Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass.

Saisha Grayson

February 28, 2025

Isaac Julien’s monumental and immersive five-channel video installation Lessons of the Hour is an evocative portrait of abolitionist, orator and aesthetic philosopher Frederick Douglass. A spoken monologue carries across the 28-minute narrative, with passages primarily excerpted by Julien from three of Douglass’ most famous speeches, namely “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” “Lecture on Pictures,” and the titular “Lessons of the Hour.” This is the first artwork to be jointly acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, though our two institutions have shared a building for decades. Douglass was born into enslavement in Maryland in 1817 and died in 1895 in Washington, DC, making his a local as well as a national and international story and the debut of this powerful work in DC especially meaningful for the artist and audiences alike.

Sir Isaac Julien has been a leading figure in the merging of art house cinema and gallery-based video art since the 1980s. In 1983, he helped co-found Sankofa Film and Video Collective, a critical self-organizing approach to supporting Black independent and artistic filmmaking in the UK. His monumental multichannel videos, which started taking over museum spaces in the 2000s, marked the global ascendance of the moving image in contemporary art. Despite British origins, Julien’s career has long been defined by deeply researched, gorgeously art-directed, and poetically interwoven portraits of Black Americans, and those whose lives crisscross oceans, as Julien’s now does regularly, living and working between London and Santa Cruz, California, where he leads the Isaac Julien Lab at University of California, Santa Cruz.

This began with his debut art film Looking for Langston (1989), which meditated on Harlem Renaissance writer and Black gay forefather Langston Hughes. This piece garnered immediate international attention and used some of the time-bending strategies seen in Lessons of the Hour. In this highly stylized black-and-white single-channel projection, every inch of the art direction shows Julien’s dedicated research towards perfectly conveying, when intended, Hughes’ early twentieth-century milieux. Yet there are several key moments when anachronistic details intrude—decidedly disco angels observe 1980s-attired police in a raid set to House music. This intrusion underscores the continuations of clandestine gay gatherings and state-sanctioned homophobic violence across decades.

Lessons of the Hour

In Lessons of the Hour, we see a puncturing of period details happen subtly, as when the actor playing Douglass addresses an audience dressed both in nineteenth-century finery and in twenty-first-century garb. This ensures we understand that his message is still meant for us, today—a point aided by the curve of the depicted auditorium being matched by the curve of the five screens so that where we sit in the gallery seems an extension of that lecture hall. Time is collapsed more pointedly when surveillance footage of protests seeking justice for Freddie Gray, a Black man who died in police custody in 2015 in Baltimore, appear on some screens while others show Douglass delivering a speech written in 1852 about the horrors and hypocrisies of American slavery.

This very intentional kind of interpolation, or insistence that the audience or reader understand themselves to be part of the world of the work and that they have a role to play in unpacking it, stitching its pieces and meaning together, and responding to complete it, is very much an important part of why Julien works in multiple channels. He builds meaning through these juxtapositions and the spaces he intentionally leaves open, even insists on, for the contemporary viewer to find themselves inside these historically immersive but not historically resolved visitations to the past. In this way, Julien addresses media theory’s critique of seamless narratives—whether from Hollywood or historical accounts or nightly news—that offer deceptively satisfying, simplified, singular storylines. Neatly concluded stories do not require the receiver to include themselves as they consume it, and leave no space for complexity, conflict, questioning, unknowability or the suggestion that power has an interest in keeping just these simple stories at the fore. Julien’s strategy of temporal intermixing and reflexivity align, then, with Douglass’s own remarks, from 1852’s  “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” when he says, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,” an idea that I imagine now echoing from the gallery where this shows to the historic artworks throughout the building.

Lessons of the Hour also involves its viewers in questions of aesthetic treatment—how we see things and how we are trained to look. We hear Douglass delivering “Lecture on Pictures” while re-enactments of African American photographer J.P. Ball’s studio and picture salon unfold. In one particularly piercing moment, Douglass seems to stare through a mirror to make eye contact with us, the gallery audience in the twenty-first century, demanding we see his full humanity and feel his presence in continued equity struggles. As Douglass notes, the daguerreotype offered a technology by which African Americans could present themselves to the world as they wanted to be seen; in Julien’s interpolative approach to moving image, we have a technology that can bring us into dialogue with important nineteenth century figures like Douglass and their aesthetic and political perspectives.

