Exhibitions
Selections from the Boston University Libraries Collections
The subjects of the books listed below are 'slavery' and the 'slave trade' as represented in western art. To find more books, browse by subject: slavery in art or by keywords, such as slavery art or slave trade art and filter your results for books, articles, and other items..
Selected Books on Slavery in Museum Exhibitions
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Black Figure in the European Imaginary [exhibition] by With forty major loans, including paintings, engravings, lithographs, watercolors, sculpture, and decorative arts, this new volume studies the way in which the visual arts in Europe perceived, or imagined, the black figure during the "long" nineteenth century (ca.1750-1914).Location: Mugar Stacks N8232 .C59 2017 on order -
Black in Rembrandt's Time [exhibition] by * An in-depth look at the depiction of black people by Rembrandt and his contemporaries * Documents an exhibition at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam from March 6 - May 31, 2020 This exhibition catalogue tells the story of the black community in 17th century Dutch society and reveals how attitudes to race were expressed in the portrayal of black figures in Dutch art. Black people were present in 17th-century Holland, both in society and in art. This subject has long remained in the shadows, a situation this ground-breaking exhibition addresses. Rembrandt and many of his contemporaries made magnificent works of art that depict people of color. There was a small community of around 80 free black people of color living in the Jodenbreestraat neighborhood of Amsterdam during Rembrandt's lifetime. Painters during this period portrayed individual black models from life, and in a number of cases they formed the main subject of the art work. This book explores the conditions that gave rise to these remarkable works of art and the reasons the public image of black people changed from about 1660 onward. It tells the stories of the Dutch artists who aimed to capture their multi-racial world, and the impact of transatlantic slavery.Location: Mugar Stacks N8232 .B52 2020 on order -
Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America, Chapter 5: American Museums and the Representation of Slavery as Trauma by Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages the book also explores the ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil haveconstructed slavery over the last hundred years. These institutional legacies emerge as startlingly different from each other at almost every level.Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects - including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera - Black Milk celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Despite itslongevity and vastness, Brazilian slavery as a cultural phenomenon has remained hugely neglected, in both academic and popular studies, particularly when compared to North American slavery. Consequently much of Black Milk is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden treasury ofvisual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance.There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focussed on Angelo Agostini the 'Brazilian Daumier') and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, lead by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials isrevealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art. Black Milk is a mould-breaking study, a bold comparative analysis of the visual arts and archives generated by slavery within the two biggest and mostimportant slave holding nations of the Atlantic Diaspora. [not an exhibition]Publication Date: 2013 online -
Black Victorians : black people in British art 1800-1900 [exhibition] by Presenting an important opportunity to assess how black figures have been portrayed in British art, Black Victorians is a fascinating survey of a subject that has been given little coverage to date. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a fresh perspective on a well-documented period of British history. Prize: 'Creating the Performance' award from the Progress Trust in recognition of its role in promoting the understanding of Black history and for work with the Black community through the exhibition.Location: Mugar Library N8232 .B53 2005 -
Bound to Appear : art, slavery, and the site of blackness in multicultural America by At the close of the twentieth century, black artists began to figure prominently in the mainstream American art world for the first time. Thanks to the social advances of the civil rights movement and the rise of multiculturalism, African American artists in the late 1980s and early '90s enjoyed unprecedented access to established institutions of publicity and display. Yet in this moment of ostensible freedom, black cultural practitioners found themselves turning to the history of slavery. Bound to Appear focuses on four of these artists--Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson--who have dominated and shaped the field of American art over the past two decades through large-scale installations that radically departed from prior conventions for representing the enslaved. Huey Copeland shows that their projects draw on strategies associated with minimalism, conceptualism, and institutional critique to position the slave as a vexed figure--both subject and object, property and person. They also engage the visual logic of race in modernity and the challenges negotiated by black subjects in the present. As such, Copeland argues, their work reframes strategies of representation and rethinks how blackness might be imagined and felt long after the end of the "peculiar institution." The first book to examine in depth these artists' engagements with slavery, Bound to Appear will leave an indelible mark on modern and contemporary art.Location: Mugar Stacks N6512.5.I56 C66 2013 -
The British Slave Trade and Public Memory, Chapter 1: Commemorating the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Liverpool and Bristol. by How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory a momentous event like its own participation in transatlantic slavery? What are the stakes of once more restoring the slave trade to public memory? What can be learned from this history? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explores these questions in her study of depictions and remembrances of British involvement in the slave trade. Skillfully incorporating a range of material, Wallace discusses and analyzes how museum exhibits, novels, television shows, movies, and a play created and produced in Britain from 1990 to 2000 grappled with the subject of slavery. Topics discussed include a walking tour in the former slave-trading port of Bristol; novels by Caryl Phillips and Barry Unsworth; a television adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; and a revival of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In each case, Wallace reveals how these works and performances illuminate and obscure the history of the slave trade and its legacy. While Wallace focuses on Britain, her work also speaks to questions of how the United States and other nations remember inglorious chapters from their past.Publication Date: 2006 online -
