The project’s animating tension derives from the collision of Locke’s dream with the realities of power. African sculpture was scarcely accessible to Black Americans of the early twentieth century, except through white collectors who often had agendas of their own. Accordingly, the film’s anchoring sequence is a dialogue between Locke and Albert C. Barnes, the founder of the collection, a pharmaceutical millionaire who helped introduce both African sculpture and European modernism to the United States. Shot in the very building where Julien’s exhibition is installed, it finds the two men surrounded by Barnes’s eclectic art hoard—his precise arrangements of the works frozen in place by a provision of his will. “It will be the glory of a few men endowed with certain prophetic visions to have inscribed in the history of the beginning of the twentieth century the revelation of the primitive statues of the African Black race,” Barnes declares.