My Bondage and My Freedom

If we turn to the opening scene of Lessons of the Hour, we can move through Douglass’ words and Julien’s shots to appreciate how they build a lesson that resonates far beyond the moment it recalls, or the scene depicted. Quoting directly from Douglass’ 1855 memoir, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” Douglass’ voiceover recalls a terrifying experience from childhood when “several old logs and stumps got themselves taken for wild beasts. I could see their legs, eyes and ears, or I could see something like eyes, legs, and ears…” while his adult self walks through stunningly saturated fall Maryland woodlands with massive old growth trees. As we hear these words, we see what the camera shows us, but also, what the child understandably once imagined, as shots attend to thick reaching brown branches, and expressively twisting knots.

And at least for some of us, adults of a later century, at the word, “legs,” we are perhaps already also seeing in our minds eye—even before Julien cuts to it—the footage of a century after Douglass’ childhood. In another masterful juxtaposition across multiple screens, we see the ravishing red of fall foliage alongside grainy black-and-white film of the “strange fruit” that these same trees will bear, from when the conflation of broken tree limbs and human limbs is not a trick of the eye but a tragedy of the nation, the legacy of lynching as public pastime. This slippage from one period to the next is underscored as Douglass looks up at the tree that does not yet contain the future, we already see that Julien has now edited into the mix. Yet, Douglass’ takeaway is expansive, instructive and strangely hopeful:

“Thus early I learned that the point from which a thing is viewed is of some importance.” This insight returns agency to the scared enslaved boy in the woods, but also to all who encounter a world that is not of their making but that they can choose to engage with criticality and on their terms.  It is true of a tree, a person, a work of art, a nation, even. Encouraging museum audiences to understand this is a huge part of how SAAM presents its permanent collection. We may not have artworks from every point of view, but we can be more aware that each work or historical chapter has many ways it can be seen and points of view it can sustain. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, by adding Lessons to our galleries, we now have Douglass, via Julien, in the ear of our visitors, prompting them to consider the point from which a thing is viewed as “of some importance.”

Lessons

It is really this lesson about perspective that drives the most heart wrenching and contemporarily pointed speech in Lessons of the Hour, as Douglass contrasts how the White audience that invited him to make remarks on the 4th of July in 1852 sees that holiday—and all that it represents, from the Declaration of Independence signed that day to the ideals it set forth and those espoused by the country and its citizens ever since—and how it must be seen from the point of view of the enslaved and all those attuned to their humanity. Because ideals are meant to exist “on high,” unchanging and universal, Douglass’ contrasting perspectives here do not expand possible interpretations so much as expose the hypocrisy and self-deception that sustains an untenable view. As Douglass holds lofty claims and stated values next to horrible deeds and barbarous actions, his stark juxtapositions illuminate that which is hardest to illustrate—a gap. In this case, the gap between an ideal and the real, and the gap between who or what we hope to be and what we do or is done in our name.

Yet, as noted above, juxtaposition is the strength of multi-screen media works, and Julien one of its highest practitioners—and so he bounces across time, across five screens, intercutting footage to make us palpably feel that gap, and how it persists. In images that rhyme with Douglass’s words—from fireworks that move in reverse over Baltimore harbor, with a still dominant Domino Sugar corporation sign, and to a 1950s Americana parade with White baton throwers and boosters marching and a lone little Black boy in a Western costume, to protesters remembering Freddie Gray, and the surveillance helicopters watching them, to Frederick Douglass speaking in 1852. We are each left to fit these pieces together—they are irreconcilable, of course, but also of a piece. These scenes will have to be stitched together differently with each viewing, dependent on how your eye moves, the angle and moment you enter. Each time you encounter the work, you are responsible for tracking your own connections and contrasts, thinking anew about what remains unresolved, what you would work on, and where the gaps between ideals and reality might yet be shrunk.

This profound call for us all to actively meditate, along with Douglass (and Julien), on “the Fourth of July” and co-create the picture before us, reaches beyond the gallery where the work is being viewed. I imagine their invitation echoing throughout our shared museums and into the streets of the capital city. By collectively attending to the gap, we resonate with another proclamation Douglass made, not in the video, but fitting to its purpose: “Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-american-art-museum/2025/02/28/a-meditation-on-the-legacy-of-frederick-douglass-by-artist-and-filmmaker-isaac-julien/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=93490758