Thomas B. F. Cummins is the new director of Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard-owned research institution in Washington, D.C. A Harvard History of Art and Architecture professor and an expert on pre-Columbian and Latin American colonial art, he discusses future plans for Dumbarton Oaks and a recent conference there on the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Welcome to Faculty Voices. Thomas B.F. Cummins is the new director of Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard-owned research institution in Washington, DC. He's a Harvard history of art and architecture professor and an expert on pre-Columbian and Latin American colonial art. Welcome, Tom.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Thank you. It's good to see you and to talk to you.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Many of our listeners may be surprised that Harvard has a Washington outpost. For those who do not know, could you describe what Dumbarton Oaks is and a bit of its history?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Yeah, I'd be happy to. Even people in Washington DC do not know that Dumbarton Oaks actually is part of Harvard. Dumbarton Oaks is the estate of Robert and Mildred Bliss that they began in 1920. Robert Bliss was a graduate of Harvard University, and they were among other things, great collectors of pre-Columbian and Byzantine art. They also engaged with Beatrix Farrand to create, according to National Geographic, one of the 10 top gardens in the world. We maintain that with 11 gardeners. It's a beautiful garden. We are celebrating its 100th anniversary this year with a gala on June 10th. We also have a incredibly fine collection of architecture beginning with McKim, Mead, and White, and then probably Philip Johnson's greatest building, which is the pavilion for the pre-Columbian collection. Then Robert Venturi who built the library at five stories, which you can't really see.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
It is also the home of the United Nations. This was used for the first convening of the United Nations conversations, out of which grew the United Nations. So this is a historic site for many, many different reasons. Robert Bliss offered Dumbarton Oaks to convene the United Nations conversations because he himself was a diplomat and was ambassador to Argentina and traveled throughout Europe.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
In 1940, it was deeded to Harvard University as a home for the humanities. And there is a set of letters between Paul Sachs and Mildred Bliss about the importance of the humanities in a time of true cultural and political crisis. We're facing that again, both in Washington and of course across the world. Right now we're engaged with bringing Russian and Ukrainian scholars here, and we're having a set of lectures and symposia on the Ukraine and its importance, of course, in the Byzantine world. We have set up scholarships or stipends for immediate relief for both Russian scholars who have had to leave Russia as well as Ukrainian scholars in all three areas.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
So it's a very active center, both in terms of symposia that we have in the three areas of research, garden landscape, Byzantine studies, and pre-Columbian studies.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You just held a major conference. So tell me about that conference Tenochtitlan, Imperial Ideologies on Display.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Yes. This is a ongoing symposium, and what I mean by that is in 1978, the great Templo Mayor of Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, which is the Nahuatl or Aztec name for Mexico City, was discovered as pipes were being laid by electrical workers. Since then, there has been ongoing excavations right next to cathedral, the Zócalo of the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan. In 1983, the director of that program in Mexico talked to Elizabeth Boone, who was then director of pre-Columbian studies and said, "We should hold a conference about the discoveries that were being unearthed in those first five to six years," which they did. It was a benchmark publication on the Templo Mayor and its excavations. It was decided that again, with Elizabeth Boone and members of the Mexican team that's working at the Templo Mayor to revisit some 40 years later to see what had been done.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
So this symposium was held to really bring everybody up to present in terms of one of the great structures in the center of the great city of Tenochtitlan, the island city of the Aztec and its greatest building, which is a building that was incrementally built one stage on top of the other. So we have all of the stages except for the very first, which was a mud hut, and the last, which was basically destroyed by the Spanish. But many of the sculptures still exist from that stage of Montezuma the Second.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
