“A Black photographer in Hartford 150 years ago? That’s amazing.”

That’s just one takeaway that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has from the extraordinary new art exhibit “I Am Seen…Therefore, I Am: Isaac Julien and Frederick Douglass” that he helped create at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.

The Harvard professor, historian, literary critic, documentarian and popular host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” was recently at the museum for a panel discussion with the multi-media British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien and acclaimed art and cultural historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis to discuss the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Black representation in photography in the 19th century. The talk, which sold out Wadsworth’s main auditorium as well as a Zoom-fed overflow room, marked the opening of the new exhibit, which is at the museum through Sept. 24.

Douglass, the former slave who became known as one of the foremost social reformers and statesmen of the 19th century, was the most photographed American of his time and often lectured on the power of photography. One of the places he spoke was in Hartford.

“I Am Seen…,” a collaboration between the Wadsworth and the Amistad Center for Art & Culture, is anchored by a multi-screen installation of “Lessons of the Hour,” a 28-minute film piece specifically about Douglass made by Julien in 2019.

There are five screens of images that interact with each other. The piece has a narrative flow: Douglass, played by actor Ray Fearon, walks a horse through a field, lost in his thoughts, then takes a steam train to a city where he delivers a stirring lecture on the power of photography. His thoughts and speech are amplified by a video documenting the African-American experience from Douglass’ time to the present day. There are images of lynching, civil rights marches and fireworks. “Pictures, like songs,” Douglass proclaims, “should be left to make their own way.”

Though “Lessons of the Hour” is a full exhibit in itself, Gates and Lewis have built upon Julien’s work by co-curating several rooms worth of daguerreotype photographs from the 1800s, meant to bring a community feel to a remarkable historical project. Most of the portraits are of Black Americans, some of which were taken by Hartford-based Black photographer Augustus Washington, who had a studio on Main Street in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Among Washington’s subjects was the famous abolitionist John Brown .

It was Wadsworth director Matthew Hargraves who decided to augment Julien’s installation with other Douglass-inspired art and local content and to involve Gates.

Gates had never curated an art exhibit before. “Nobody had ever asked,” he said. He was an ideal choice for this project since he has published essays on photography and has written about Douglass “since I was 20 years old.” Also, “Isaac’s a friend, so, of course, I wanted to do it. I said yes if they would also bring in this great art historian who’s an expert in this area, who I happen to know at Harvard.”

That art historian was Lewis, an associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies at Harvard who specializes in 19th-century Black representation and racial justice in American art. “Sarah made history with her special issue of Aperture,” Gates said. Lewis edited the spring 2016 issue of the art magazine, which had a “Vision and Justice” theme.

The photos are displayed in glass cases as if they were precious gems. They depict everyday people either dressed up to have pictures taken or showing off something they’re proud of. One man brandishes a bugle. There are children and pets. There is a formal dignity in how the subjects pose. The exhibits glow with history and humanity.

While showing off the treasures in the exhibit, Gates spoke of how the academic field of African-American studies is “50 years old and still fighting for its existence.” He railed against those who would censor or suppress books. “Even one of my works of scholarship has been banned,” he said.

Among those there to see Gates on Friday was Wadsworth board member Mally Cox-Chapman, an old friend of his from when they both attended Yale. “We took a jazz class together,” Cox-Chapman said. In the panel discussion, Gates recalled walking around downtown New Haven in the 1970s and interacting with the various Black political groups around the Yale campus. He said he designed the African-American studies course he teaches at Harvard around the discussions that he experienced there.

Gates and Lewis both explained how the invention of photography was liberating for certain cultures and classes. It meant that portraits were no longer limited to wealthy people who could afford to have them painted.

Now, Lewis said, with cameras on our phones, “regular citizens are using the camera to document life.”

In the panel discussion, Hargraves noted that “this week marks the 180th anniversary of when Frederick Douglass first visited Hartford.” Julien said that he was inspired to create “Lessons of the Hour” in part because of essays like Gates’ “Figures in Black” and because he’d seen monuments to Douglass in London and elsewhere. “I didn’t know that Frederick Douglass had taught and given hundreds of lectures, that he’d had sonnets written about him,” the artist said. He said he included a train trip in the film because that “was the other technology that allowed him to give those lectures.”

