Interrogating Progress

The curators of this exhibition have taken inspiration from the work of art at left, Interrogations of Progress (2018) by Adama Delphine Fawundu. As the central figure of a young Black woman looks out upon a nineteenth-century American landscape, she bears witness to white settler colonists’ violent displacement of Indigenous peoples while railroads speed industrialization westward and white farmers sow the land—all in the name of progress. Similarly, the curators of this exhibition examine the nineteenth-century architectural landscape of Bryn Mawr’s campus, bearing witness to how exclusion was built into this institution’s premise of progress, not only in its buildings, but also its curriculum, its administration, and its social life.​

Fawundu intervenes into John Gast’s well-known painting American Progress (1872) to declare that Gast’s normative vision of history is not shared by all. Like Fawundu, the curators of this exhibition revisit the College’s standard narrative of progressive reform and activism in women’s higher education to remind us that it is likewise marred by histories of exclusion and subordination.