So that's what that symposium was about. We will then do a volume of the papers that were presented, and they were absolutely brilliant and incredibly revelatory. The newest discovery or unearthing is the tzompantli. Tzompantli is the skull rack that's described by Tapia and Bernal Diaz Del Castillo and many other chroniclers in which many of the sacrificial victims were ultimately decapitated and their heads placed upon poles that were in front of the Templo Mayor, and they build a structure there and it's still there and any of the skulls are still there. It's really quite remarkable.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Does the importance of this structure go beyond the physical? Does it tell us something about that culture?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Oh, it tells us a great deal about the culture itself because the temple itself is filled with dedicatory caches and they are specific to different periods of time and historical events. Some have to do with the expansion of the Aztec to different areas, but others have to do with periods of drought and what's placed in these caches as dedicatory caches. So that there's a whole historical register in the dedicatory caches that are deposited in the Templo Mayor.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
In addition, this was a cosmic center that really is created to reenact the foundational myth of Tenochtitlan and the birth of its primary deity for the Aztec, Huitzilopochtli or hummingbird on the left and all these great sculptures of Coatlicue, that is she of the serpent skirt, or Coyolxauhqui, Huitzilopochtli's sister, who is thrown down the mountain of Coatepec, snake mountain. I mentioned all those names. I'm sure everybody can repeat them and spell them. But what that myth is actually created through the temple itself. It has snakes on it, and that at the top, there was the great Coatlicue sculpture that is now in the Museum of Anthropology and the great Coyolxauhqui or she of the bells on her cheeks, who's the sister who's rolled down on the sides of the mountain, is like the bodies that are rolled down the steps of the Templo Mayor.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
So it's a really incredible [French 00:07:47] kind of mythology, that is they built the theater and recreated the foundational myths of the Aztec emperor. And many of our faculty, David Carrasco was involved in this and has written about this. I'm just repeating what other scholars have divined from what has been found in the last 40 years.
June Carolyn Erlick:
What were some of the new things that came up in the conference besides the skull rack?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Well, we know that there was a zoo that was kept by Montezuma the Second, and there has been forensic work done on some of the dedicatory caches of eagles and wolves that were interred. We know that they kept them there for over a year. You can tell by their diets and things like that, as well as quetzal birds, et cetera. So we know quite a bit more about the use of the zoo, how the animals were kept, what they were fed, because they appear in these dedicatory caches and their skeletons have been forensically studied. So that's one of the things.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Another was the discussion of the sculpture of Montezuma the Second at Chapultepec and how it was facing the Templo Mayor. That was still partially there, although the other images have been destroyed. So there was a tremendous amount of new information that was this disseminated in the conference. It was really brilliant papers. And then it went into the early colonial period and the reuse of certain Aztec sculptures for Christian practices. A brilliant paper on the conversion of a sculpture of the plumed serpent that is Quetzalcoatl and how it was resculpted to become a baptismal font in one of the very first churches established in Tenochtitlan by the Spanish. So it was a really a wonderful conference that went from the creation of Tenochtitlan to its destruction.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You mentioned that it was a hybrid conference. How many people attended physically and what did that hybridity feel like?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Well, this is the first in-person conference that we have had since I became director. My first order of business as director of Dumbarton Oaks was to close it down, and we are a resident residential research center. So we have 50 residential scholars here every year. For the first year we had none. We had did everything virtually. This year, we opened it up to 50 residential scholars, but really closed the library. We have a great library as well as a rare book library. And we opened it up only to scholars. We planned to open in December to numerous events. I should say that we also have a substantial music program here. We commission music. We have a great music room where we have concerts. We were to open those to the public in December, but unfortunately, the beginning of December, I said we could do it. And then by December 15th, Omicron reared its ugly head. So we had to close it down.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
But I should say that as we commissioned music, they commissioned, that is the Bliss' commissioned Stravinsky. So there's the Dumbarton Oaks concerto. Samuel Barber was commissioned. So we continue this tradition of having onsite musicians, early career musicians. We then had a 75th anniversary concert here with a Boston group playing only Dumbarton Oak's commissioned music with beginning of the Brandenburg Concerto because Stravinsky, as was Barber, influenced by Baroque music and especially Bach. That was our very first concert open to the public a week before the pre-Columbian studies conference on Tenochtitlan.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
What that meant was that the fellows who were here in pre-Columbian studies, as well as the speakers, as well as a few guests were in the audience. The rest of the public was in presence virtually. We have three more symposia this spring, because everything got backed up because of COVID. At any one time, we had about 230, 40 outside guests registered, but we had 500 registered and I suspect there are probably 500 people that came in and out.
