The American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) seeks proposals for contributions to an interdisciplinary publication to accompany the upcoming exhibition Unnamed Figures: Black Presence & Absence in Early American Vernacular Art, on view in New York City from November 13, 2023 – March 24, 2024.
Black figures seldom appear in American art of the 18th and early 19th centuries. When represented, they are typically placed in secondary positions, subjected by both artist and patron to marginalization, and portrayed as lacking in individuality and interiority. Most often, these figures go unnamed—continuing a legacy of perceived insignificance and unknowability implied from the moment of their depiction.
The exhibition and publication will give special focus to the 18th- and early 19th-century American North, tackling stubborn mythologies about the benign or insignificant nature of slavery in this region, and focusing on Black lives in a time and place that has often been overlooked as a site of African American history and culture. The exhibition contents—comprised of approximately fifty works including overmantel paintings, needlework, portraits, works on paper, and other vernacular media—will form a critical foundation for the book and provide a crucial opportunity to explore the exhibition’s themes at greater length, from the perspective of multiple voices within African diaspora scholarship. Both the exhibition and the book seek to bring together a diversity of perspectives from various fields, mining evidence from visual, material, literary, and archival sources to explore stories of Black endurance, agency, and creativity through multiple forms of cultural production.