A History of Loss

In 2012, the artist Lyle Ashton Harris recovered multiple boxes from his mother’s basement in the Bronx that contained 35mm photographic slides that he’d taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The images depicted people from the era’s queer art scene and beyond, many of whom were Harris’s personal friends who had since died of AIDS—the epidemic that disproportionately affected the gay community as well as African Americans. One photo is of the poet and activist Essex Hemphill, showing him at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions space lounging confidently with a cigarette in hand in a pink dressing room. Hemphill had once written in his poem "For My Own Protection":

I don’t want to wait
for the Heritage Foundation
to release a study stating Black men
are almost extinct.

Now, Getty predoctoral fellow Alex Fialho is studying Harris’s photographs of Hemphill and others as part of a project on resurfacing artworks by Black queer artists responding to the AIDS crisis—many of whose works have lain dormant in storage for years.

“I imagine that many people have photos of family and friends, and possibly their art, under a bed, in a basement, or in a storage unit,” Fialho says. “Once museums acquire these objects, these moments of storage and care that came before are often erased. That’s the layer I’m interested in—a box under the bed as art history.”

Fialho is part of the Getty Scholars Program, which hosts researchers in residence around a shared theme. This year, the theme is extinction: the loss of objects, languages, cultures, plant and animal species, the environment itself. How have communities throughout time and place responded to that feeling of living on the edge of a precipice—a feeling many of us in the present probably relate to?

It turns out that art history provides a unique lens for exploring issues of extinction and catastrophe. For instance, botanical illustrations are sometimes the only records we have of extinct species. Shipwrecks can actually preserve precious objects that get salvaged later. Arguments for cultural heritage end up saving historical sites from the wrecking ball. And, most of all, people often respond to the threat of loss through art.

Take, for instance, the convergence of environmental justice and art making. That’s what Getty postdoctoral fellow Aaron Katzeman is looking at in his research. One of his case studies is the ahupua‘a system of traditional land stewardship in Hawai‘i, which, prior to the US seizure of the islands, divided the land into different types of agricultural zones to maximize sustainability. An artist in Katzeman’s study, Sean Connelly, has a media project called Hawai‘i Futures that uses digital modeling of the land to reaffirm this Indigenous knowledge.

“In Hawai‘i, the ahupua‘a system was also a form of social organization,” Katzeman explains. “I don’t see a stark distinction between environmental extinction and cultural extinction. In fact, extinction often occurs when environmental and cultural issues are deemed to be separate.”

Conversely, the idea of extinction has also been romanticized. In another research project, Getty predoctoral fellow Ivana Dizdar is examining 19th-century France’s fascination with the Arctic and its peoples. In this period, Arctic-themed imagery appeared across French art, design, and popular visual culture, from paintings to wallpaper to, in one case study, cartes de visite featuring zoological displays of living people “from the North Pole” (in reality, Inuit people brought from Greenland to Paris).

“There were ideas circulating in science—and the public imagination—that Arctic Indigenous peoples were disappearing,” says Dizdar. “This was akin to the ideology of Manifest Destiny in the United States, the notion that Native Americans were a ‘dying race’ and that Euro-American expansion was not only inevitable but a natural right.”

Sometimes the threat of cultural erasure prompts a community to find creative ways to survive. Professor Heather Badamo, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies this phenomenon within the medieval Coptic Church, regarded as the Indigenous Christians of Egypt. As Islam spread across the Middle East and North Africa, Arabic became the lingua franca, and Coptic leaders launched a massive effort to preserve their language and religion. They strategically adopted Arabic within their religious practices, creating bilingual bibles with Coptic and Arabic translations, adapting Quranic-style decorations, and writing defenses of their own practices, including the use of cross tattoos to publicly declare their faith.

As Badamo puts it, “The Copts mobilized liturgical works for cultural survival. They saw a moment of crisis, they knew they could lose their community through assimilation, and they decided to take action. Some of these practices continue to this day.”

Extinction might imply the end of something, but as these projects all show, art helps keep it alive.

Learn more about the Getty Scholars Program and how to apply.