June Carolyn Erlick:
In the music area, do you have any plans for involving Latin Americans?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
We have had Latin Americans. Yeah.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Tell me about it.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
I would have to look at the program for next year. But we have had composers from Latin America as well as performers. And so we've had performers from all over the world.
June Carolyn Erlick:
It sounded like you were veering a little bit towards the classical in the example.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
It is classical.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Ah. So these are Latin American composers who work in the classic music?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
It is a chamber set of up for chamber orchestra and music, but I mean we've had very modern composers. But we have not had jazz. We've had primarily classical or classically trained musicians.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you tell me a bit more about what is the role of visiting scholars at Dumbarton Oaks? And you have very distinct areas of study. Do they all get together? Do they interact only within their programs? What does that look like?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
So we do have three radically different areas of study and that's based upon the interests of the Blisses and the endowment. We have a variety of different scholars. So we have fellows, and these are individual scholars who are usually finished their PhDs, are in professional jobs somewhere in the world. We have people from Latin America. We have people from everywhere: Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Chile. And that is also true for Byzantine, many of them coming from Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, et cetera. Then garden landscape has the broadest range. So one of our scholars this year in garden landscape actually works with contemporary Mapuche landscape. So we have intersections that are natural, but I should say then there are junior scholars. These are people who are working on their PhDs, and they're called junior scholars. But we have a scholar house, a residential scholars, the building that was purchased and refitted by predecessor Jan M. Ziolkowski and they live there.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
We also have scholars from Harvard. We have Tyler scholars. These are open only to graduate students from Harvard in any of the areas, and that is much broader. So one of my students who's working on Copacabana from Peru and Carabuco, [Aniq Benedidez 00:14:55] is here this year, working with a Tyler. It's a two-year fellowship, one year here, one year in the field.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Then we have post-baccalaureate scholars from Harvard, that is we bring in students mainly in the humanities and we pair them with institutions here. They spend part of their time at Dumbarton Oaks and part of the time at the Folger Library or the Smithsonian and learn skills and create an idea of what you can do with a degree in the humanities.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
We also have a winter studies for students at Harvard. We bring them down for a week or two, although that's been curtailed the last two years and we did it virtually on cultural philanthropy. So we are having a symposium this spring on the role of philanthropy and culture and soft power. Then we also have post-doctoral fellows here who will be either in the museum or doing other areas of studies, such as the publication. So we have multiple series. There's the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. We have three areas that are publishing their symposia as well as special volumes. Then we also have a translation series in garden landscape as well as pre-Colombians so that early modern texts in Latin, Nahuatl, Guarani, Quechua, Aymara, all of those, we're beginning to translate those and publish those for use in classrooms.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Then we have Extravagantes for example, which is a one-off series. So that one of the very first books is written by Eleni Kefala called The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity. It's a study because Constantinople falls in 1453 and Tenochtitlan in 1519, space of 50 years or 60 years. This was a study of the poetry that is created as a lament of the conquest of both places. It's a beautiful book.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you do anything to bring these three groups of scholars together? Do they interact?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Yes. That's one of the programs that I've been working on. Every scholar has to present their work once, and we have one presentation a week. Now we have to have two because we're backed up and the scholars are asked to attend those presentations and then they can go to, the next day there's a discussion. Then very often people from garden landscape will go to pre-Columbian or Byzantine to talk. Then next year we're going to institutionalize a joint symposium between the three areas and next year it will be on climate change and the three areas talking about what that means in the three areas. They will each bring scholars from around the world in their own area to discuss this. We will have then the senior fellows, that is the people who actually from around the world who come here to select both themes for symposia as well as the next year's crop of scholars. They will all be together for the first time ever, I think.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's fabulous. Do you have any other shaping of the programs, different vision for Dumbarton Oaks?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
