Press release. - William L. Clements Library

William L. Clements Library
University of Michigan
909 S. University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1190
Hours: Monday-Friday, 1:00-4:45 p.m., and by appointment.
(734) 764-2347
www.clements.umich.edu
October 1, 2009
Exhibit and symposium “Reframing the Color Line: Race and the Visual Culture of
the Atlantic World”
Exhibit dates: October 19, 2009 - February 19, 2010
Exhibit location: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan
Curated by Martha S. Jones, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and
African Studies, University of Michigan, and Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphics,
Clements Library.
Symposium dates: October 30, 31, 2009
Symposium location: 1014 Tisch Hall, 435 S. State St., University of Michigan,
Department of History
http://www.clements.umich.edu/exhibits/colorline/colorline.html
Contact: Clayton Lewis clayclem@umich.edu, (734) 764-2347
The William L. Clements Library presents “Reframing the Color Line: Race and the
Visual Culture of the Atlantic World.” This exhibition and symposium explore the origins
of American racism in visual culture by examining original 19th century engravings,
lithographs, watercolors, and books. Through an interdisciplinary approach, “Reframing
the Color Line” explores the interplay between visual culture and U.S. race politics of the
early nineteenth century. Visitors will come away with a better understanding of racism’s
past. They will also acquire a new, critical vantage point on how race continues to be
constructed by the visual culture of today. Many images we confront in our everyday lives
have long histories that imbue them with social meanings.
“Reframing the Color Line” centers on the work of Philadelphia artist Edward W.
Clay. The artist’s most notorious series, “Life in Philadelphia” was published in the late
1820s. Clay deployed caricature to pose questions about who African Americans, many
of them former slaves, could be in a nation that relied upon race and slavery to signal
inequality and difference. Clay invented black figures that uttered malapropisms, wore
clothing of exaggerated proportions, struck ungraceful poses, and thereby failed to
measure up to the demands of freedom and citizenship. His ideas were cruel, yet
enduring.
The Exhibition reframes “Life in Philadelphia” in two new contexts. The series was
influenced by parallel developments in Europe’s visual culture. The exhibition contrasts
the series with the work of British and French caricaturists and reveals the trans-Atlantic
roots of racism in visual culture. “Life in Philadelphia” also had a local context. In
Philadelphia, Clay was only one numerous artists to portray African Americans. Others,
including Patrick Reason, Charles Willson Peale, James Akin, and John Lewis Krimmel,
portrayed black Philadelphians as respectable, sympathetic and at times unremarkable
figures on the urban landscape.
Visitors will be challenged to consider how these works, which drew upon wellestablished, fine arts techniques, also perpetuated derogatory ideas. The core materials
are as provocative as they are important. Great care has been taken to ensure that their
presentation teaches about their origins and meanings, while never perpetuating the
pernicious stereotypes they contain. To meet this challenge, an interdisciplinary team
from university programs in History, Museum Studies, American Culture, History of Art,
and Afroamerican Studies has advised the production of this project. This exhibit will
appeal to scholars, students, and members of the general public who have an interest in
American history and culture, art history, ethnic studies, and graphic satire.
The symposium, scheduled for October 30, 31, 2009, will discuss issues related to race
and 19th century visual culture, and the role of archives and museums in the construction
of historical memory. The symposium panelists are:
Corey Capers, University of Illinois, Chicago.
Jasmine Cobb, University of Pennsylvania.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, University of Delaware.
Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan.
Phillip Lapsansky, Library Company of Philadelphia.
Elise Lemire, SUNY Purchase.
Clayton Lewis, Clements Library, University of Michigan.
Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley.
The symposium events will be held at Tisch Hall on the University of Michigan central
campus and will be free and open to university faculty, students, and the public. There
will be a reception at the Clements from 4:30 - 6:00 pm on Friday October 30.
Symposium email contact: reframingthecolorline@umich.edu
REFRAMING THE COLOR LINE:
RACE AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD
AN EXHIBITION AND SYMPOSIUM
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30. 1:00 P.M. – 4:30 P.M.
