Sponsored
by the Louisville Coalition on the History of Enslavement (Farmington, Historic
Locust Grove, Oxmoor Farm Foundation, and Riverside, the Farnsley Moremen Landing).
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists
crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying
the violence, familial separation, and dehumanization that they faced. In
response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either
through idealization or outright erasure of enslaved life.
In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in
American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of
material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings,
photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the
abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research
across a range of southern historical narratives.
Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of
the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art.
She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by
supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting
slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female
caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s
confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an
especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.
Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum
battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the
existing narratives of American art and history.
Rachel Stephens is associate professor of art history
at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Selling Andrew
Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture. In preparing
this project, Stephens served as a Tyson Scholar at Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art in the fall of 2018; a fellow at Yale’s Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in the
spring of 2019; and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the fall of 2020.