Displays of Power : memory and amnesia in the American museum by Museums have become ground zero in America's culture wars. Whereas fierce public debates once centered on provocative work by upstart artists, the scrutiny has now expanded to mainstream cultural institutions and the ideas they present. In Displays of Power, Steven Dubin, whose Arresting Images was deemed "masterly" by the New York Times, examines the most controversial exhibitions of the 1990s. These include shows about ethnicity, slavery, Freud, the Old West, and the dropping of the atomic bomb by the Enola Gay. This new edition also includes a preface by the author detailing the recent Sensation! controversy at the Brooklyn Museum. Displays of Power draws directly upon interviews with many key combatants: museum administrators, community activists, curators, and scholars. It authoritatively analyzes these episodes of America struggling to redefine itself in the late 20th century. [not an exhibition]Location: Mugar Stacks AM151 .D84 1999 -
Landscape of Slavery : the plantation in American art [exhibition] by Through eighty-nine color plates and six thematic essays, this collection examines depictions of plantations, plantation views, and related slave imagery in the context of the history of landscape painting in America, while addressing the impact of these images on US race relations.Location: Mugar Library N8236.P466 L36 2008 -
Mining the Museum: an installation [exhibition] by Location: Mugar Stacks N6537.W546 A4 1994 -
Politics of Memory making slavery visible in the public space by The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia - allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.Publication Date: 2012 online -
Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery by In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation. This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.Location: Mugar Stacks N8243.S576 P83 2009 -
Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: ambiguous engagements [exhibition] by The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the Act abolishing British participation in the slave trade. Representing Enslavement and Abolition on Museums- which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary - reflects on the complexity and difficulty of museums' experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and places these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary's significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The history of Britain's role in transatlantic slavery officially become part of the National Curriculum in the UK in 2009; with the bicentenary of 2007, this marks the start of increasing public engagement with what has largely been a 'hidden' history. The book aims to not only critically review and assess the impact of the bicentenary, but also to identify practical issues that public historians, consultants, museum practitioners, heritage professionals and policy makers can draw upon in developing responses, both to the increasing recognition of Britain's history of African enslavement and controversial and traumatic histories more generally.Location: Mugar Stacks AM7 .R463 2011 -
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe by Location: Mugar Stacks N8232 .R48 2012 print & online -
Slavery : the story of João, Wally, Oopjen, Paulus, van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk, Lohkay by Location: on orderPublication Date: 2021
Background: Selected Surveys & Books on Slavery in Art
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'Black but Human' – Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 by 'Black but Human' is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves. The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings and sketches for costume books.Publication Date: 2019 online -
Black Victorians, Black Victoriana by Black Victorians/Black Victoriana is a welcome attempt to correct the historical record. Although scholarship has given us a clear view of nineteenth-century imperialism, colonialism, and later immigration from the colonies, there has for far too long been a gap in our understanding of the lives of blacks in Victorian England. Without that understanding, it remains impossible to assess adequately the state of the black population in Britain today. Using a transatlantic lens, the contributors to this book restore black Victorians to the British national picture. They look not just at the ways blacks were represented in popular culture but also at their lives as they experienced them--as workers, travelers, lecturers, performers, and professionals. Dozens of period photographs bring these stories alive and literally give a face to the individual stories the book tells. The essays taken as a whole also highlight prevailing Victorian attitudes toward race by focusing on the ways in which empire building spawned a "subculture of blackness" consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism absorbed by society at large. This misrepresentation made it difficult to be both black and British while at the same time it helped to construct British identity as a whole. Covering many topics that detail the life of blacks during this period, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana will be a landmark contribution to the emergent field of black history in England.Location: Mugar Stacks DA125.N4 B528 2003 -
Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination by Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition. In Characters of Blood, Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminates the ways in which six iconic men and women--Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman--challenged the dominant conceptualizations of their histories and played a key role in the construction of an alternative visual and textual archive. While these figures have survived as symbolic touchstones, Bernier contends that scholars have yet to do justice to their complex bodies of work or their multifaceted lives. Adopting a comparative and transatlantic approach to her subjects' remarkable life stories, the author analyzes a wealth of creative work--from literature, drama, and art to public monuments, religious tracts, and historical narratives--to show how it represents enslaved heroism throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. In mapping this black diasporic tradition of resistance, Bernier intends not only to reveal the limitations and distortions on record but also to complicate the definitions of black heroism that have been restricted by ideological boundaries between heroic and anti-heroic sites and sights of struggle.Publication Date: 2012 online -
The Color of Stone : sculpting the black female subject in nineteenth-century America by Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color. In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture--color. Considering three major works--Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story's Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis's Death of Cleopatra--she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation as well as issues of artistic production, identity, and subjectivity. She also juxtaposes these sculptures with other types of art to scrutinize prevalent racial discourses and to examine how the black female subject was made visible in high art. By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts. Charmaine A. Nelson is assistant professor of art history at McGill University.Publication Date: 2007 online -
