the ostrich feathers of the Prince of Wales. Through these objects, Locke challenges colonial nostalgia and demands a transparent reckoning with the museum's complicity in histories of exploitation.
Source: The earliest images of Indigenous Americans and a slave penny | Hew Locke: what have we here?