We are building a new building in the last piece of available real estate, although this real estate here is extremely sloped, so it's a bit difficult. It's going to be expensive. But this is a building that is going to accommodate a new program of K-12 education that will bring the humanities and the arts to the children of Washington, DC in the lesser-served communities. In a sustained way, we'll probably be able to have 70 students each day, five days a week, and integrate them with study collections in Byzantine and pre-Columbian as well as get them into what it means to be in the gardens and what garden landscape means. This is a very expensive building and it's geared not towards our fellows or anybody else. We will have an artist studio, we'll bring. We do have artists who come and do interventions here. That is one of the new buildings that we are creating for this program.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
I firmly believe in this, that America has walked away from its children in terms of education and the humanities. It's all based upon a kind of utilitarian knowledge, instrumental knowledge should I say. We're seeing the effects of that actually across the board. And it's not that we are going to create many humanists out of these children, but they will understand that there are programs that sustain the history of different areas of the world, understand what it means to have horticulture, and what it means to have a knowledge of the past. Some students may actually become curators or scholars, but that's not the intent. The intent is to give them that experience that is being withdrawn across the board in the United States.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's fabulous. When do you expect that to be up and running?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Two years. I tell you right now that construction costs and timetables are unpredictable. The first thing we have to do is actually address and rehabilitate the existing greenhouse. We have to do that first. That's McKim, Mead, and White designed. It's beautiful. One of the most beautiful greenhouses. It's in sad repair right now. And we need that greenhouse because that is used to grow the plants that we put into the gardens, et cetera. We will rehabilitate that as well as our guest house. Then we start on the Farrand house. It's called the Farrand house after Beatrix Farrand who wanted to do something like this in her estate in Maine.
June Carolyn Erlick:
It sounds like a fascinating project. As someone who's known you for quite a while, I'm curious, when you talk about Tenochtitlan, it seems to be more archeology than what I would envision for a art historian. How do you see the relationship between those two fields?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Well, it's very easy that this is a extremely visual culture. It is archeologically known because these cultures were extinguished by the conquest, and so much of it was suppressed, but there's a rich visual culture that exists. It's very different than what exists in Western sense of art and art history. So if it's archeologically recovered, just as classical art is archeologically recovered... We have a lot of archeological material from the Byzantine. But we have an art history department, and we have Ioli Kalavrezou who is the art historian in the art history department of Harvard. Just because something is archeologically recovered, doesn't mean it's archeological.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So this is just a couple of questions of curiosity before we wind up. How much did you know about the Byzantine culture when you took over this post?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
I was originally a medievalist. I was writing my dissertation on Chartres Cathedral and I was a 100 pages into it when I decided that I would be a lousy medievalist and I really wanted to work in pre-Columbian art and colonial art. So I stopped, went back, took my languages in Quechua. I already had Latin and Spanish and French, German and then took my exams again. So I had taken a lot of courses in Byzantine. In fact, Ioli Kalavrezou, who's the professor at Harvard in Byzantine art, I was her first TF. So I probably know more about the two fields than anybody who's ever been here.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That is absolutely fascinating. Okay. How about landscape?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Landscape, I have to deal with because if you work in the Andes, this is about landscape. It's not an urban population. It's how you actually deal with reforming the land. It's one of the great projects that the Inca and cultures that come before... So I've always been interested in that, but from an historical point of view, in terms of how you incorporate a tremendously rugged landscape into an ordered world...
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you garden?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
[Kyle 00:23:23] does, my wife. And I sometimes go out and weed.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Is there anything I haven't asked you that you would like to put forth?
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Well, I would invite everyone to come see Dumbarton Oaks. As I said, the buildings are beautiful. The collections are some of the finest in the world and the garden is also one of the finest in the world. The garden, there is an entrance fee. The museums are free and it is open to the public. It is really one of the great jewels of Harvard.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you. You've been listening to Thomas B.F. Cummins, who is the new director of Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard-owned research institution in Washington, DC. He's a Harvard history of art and architecture professor and an expert on pre-Columbian and Latin American colonial art. Thank you, Tom.
Thomas B.F. Cummins:
Thank you, June. It's a pleasure.