The creative process of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who brought an indelible black voice to American literature in novels like “Song of Solomon” (1977) and “Beloved” (1987) and taught at Princeton from 1989 to 2006, will be featured next semester at university. A campus-wide series of public events and exhibitions uses Morrison’s 200 yards of personal papers, which Princeton acquired from the author in 2014, as a springboard for new scholarship and interdisciplinary collaborations.
“This project brings artists and scholars to Princeton who wouldn’t normally come here and stimulates thinking about what the archive can inspire,” said Autumn Womack, a professor of African American studies and English departments, who led the initiative.
With a team of graduate students, Womack spent two years culling 90 never-before-exhibited objects from some 400 boxes of Morrison’s manuscript drafts, speeches, correspondence, photographs, and other ephemera housed in Princeton University’s Special Collections Department Library. The selections will be featured in the exhibition “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” which opens Feb. 22 at the Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library.
Highlights include day planners from 1974 and ’75, when Morrison worked at Random House (she was the first black editor-in-chief in fiction) and sketching “Song of Solomon” during free moments in the margins of paper schedules she carried . bag. These planners, the only extant versions of that novel, also included notes for speeches and editorial feedback for people she worked with, including Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.
“The day planners are this really dynamic space where you see all the layers of her career and different kinds of writing that she was doing,” Womack said. She also dug up some of Morrison’s hand-drawn maps of imagined spaces in “Beloved” and “Paradise” (1997), visualizing the worlds from which her characters emerged, as well as correspondence from friends and collaborators in the 1970s and 1980s, including Toni Cade Bambara and Nina Simone, illuminating black feminist thought as it was taking shape.
Another exhibition brings sculptures, prints and textiles by visual artist Alison Saar into conversation with the author’s writings. Titled “Cycle of Creativity: Alison Saar and the Toni Morrison Papers,” it opens Feb. 25 at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery. Both women share a “commitment to this idea that they actively search for their ancestors to create a platform for their descendants,” said Mitra Abbaspour, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, who was invited by Womack to the Morrison gauge archive.
For example, the curator took out Morrison’s typed 1993 Nobel Lecture (wrinkled when she folded it in her pocket) and handwritten sheets of yellow legal paper that she used to brainstorm her speech. “In that speech, Morrison conducts a dialogue between an old blind woman and some children,” said Abbaspour, who will juxtapose these papers with Saar’s “Swing Low (maquette for Harriet Tubman Memorial)” (2007), a small bronze iteration of the artist’s monument in Harlem that also talks about the idea of intergenerational exchange. “That sculpture was installed on 125th Street as a way to link the historic event of the Underground Railroad to the creative fluorescence of the Harlem Renaissance,” Abbaspour said.
Saar will appear in conversation with poet Evie Shockley at Princeton, where 30 thinkers — including novelist Edwidge Danticat and Berkeley professor Stephen M. Best — will discuss Morrison’s archive at a March 23-25 symposium. It will be punctuated by two new works commissioned by performance artists Daniel Alexander Jones and Mame Diarra (Samantha) Speis, created in response to Morrison’s papers, which will be presented March 24-25 at the University’s McCarter Theatre. On April 12, jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform a new composition inspired by the archive, co-presented by Princeton University Concerts, at the Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.
“This project could only be done in Princeton,” Womack said. “It really opens the gates in a number of different ways.”
