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NYT Syndicate
Loreen Williamson and Pamela Thomas know that there are funkier figures in history than Booker T Washington. Bear with them, though, and they will connect the dots that landed him in the Museum of UnCut Funk.
The visage of Washington, the 19th-century author and educator, is printed on a 1947 half-dollar coin featured in 'For the Love of Money', an exhibition of blacks on US currency at the Museum of American Finance in Manhattan, on view through January. The show, with more than 35 coins, tokens, medallions and medals that celebrate black history leaders, events and institutions, is on loan from the Museum of UnCut Funk, the online destination for all things funky, which Williamson and Thomas began to curate about a decade ago.
"I bet you didn't know there was all this money with actual black people on it," Thomas said."And I doubt anybody knows the process that was undertaken to get these people put on currency." That process includes presidential authorisation only after two-thirds of both the House and the Senate have first voted to approve the idea, she explained."If you look at it from the perspective of, 'Well, damn, I had no idea about this,'" she said,"that makes it pretty funky."
Williamson continued,"This may be our most traditional show in that it's the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a black history exhibition." She and Thomas founded the funk museum, which usually focuses more on pop culture, in 2007. Besides Washington, other figures whose images are cast in bronze, gold and silver within the single-room show on Wall Street in the financial district include Joe Louis, Bessie Coleman and the Tuskegee Airmen. A few of the objects, like a 2016 Harpers Ferry National Historical Park quarter, representing Washington, and another from Washington, featuring the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, issued in 2017, are in circulation. But most, like two for President Barack Obama from his first and second terms in office, and Rosa Parks' 1999 bronze medal, were pressed strictly to honour the subject, not to be used as money. Still, they represent what Williamson called a funky twist in how people think about the US Mint.
Thomas and Williamson opened their online museum, which has all the usual elements of the brick-and-mortar kind, including a gift shop with T-shirts and coffee mugs, as a way of celebrating their blackness and their mutual love of 1970s black culture. 'Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' cartoon cels and blaxploitation movie posters can be viewed at the museum site. So can recorded interviews with James Brown, Isaac Hayes and Teddy Pendergrass, and the work of pioneering black cartoonist Morrie Turner, whose comics appeared in publications like Negro Digest and Ebony.
A comprehensive 'Fro Back' exhibition offers a tour of the hairstyle. 'Fro Back', like each of the museum's 20 online exhibitions ” 'Black Barbie' is another ” has titles and text panels. It includes a vintage Afro Sheen commercial and a slideshow of Afros on household names like Malcolm X and Michael Jackson.
Thomas, 55, and Williamson, 53, who live together in New Jersey but won't disclose where because a large portion of their collection lives with them, met through a personal ad 20 years ago."When I saw that Loreen had a collection of animation art," Thomas recalled,"I said, 'Where are the black cartoons?'" She had studied African-American history in college, and Williamson had always been interested in black history."I thought it was a good question," Williamson said.
They started the collection with one 'Fat Albert' cel. A year or so later, they had about 30, and now the collection has ballooned to around 12,000 objects, including black advertising tins and black postage stamps, and all of it is self-funded. In the late '90s, they opened a gallery in Summit, New Jersey. But the aftermath of 9/11 forced them to close.
"The community was in mourning," Thomas said, and foot traffic slowed so much it didn't make sense to stay open.
"Having the gallery space, just the physicality involved in moving stuff and hanging art, was hard enough, and something I would rather not do again," Williamson said."So I said, 'How about we put our stuff online first, and maybe we can have a physical space later?'"
The move from physical to digital worked so well that they never looked back. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited the site, including representatives of colleges, libraries and institutions like the Museum of American Finance.
The seriousness of the museum has been recognised not just by the Museum of American Finance, but also by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, site of the first travelling show Thomas and Williamson organised, 'Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution', in 2014. A version of that show, made up mostly of the animation art, including 'Fat Albert', later travelled to the Brown v Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, and the Bessie Smith Cultural Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Google, too, has taken notice. The women have teamed up with Google Arts & Culture, where visitors can see more than 240 artifacts from their collection.
The plan is to keep expanding the collection, and to keep curating and lending it. But Williamson acknowledged that there are still kinks to be worked out.
"People go to school to learn how to run a museum," she said."We've never done any of that. It's like any entrepreneurial thing. We're working hard and learning as we go."
