Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2019)
Installation. 35mm film and 4K digital, color, 7.1 surround sound. 28 minutes, 46 seconds.
Sir Isaac Julien, RA (British, b.1960)
Lessons of the Hour is an immersive interpretation of the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) especially his early and formative journey to the United Kingdom from 1845 until 1847.
Douglass defined his era as the “Age of Pictures,“ from grand, public galleries of paintings to cheap engravings and newly affordable, widely available photographs. He believed in the power of pictures, especially portrait photographs, to inform, reinforce, and refute social perceptions and stereotypes.
Julien shares this fascination in the power of images to shape our “public“ social identities and the rights accorded to and derived from these images, these visual social constructions. Juxtaposing still and moving images, Julien renders a profoundly penetrating exploration of nature, beauty, picture-making, photography, portraiture, and equality.
Employing a series of simultaneous and overlapping sequences, the installation brilliantly evokes the salon-style display of paintings popular in nineteenth-century galleries—where pictures were crowded together frame by frame upon red walls—and the rich, red velvet linings of daguerreotype cases in a sublime act of visual and historical union.
Julien’s artistic brilliance invites us to consider how time—past, present, and future—is bound inextricably together and to ask what lessons Frederick Douglass’s profound and prophetic insights about the new media of photography can teach us today.
Sir Isaac Julien, RA (British, b.1960)
Sir Isaac Julien is one of the most prominent artists working today. Born and raised in East London to parents from St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Julien emerged in the early 1980s as one of the key figures in experimental filmmaking.
In 1983, he cofounded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, a group of like-minded Black filmmakers dedicated to recovering the voices and knowledge of history to change the present. By the 1990s, he had begun to undertake major installations in a museum context, using multiple screens simultaneously to break down barriers between art and film.
Julien is a member of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts, has exhibited his work across the globe, and has been honored numerous times for his pioneering work, most recently receiving a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. He epitomizes Frederick Douglass’s definition of a “picture-maker“: “They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.“