AHNCA | Rethinking the Visual and Material Culture of Enslavement

Please join the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) on Wednesday, January 19, at 7PM ET for Rethinking the Visual and Material Culture of Enslavement, the January Virtual Salon co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art. This online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required: https://tinyurl.com/rethinkingenslavement.

For this event, we are fortunate to host three specialists who will discuss this important area of nineteenth-century studies: Jennifer Van Horn (Moderator), Adrienne Childs, and Phillip Troutman. Each will give a brief presentation on an object drawn from their research on the visual and material culture of enslavement, followed by discussion and then a Q&A.  After the event, there will be a break-out room where attendees can socialize informally.

Jennifer Van Horn holds a joint appointment as associate professor in the departments of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America and Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery, forthcoming from Yale University Press (2022). A piece of this project published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the National Portrait Gallery’s Director’s Essay Prize. Recently she co-edited a special double issue of Winterthur Portfolio: “Enslavement and Its Legacies.”

Adrienne L. Childs is an art historian and curator. She is an adjunct curator at The Phillips Collection and associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She curated the exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, 2020, at the Phillips Collection. Her current book project is Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, forthcoming from Yale University Press. She has held fellowships the Lunder Institute at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), The Hutchins Center at Harvard University, The Clark Art Institute and the David C. Driskell Center. She is co-curator of the recent exhibition The Black Figure in the European Imaginary at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. She contributed to The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V from Harvard University Press. Childs is co-editor of the book Blacks in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, Routledge. Her scholarly interests are the relationship between race and representation in European and American fine and decorative arts. She also served as curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland where she curated numerous exhibitions of African American art.

Phillip Troutman is Director of Writing in the Disciplines and an Assistant Professor of Writing and of History at the George Washington University. He was a 2018-2019 Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History and is completing a book entitled “‘Incendiary Pictures’: the Radical Visual Rhetoric of American Abolition.” The book details the 1830s work of African American engraver Patrick Henry Reason and white editors Lewis Tappan and Elizur Wright, Jr., and has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and a Reese Fellowship in the Print Culture of the Americas, Clements Library, University of Michigan.