Cécile Fromont believes that something new can be revealed about an artwork or artifact every time someone lays eyes on it. It’s one of the reasons she loves the classroom environment, where she and her students can examine objects of visual and material culture together and surprise one another with their perspectives.
“I really, truly, and cheesily love the experience of being amazed at what other people can see and the insights that they can bring that other people in the room would never in a million years have thought about,” said Fromont, professor of the history of art and architecture. “To have that experience over and over again is, for me, one of the great gifts of being a teacher.”
Fromont, an art historian specializing in the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period, joined the Department of History of Art and Architecture in 2024, and will begin teaching this fall after a year of research leave. She is also the inaugural faculty director of the Alain Locke Gallery of African & African American Art (formerly the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery) at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
“This is an historic moment for the Hutchins Center and indeed for Harvard as a whole,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center. “As the only art space at a major university devoted exclusively to exhibiting and exploring African, African American, and Afro-Latin American art, the Alain Locke Gallery now has at its helm an art historian whose work reflects the breadth and depth of this vibrant field of study. Widely respected for the range and originality of her critical scholarship, Cécile Fromont will bring a rigorous, cosmopolitan intelligence to her leadership of the Locke Gallery.”
Fromont’s expertise centers on cross-cultural interactions in the Atlantic world from 1500 to 1850, including as a result of the slave trade. She has long been fascinated by the global significance of the events concentrated in that time and place in history.
“What keeps me interested in studying that time and place is the ways in which the interactions, the connections, the fights, the tragedies, the shipwrecks, and the triumphs of that moment have defined and continued to shape the world that we live in, in terms of the structures of politics, geopolitics, knowledge, and artistic practices,” Fromont said. “It really allows me to understand many of the challenges that we’re facing today and to imagine possible ways forward.”
Part of the appeal of her work, she said, is the chance to play detective, using documents and visual objects to solve historical mysteries. One early example was her first book, which examined the debate over whether Christianity truly shaped the Kingdom of Kongo during the early modern time, or if its influence was superficial. Fromont found that the period’s visual culture — fashion, architecture, crucifixes, figurines, and even currency — supported the existence of a distinctly Kongolese Christian worldview during that time.
“I’ve always been a little bit contrarian. When people say, ‘We’ll never know,’ that usually piques my interest, and I try to see if that is really true,” Fromont said. “That’s perhaps why I have created this field of study for myself: it’s very problem-driven. Identifying a visual problem and trying to get to the bottom of it has been the main motor of my research agenda.”
This semester, Fromont is one of six professors co-teaching “HAA10: Introduction to the History of Art.” In the spring, she will teach the graduate seminar “Africa and the Atlantic World,” and a first-year seminar titled “Making Monsters in the Atlantic World,” a course about what visualizations of monsters in the Atlantic corridor in the early modern period can teach us about cross-cultural encounters, oppression, and control.
“I really try to create a community within the class where we know each other. Then we can discuss ideas as scholars at different stages of thinking about the material,” Fromont said. “I may have been thinking about some of those things for more years than some of the scholars in the class, but there is material that I encounter anew too, and then we are all thinking on our feet.”
“I’ve always been a little bit contrarian. When people say, ‘We’ll never know,’ that usually piques my interest, and I try to see if that is really true.”
Fromont is working on several book projects. One, titled “Objects of Power,” looks at 18th-century protective amulets created by African ritual practitioners in Europe and the Americas — small cloth bundles filled with items like holy hosts, sulfur, prayers, and bones — that lent power and protection to their users and drew scrutiny from both civil and religious authorities such as the Portuguese Inquisition or French courts.
“It tells us about the nature of power and the mode of its exercise in that crucial moment in the history of the Atlantic world,” Fromont said.
Another book project, “The Discreet Charm of the ‘Old Indies,’” re-examines French Baroque tapestries depicting Brazil and aristocrats from the Kingdom of Kongo from a European perspective as imagined exotic tableaux both showing and hiding colonialism and Atlantic slavery, and the question of whether it is still appropriate to display these artworks today.
“The question is: As a society, what do we choose to see in these objects?” said Fromont, who is working with artist Sammy Baloji to create a new tapestry featuring a historically accurate scene, which will be displayed in the Netherlands in October. “How do we make a decision as a society about what we make visible and what we make invisible, what we choose to see and what we choose not to see in these objects?”
At the Alain Locke Gallery, Fromont will curate her first on-campus exhibition this spring, a show on art from the French- and Creole-speaking Caribbean. The gallery will open “Renaissance, Race, and Representation in the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art,” 65 works from one of the country’s finest collections of African American art along with selections from the Hutchins Center’s own collection, on Sept. 30.
“One of the strengths of this gallery is that it’s very nimble and creative by design in the way that it conceives its exhibitions and programing, which creates unique possibilities in terms of what we can bring to the Harvard and Boston community,” Fromont said. “It’s a rare place where you can make an exhibition that is scholarship-led and focused on a research problem, and then the next one may be celebrating the aesthetics of an artistic or vernacular practice. It is a space of possibilities that in many ways channels the spirit of Alain Locke the scholar, but also Alain Locke the art collector, the educator, and the community builder.”