The Hampton Project & Industrial-Education Colonialism
Artist’s Shift to Large-Scale Format
Carrie Mae Weems (referred to as "Means" in transcript) expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of her earlier 16 \times 20 in. black-and-white, matted photographs.
Called the size inadequate for conveying certain ideas & emotional registers.
Prompted a move toward mixed-media, site-specific, room-filling installations.
Overview of “The Hampton Project” (Installed 2000)
Multi-part installation consisting of archival photographs printed on sheer muslin banners that hang from ceiling like floating scrolls.
Creates a ghostly, immersive, cathedral-like environment; viewers literally walk through history.
Source imagery: Hampton University photographic archive—African-American & Native-American students, originally shot by white woman photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Johnston’s commission: display Hampton Institute as proof that formerly enslaved Blacks & recently conquered Indigenous peoples could be “civilized.”
Installation goal: expose the racial & colonial logic embedded in the archive and in Hampton Institute’s founding mission.
Hampton University’s Archive
Tens of thousands of photographs, many depicting Central Plains Indians.
Extensive collection of tribal artifacts—often donated by former students.
Archive doubles as:
• cherished institutional heritage
• documentary evidence of U.S. racial-colonial projects.
Hampton Institute’s Founding Agenda
An HBCU employed as a laboratory for Americanization & settler colonialism.
Promoted as “civilizing” and “moralizing” campaign aimed at turning Blacks & Native Americans into compliant, semi-citizens.
Program asserted control over students’ bodies, labor, family structures, sexuality & spirituality.
Education model: industrial/manual training paralleling Booker T. Washington’s philosophy but weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty.
Sloganized as lifting pupils from “backwardness & savagery” into segregated, second-tier citizenship.
Spiritual Epigraph & Sonic Layer
Weems chooses a spiritual line: “I’m a-rolling, I’m a-rolling, Lord.”
Functions as a shared lament for African-American and Indigenous experiences under the same systems of domination.
Banner text: “With your missionary might, you extend the hand of grace, reaching down and snatching me up and out of myself.”
• Ironically captures paternalistic rescue narrative that erases subjects’ agency.
Generational Transmission of Colonial Logic
Imagery & curation underscore how settler colonialism’s moral codes get passed parent-to-child just like material inheritance.
Boys schooled in “proper” land use & agriculture; girls in homemaking & motherhood.
Mirrors plantation logic: ensure productive labor & reproduction of a subordinated workforce.
Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt & Captive Children
Founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School praised Hampton’s model, calling it “unequaled” for Indian education.
Collaboration with Hampton solidifies pipeline of Native students to industrial schools.
Early Targeting of Nez Perce Nation
Hampton principal Samuel Chapman Armstrong petitioned Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to enroll Nez Perce students (even before meeting Pratt).
Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph (In-ma-ton-yá-la-kékht) resisted illegal U.S. land seizure, articulated democratic principles of coexistence:
“We only ask an even chance to live as other men live, free to think and talk and act for myself.”
Children’s enrollment framed as spoils of war and a mechanism for territorial control.
Photographic Strategy & Material Choice
Weems reproduces Charles Roscoe Savage’s 1875 photo “Indian Baptism.”
Invokes forced religious conversion as part of civilizing mission.
Prints on thin muslin (referred to as “fabric boasting a whisper-like quality”).
Evokes fragility of lives & stories; allows light to pass, creating spectral presence.
Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Paris Exposition Portfolio (1900)
Hired by Hampton’s 2nd principal, Hollis B. Frissell, for PR campaign to display “success” of institute.
Photos marketed the idea that Blacks (recently emancipated) & Natives (recently subdued) could assimilate.
Key Johnston Images Re-contextualized by Weems
“A Hampton Graduate at Home”
Nuclear family seated in modern dining room of a staircase house, dressed fashionably.
Projects bourgeois, heteropatriarchal norms as index of success.
“Trade School, Shoemaking”
White-appearing instructor with two Native students assembling shoes; two more seated behind.
Visual shorthand for industrial pedagogy & racialized division of labor.
“Doctor of Industrial Education” Concept
Hampton floated idea of conferring university-recognized doctorates on non-university “free teachers.”
Would institutionalize a new class of racial intermediaries—Black & Native experts who disseminate industrial discipline within their communities.
Weems interprets this as bonding the two groups as "siblings" inside a colonial border that defines American identity.
Economics of Student Labor
Principal H. B. Frissell (and successor H. D. Pritchett) admitted Hampton’s financial dependence on student labor in 1898 funding plea.
School effectively operated as a factory producing commodified labor power cheap to the nation.
Weems calls such info “the little-known facts & secrets that make a place.”
Secret = Hampton as engine of racialized, colonized labor rather than pure benevolent education.
Ethical & Practical Implications
Installation positions archival photographs as living documents that still exert power.
Provokes viewers to question how universities, museums, and archives perpetuate colonial violence even while celebrating diversity.
Demonstrates art’s capacity to:
Re-contextualize historical images.
Surface suppressed narratives.
Bridge Black & Indigenous histories of resistance.
Warns that racism & colonialism are not past issues; their infrastructures remain embedded in education, labor, family, and land policy.
Connections to Wider Scholarship & Real-World Context
Resonates with critiques by scholars like Michelle Burnham (on assimilationist education) and Glen Coulthard (on “recognition” & settler colonialism).
Parallels Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model; yet underscores how Hampton targeted two racialized populations simultaneously.
Illuminates ongoing debates on:
• land acknowledgments
• reparations for boarding-school abuses
• decolonizing university archives.
Takeaway Equations & Figures (for quick recall)
Photo dimensions: 16 \times 20 in.
Installation debut: 2000.
Paris Exposition date: 1900.
Savage photo date: 1875.
Fundraising letter acknowledging student labor: 1898.
Number of tribes (or “nations”) represented in early Hampton Native enrollment: 65 (as cited by Weems).