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 18^th and early 19^th 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.

Although initiated by the works’ makers and original consumers, this compositional sidelining has also been reinforced by histories of interpretation, with museums and art historians re-inscribing, through narrative repetition, white representations as the dominant point of interest. In landscapes, small Black staffage figures are glossed as incidental, their presence left without further exploration or interpretation. Incorporated into portraits of elite white sitters, enslaved Black servants are continually described only as accessories to power, symbols that elevate the status of the primary, white subject of a picture.

What if we actively choose to refocus our attention, to center interpretation on questions about Black subjects, even though the answers may well elude us? Taking these questions as a prompt, Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in Early American Vernacular Art shifts the traditional narrative by inviting the viewer to consider early American images from an alternative perspective, positioning the Black figure as the principal subject of inquiry. Through this re-focused approach to interpretation, the project seeks to destabilize the original racial politics behind the images, positing agency for the real historical people whose presence is indicated by the represented figures.

The exhibition and publication will give special focus to the 18^th– and early 19^th-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.

Possible lines of inquiry include:

• Intersections between Black history and portraiture in New England and the Mid-Atlantic in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries
• Images or objects produced by enslaved or free Black makers such as Joshua Johnson, Scipio Moorhead, Prince Demah, and Moses Williams
• The representation of Black figures within the landscape or domestic interior as components of larger compositions
• The significance of scale in Black representations
• The use of enslaved labor in white image-making processes
• Reading between the lines of the visual and documentary archive to find meaning in Black absence as well as presence
• Tracing Black histories through the making and use of everyday objects
• Historical Black use of fashion and performance, for instance in such festivities as “Black election day”
• Questions around memory and the archive
• Approaches to/complications of the recovery of lost narratives
• The construction of historical Black genealogies
• Contemporary Black artists’ reflections on historical material
• Transtemporal considerations of objects/images as repositories of memory
• Histories of museum interpretation and collecting that have contributed to the making of meaning, misunderstandings, remembering, and forgetting of Black histories
• Methodological approaches to working with any of the above

We invite researchers across disciplines, including but not limited to art history, history, material culture, folklore, African American studies, archival studies, memory studies, and museum studies, to contribute to the volume. Submissions by both emerging and established scholars are encouraged.

Please send abstracts of up to 500 words along with CV and short author biography to Sadé Ayorinde at sayorinde@folkartmuseum.org. Deadline for submissions is December 1, 2021. The deadline for manuscripts is July 1, 2022. Expected length is 6,000-8,000 words.

Curatorial team:

Emelie Gevalt, Curatorial Chair for Collections & Curator of Folk Art, AFAM

Dr. RL Watson, Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies, Lake Forest College

Sadé Ayorinde, Warren Family Assistant Curator, AFAM