In approximately 1,000 words, we invite you to confront a work of visual media (film, photograph, painting, or object) in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (1950 – present) and reflect upon a public or private future that the maker(s) of that piece envision, have envisioned, or a future that might be imagined through your engagement with the piece.

Amid thousands of works of art, artifacts, photographs and elements of material culture archived in the NMAAHC, I became enthralled by a handful of photographs that foreground the potent persistence of Black religious and spiritual life. Drawing from a subset of several dozen vernacular photographs, a central theme that emerges is the power of Black life as a sacred encounter. Through these images, I bear witness to Black bodies in the postures of reflection, quiet, meditation, prayer, worship, and fellowship. These images create space for reading Black life as an encounter with the love and power that moves in and through the individuals who are pictured.

Robert Farris Thompson’s groundbreaking book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983), charted “visual and philosophic streams of creativity and imagination.”{1} Inspired by Thompson, I use the term “spirit” to imagine Black visual culture as the embodiment of a set of metaphysical qualities, yet my objective is not to produce a superficial aesthetic theory. Instead, I am invested in the affective capacity of these images to transmit to their viewers the spiritual experiences of the people captured in the photographs, particularly when these images are recontextualized by the spaces of museums, galleries, and the cinema.

We need ways to demarcate images that depict Black spiritual experience from the familiar, deformed depictions of Black religious experience which film, television and popular culture have often deployed to mock and misrepresent Black life. Black religious experience has become a meme, a set of visual clichés used for comic relief, which often reduces a vast and complex set of experiences to a series of archetypal figures: the elderly woman “catching the spirit,” the church songbird, and the dim- witted preacher, for instance. These figures not only misinterpret Black religious experience, they also fail to capture the profundity of Black spiritual traditions. While Black life is often framed through the lens of religion, these photographs capture bodies that were not simply practicing a religion, but which are tapping into an unseeable presence and power: bodies moving in praise dance, held captive in the throes of worship, or taken over by an inward peace and contemplation. The bodies in many of these photos communicate both power and humility as inward (and outward) movements of consciousness. Bodily practices that demonstrate a deference to the Divine, such as the bowing of a head, the closing of eyes, or kneeling, which we see in many of these photos, perform more than mere humility. A bowed head can be conjoined with a raised fist (recalling Tommie Smith and John Carlos). Quiet and calm can be acts of refusal, and that kneeling can also signify defiance and intractability. Many of these photos affirm some traditional readings of the body in a religious posture, but they also typify what we might consider a more spiritual kind of power in the broader archive of Black visual embodiment, connecting complicated notions of resistance, freedom, and joy as they capture individual power within a larger context of social liberation.

One photograph in particular encapsulates the metaphysical expression of both pain, ecstasy, and this “inward movement.” Given the generic title of Carolina Baptist Church and taken by photographer Milton Williams, the photo plummets the viewer into a moment that is familiar to some and perhaps unrecognizable to others. Williams’ photo centers on a Black woman who is taken over by the spirit. Her hand stretched upward, head thrown back, mouth open, she is flanked by women fanning her and others having their own experience. While this woman’s singular experience is powerful, this is also a moment of communal intimacy, a shared encounter and viewers of this photo are given access to this sacred space and a small glimpse into the mysterious inner lives of Black worshipers.

Processes of archiving, displaying, and viewing images that index Black spiritual life are sacred and the experiences that they bear witness to deserve a special kind of care and attention. They are photographic evidence of Black triumph over the tribulation, despair, and trauma of the material world. In other words, in the archive of photos of Black spiritual life, we are given access to how bodies experience transfiguration—the mystical movement between human, body, soul, spirit, and the cosmos. As viewers, we can observe the vulnerability of human life, but also sense the boundless power of bodies that are conjoined to unseeable and unnameable sensibilities. In this framework, museums, curators and patrons each participate in creating a more sacred space, function, and relationship to how we experience art and culture.

My articulation of this more sacred function of museum spaces and visual culture runs counter to the norm, as spaces devoted to archiving and displaying artifacts about Black life typically function rather pragmatically. Scholars Melissa Johnson and Keon Pettiway describe the traditional role in which spaces like the Smithsonian have performed, saying:

These institutions were founded to educate Americans and other visitors about Black history, art, and culture. Typically, the stated goal is to project African American culture, with missions ranging from maintaining positive relations in the local community, to attracting regional or U.S.-wide tourists, to serving the Black global diaspora.{2}

While the project that Johnson and Pettiway describe remains admirable and significant, I want curators, scholars, and patrons to reimagine these spaces and Black life in visual culture beyond the boundaries of education, social relations, and tourism to consider other ways that we might be affected by this archive.

Expressions of religious ecstasy in musical performance were seen recently in the long-awaited documentary film Amazing Grace (2019), featuring a legendary performance by Aretha Franklin, gospel icon James Cleveland, and the Southern California Community Choir. It was recorded at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in 1972 and directed by the late Hollywood veteran Sydney Pollack. The film provides a kind of access to the power of worship, music, and the ecstatic performance and interior lives of Black Americans; one which is always haunted by the pain of racial oppression, inequality, violence and terror. The power of both Williams’ photograph and the images of Franklin and Cleveland onscreen are particularly poignant because they bear the weight or the burden of Black life, while also embodying ethereal transcendence to a place beyond human suffering. As a viewer, I can bear witness to this flight and imagine that it is possible.

Al Green performs “Jesus is Waiting” on Soul Train, which begins Arthur Jafa’s AKINGDONECOMETHAS (2018).

Arthur Jafa’s recent akingdoncomethas—part his 2018 exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Air Above Mountains, Unknown Pleasures—also engages this weight and transcendence. Described by critic Lauren Cramer as “a montage of filmed sermons and gospel songs performed in Black churches from the 1980s to the 2000s,” it features dozens of preachers and performers, including Al Green, T.D. Jakes and singer Le’Andria Johnson.{3} Several of Jafa’s peers and collaborators from the Ummah Chroma Collective (Bradford Young, Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, Marc Thomas, and musician Kamasi Washington) joined to create a moving twenty-two minute experimental film called As Told to G/D Thyself (2019), conceived as a visual counterpart to Washington’s 2018 album Heaven and Earth. Through a series of animations and supernatural vignettes, the film stages cosmic, mundane, and transcendent moments of spiritual expression and power, imagining Black life as a future unbound by the weight of racial oppression.

Taken together the photographs of the NMAAHC and several works of contemporary documentary and experimental filmmaking continue to bridge the past and future lives of Black people carrying their agonies, but perhaps more importantly, the transcendent ecstasies, forward.