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The exclusion of Black women from exhibiting with the Woman’s Department protected a specific representation of femininity. Organizers of the fair and the Woman’s Department wished to represent white femininity and to represent femininity as white. In privileging whiteness, organizers excluded works by Black women as exemplifying something other than femininity. In my timeline of her life, I present Francis “Fannie” Barrier Williams as a synecdochal figure who represents Black women on multiple levels. Barrier Williams, who exhibited her portraiture with the Colored Department, can be understood as standing in for the larger array of Black women who were excluded from presenting. However, she should also be recognized as most representative of the middle- and upper-class Black women whose works were more likely to be deemed worthy. In this, Barrier Williams reminds us that exhibitions like this one typically aided in the production of respectability politics, which privileged elite, light-skinned women like Barrier Williams over working and lower-class, darker-skinned women. My exhibit of Barrier Williams’ timeline discusses her activist work as it was informed by her own racial, gendered, and class-inflected consciousness to present her as a synecdochal figure representing multiple levels of this intersectional hierarchy as it is applied to Black women.

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Works Cited

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