Portraits of Resistance

Portraits of Resistance
Author: Jennifer Van Horn
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300257635

A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World
Author: Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107354781

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.

Picturing Imperial Power

Picturing Imperial Power
Author: Beth Fowkes Tobin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780822323389

An interdisciplinary study of visual representations of British colonial power in the eighteenth century.

Painters and Paintings in the Early American South

Painters and Paintings in the Early American South
Author: Carolyn J. Weekley
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Art and history
ISBN: 9780300190762

This beautifully illustrated volume presents the complex ways in which the lives of artists, clients, and sitters were interconnected in the early American South. During this period, paintings included not only portraits, but also seascapes, landscapes, and pictures made by explorers and naturalists. The first comprehensive study of this subject, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South draws upon materials including diaries, correspondence, and newspapers in order to explore the stylistic trends of the period and the lives of the sitters, as gentility spread from the wealthiest southerners to the middle class. Featuring works by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Benjamin West, among many others, this important book examines the training and status of painters, the distinction between fine art and the mechanical arts, the popularity of portraiture, and the nature of clientele between 1540 and 1790, providing a new, critical understanding of the history of art in the American South. Published in association with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Exhibition Schedule: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation(03/23/13-09/07/14)

Portrait of a Woman in Silk

Portrait of a Woman in Silk
Author: Zara Anishanslin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300220553

Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

American Colonial Women and Their Art

American Colonial Women and Their Art
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1442270977

Less celebrated than their male counterparts, women have been vital contributors to the arts. Works by women of the colonial era represent treasured accomplishments of American culture and still impress us today, centuries after their creation. The breadth of creative expression is as impressive as the women themselves. In American Colonial Women and Their Art: A Chronological Encyclopedia, Mary Ellen Snodgrass follows the history of creative expression from the early 1600s to the late 1700s. Drawing upon primary sources—such as letters, diaries, travel notes, and journals—this timeline encompasses a wide variety of artistic accomplishment, such as: Stitchery, quilting, and rug hooking Painting, sculpture, and sketches Essays, poems, and other writings Dance, acting, and oratory Musical composition and performance Individual talents highlighted in this volume include miniature portraits by Mary Roberts, pastel likenesses by Henrietta Dering Johnston, stagecraft by Elizabeth Sampson Sullivan Ashbridge, basketry by Namumpum Weetamoo, dance by Mary Stagg, metalwork by blacksmith Elizabeth Hager Pratt, calligraphy by Anna “Anastasia” Thomas Wüster, city planning by Deborah Dunch Moody, poems and essays by Phillis Wheatley, and fabric design by Anne Pogue McGinty. Featuring appendices that list individuals by skill and by state—as well as a glossary that clarifies the parameters of genres—this volume is essential to the study of Colonial women’s art. Resurrecting the efforts of women to record, adorn, and illustrate the spirit of their times, American Colonial Women and Their Art is a valuable resource that will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and women’s studies, art history, and American history.

The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary

The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary
Author: Simon Dell
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9462702152

French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).