Lewis explained that Douglass had several different prepared lectures he gave on photography alone. In talks titled “Pictures and Progress” and “Life Pictures,” the scholar said, “he talked about representation. What is the role of representation in a representative democracy?”

Gates ticked off Douglass’ achievements: “The greatest Black abolitionist. One of the greatest orators of the 19th century. The most photographed American of the 19th century. A great autobiographer. A philosopher. A theorist of photography.”

“There is a fundamental question here,” Lewis posed. “How are we going to tell the story of who we are?” She said Douglass thought he could make a statement by having his photo taken.

“He also thought he was good-looking,” Gates added to roars of laughter from the audience. “And he was.

“But Frederick Douglass knew the goal was to establish the subjectivity of the Black man, who’d been seen as an object. This was a technology that could be used to free people.”

“I Am Seen… Therefore I Am: Isaac Julien and Frederick Douglass” is on view through Sept. 24 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main St., Hartford. thewadsworth.org.

I arrived in this country when I was 5 and my brother was 7. The first place we visited was Disneyland. I thought we had hit the jackpot. America was even better than I had expected. Soon after, we settled in Warrensburg, Mo., and a new reality sank in. I was transported from the cityscape of Seoul to the American Midwest. I have clear memories of walking through the vast prairie and the mazes of cornfields as a child.

My mom, Young Ok Na, had a studio photo taken in preparation to come to the United States — for her passport and visa applications. My dad was going to graduate school and we had come to visit. We didn’t know that we were never going back to Korea. He didn’t want us to leave. When I made a picture of that photo, it was drizzling. A tiny fortuitous raindrop fell right under my eye. I didn’t realize until I was editing that this had happened. I ask my child self, “Why are you crying?”

I notice my kids Mila and Teo interacting with nature, playing together and seeing how they create their own worlds and make their own memories. It is when I give in to seeing the world through their eyes that I find it easiest to parent. And then sometimes, their magic seeps into my world, when I let go of trying to be in control. I project my past onto them but I know parts of them remember it too.

In Korea, there is a concept called han, which roughly translates to a collective feeling of sorrow relating to having been colonized and oppressed. It is a sentiment that connects Koreans to each other as well as to our ancestors. For members of the diaspora, han can also relate to the immigrant experience — to feelings of loss and displacement. But we can release some han in making new memories on land that feels more familiar to my children than it did to me at their age. As we walk through the tallgrass prairie, my daughter asks me, “Are we in a dream? Are we?” I wonder if she is starting to remember.

What does this land represent? I think about the house we are staying in — a casita built for Mexican rail workers a century ago, one of the last ones to survive. There are three units in the bunkhouse. From the drawing in the room, it looks like there could have been up to 10 units at one point. I had packed a Mexican dress that was gifted to my daughter, Mila, without knowing the history of the bunkhouse. I feel like it is an homage to those workers. The kids are obsessed with the wild garlic here, possibly brought here by the Mexican laborers. A part of their history continues to grow and nourish.

The more trains I watch pass behind the casitas, the more details I notice. I realize the ones carrying oil move more slowly than the ones carrying coal. My children recognize the logos on the trains moving consumer goods across the U.S. after just a few clicks on someone’s phone or computer.

I think about the Chinese rail workers who built the transcontinental railway — how they were omitted from the 1869 photo commemorating the completion of the railroad. Everyone is celebrating, opening champagne as the final golden spike is hammered into the track. How easily have our experiences, as immigrants, been erased from American history. Corky Lee recreated that photograph in 2014 with the descendants of those Chinese laborers, 145 years after the original photo was made. We can take back some of our histories in commemorating the forgotten, lost and erased. Remembering.

Through this work, I re-examine my connection to this land, reconsidering overlooked histories, as I tap into my own forgotten memories, conjuring the past, creating new memories, all while exploring my connection to the natural landscape, to my children, and to our past and future selves.

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