The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 by Presenting a thorough analysis of the Dutch participation in the transatlantic slave trade, this book is based upon extensive research in Dutch archives. The book examines the whole range of Dutch involvement in the Atlantic slave trade from the beginning of the 1600s to the nineteenth century.Location: Mugar Stacks HT1203 .P67 1990 -
The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852 by From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork. Yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books published prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated Slave analyzes some of the more innovative works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement. Martha J. Cutter argues that some illustrated narratives attempt to shift a viewing reader away from pity and spectatorship into a mode of empathy and interrelationship with the enslaved. She also contends that some illustrated books characterize the enslaved as obtaining a degree of control over narrative and lived experiences, even if these figurations entail a sense that the story of slavery is beyond representation itself. Through exploration of famous works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as unfamiliar ones by Amelia Opie, Henry Bibb, and Henry Box Brown, she delineates a mode of radical empathy that attempts to destroy divisions between the enslaved individual and the free white subject and between the viewer and the viewed.ISBN: 9780820351162Publication Date: 2017 online -
The Image of the Black in Western Art by In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones. The new edition of From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire offers a comprehensive look at the fascinating and controversial subject of the representation of black people in the ancient world. Classic essays by distinguished scholars are aptly contextualized by Jeremy Tanner's new introduction, which guides the reader through enormous changes in the field in the wake of the ?Black Athena? story.Location: Mugar Stacks N8232 .I46 2010 volumes 1-5 -
Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid by Inside the Invisible provides the first examination of the work of Turner Prize-winning Black British artist and curator Professor Lubaina Himid CBE. This comprehensive volume breaks new ground by theorizing her development of an alternative visual and textual language within which to do justice to the hidden histories and untold stories of Black women, children, and men bought and sold into transatlantic slavery. For Himid, the act of forgetting within official sites of memory is indivisible from the art of remembering within an African diasporic art historical tradition. She interrogates the widespread distortion and even wholesale erasure of Black bodies and souls subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes and grotesque caricatures within western imaginaries and dominant iconographic traditions over the centuries. Creating bodies of work in which she comes to grips with the physical and psychological realities of iconic and anonymous African diasporic individuals as living breathing human beings rather than as objectified types, she bears witness not only to tragedy but to triumph. A researcher, historian, and storyteller as well as an artist, she succeeds in seeing "inside the invisible" regarding untold narratives of Black agency and artistry by mining national archives, listening to oral stories, acknowledging art-making traditions, and revisiting autobiographical testimonies.Publication Date: 2019 online -
Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, Chapter 3: Proslavery Art and Culture by This book tells the untold story of the fight to defend slavery in the British Empire. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from art, poetry, and literature, to propaganda, scientific studies, and parliamentary papers, Proslavery Britain explores the many ways in which slavery's defenders helped shape the processes of abolition and emancipation. It finds that proslavery arguments and rhetoric were carefully crafted to justify slavery, defend the colonies, and attack the abolition movement at the height of the slavery debates.Publication Date: 2016 online -
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World by Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.Publication Date: 2013 online -
Slavery in Art and Literature: Approaches to Trauma, Memory and Visuality by Publication Date: 2009 online -
Slaves Waiting for Sale: abolitionist art and the American slave trade by In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe's paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe's trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London--where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War--Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public's grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.Location: Mugar Stacks N8243.S576 M35 2011 -
Visualising Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora by The purpose of this book is to excavate and recover a wealth of under-examined artworks and research materials directly to interrogate, debate and analyse the tangled skeins undergirding visual representations of transatlantic slavery across the Black diaspora. Living and working on both sides of the Atlantic, as these scholars, curators and practitioners demonstrate, African diasporic artists adopt radical and revisionist practices by which to confront the difficult aesthetic and political realities surrounding the social and cultural legacies let alone national and mythical memories of Transatlantic Slavery and the international Slave Trade. Adopting a comparative perspective, this book investigates the diverse body of works produced by black artists as these contributors come to grips with the ways in which their neglected and repeatedly unexamined similarities and differences bear witness to the existence of an African diasporic visual arts tradition. As in-depth investigations into the diverse resistance strategies at work within these artists' vast bodies of work testify, theirs is an ongoing fight for the right to art for art's sake as they challenge mainstream tendencies towards examining their works solely for their sociological and political dimensions. This book adopts a cross- cultural perspective to draw together artists, curators, academics, and public researchers in order to provide an interdisciplinary examination into the eclectic and experimental oeuvre produced by black artists working within the United States, the United Kingdom and across the African diaspora. The overall aim of this book is to re-examine complex yet under-researched theoretical paradigms vis-�-vis the patterns of influence and cross-cultural exchange across both America and a black diasporic visual arts tradition, a vastly neglected field of study.Publication Date: 2016 online -
Witnessing Slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition by A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. "Being there," indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the "armchair traveler" at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject.Location: Mugar Stacks N8243.S576 T466 2019