HISTORY DEPARTMENT, 1014 TISCH HALL.
PANEL I. PARODY AND PUBLIC CULTURE.
Chair. Paul Farber, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan
Samuel Otter. University of California, Berkeley. Department of English.
‘Have You Any Flesh Coloured Silk Stockings?’: Re-Viewing Edward W. Clay’s ‘Life in
Philadelphia.’
Corey Capers. University of Illinois, Chicago. Department of History.
Reading Bobalition: Toward a Genealogy of Satiric Public Blackness.
PANEL II. SEEING GENDER AND SEXUALITY.
Chair. Christa Holm Vogelius, Department of English, University of Michigan.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar. University of Delaware. Department of History and Black
American Studies Program.
Reading, Writing, and Womanhood: Representations of African American Women in the
Antebellum City.
Elise Lemire. SUNY at Purchase. Department of Literature.
Edward Clay’s “Practical Amalgamation” Series.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30. 4:30 – 6:00 P.M.
CLEMENTS LIBRARY.
RECEPTION AND VIEWING OF REFRAMING THE COLOR LINE.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31. 9:30 A.M. – 1:00 P.M.
HISTORY DEPARTMENT, 1014 TISCH HALL.
PANEL III. TRANS-ATLANTIC MIGRATIONS.
Chair. Rachel Quinn. Program in American Culture. University of Michigan.
Jasmine Nicole Cobb. University of Pennsylvania. Annenberg School for Communications.
Race in the Trans-Atlantic Parlor: Diffusions of “Life in Philadelphia.”
Martha S. Jones. University of Michigan. Department of History, Center for Afroamerican
and African Studies, and Law School.
Trans-Atlantic Visions: The Case of Haiti’s Faustin Soulouque.
PANEL IV. CURATOR’S ROUNDTABLE: ARCHIVING RACE AND VISUAL CULTURE.
Chair. Aston Gonzalez. Department of History, University of Michigan.
Georgia B. Barnhill. Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts & Director, Center for
Historic American Visual Culture. American Antiquarian Society.
Phil Lapsansky, Curator of African American History, Library Company of Philadelphia.
Clayton Lewis. Curator of Graphic Materials, William L. Clements Library, University of
Michigan.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31. 2:00 - 4:00 P.M.
CLEMENTS LIBRARY.
BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE CLEMENTS LIBRARY.
With Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphic Materials. (Program participants only.)
SPEAKERS
COREY CAPERS teaches Early American History and African American Studies from the
Seventeenth to the mid-Nineteenth Century. Among the courses he has recently taught are: Ritual,
Print and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-America; Authority, Resistance and Power in Early
America; Black Lives in Revolution; and A History of Punishment: From Early Modern Europe to
the Nineteenth-Century U.S. His primary areas of interest are in racial practice, print culture and
citizenship during the Revolution and Early Republic as reflected in his dissertation, Black
Voices/White Print: Race-making, Print Politics and the Rhetoric of Disorder in the Early National
U.S. North. He is currently working on his book project entitled Public Blackness: Racial Practice,
Publicity and Citizenship in the U.S. North, 1776 - 1828 as well an article entitled "Reading Bobalition:
Racial Publicity and the Shaping of Democratic Order, 1816 - 1834."
JASMINE NICHOLE COBB is a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at
the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Racing the Trans-Atlantic Parlor,” considers
representations of Black women in popular culture of the early nineteenth century. More broadly,
her writing and research focuses on race, gender, and visual culture.
ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR specializes in 19th century African American and Women's History.
She received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and her Ph.D. from Columbia
University in 2000. Her first book is entitled: A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and
Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008). She is currently working on her next
book length project that focuses on African Americans and mental illness in the 19th century.
MARTHA S. JONES is Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting
Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jones is the author of All Bound Up
Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900(2007), which examines
nineteenth-century debates over the rights of women. She directs the Law and Slavery and Freedom
Project, an international research collaborative with Rebecca J. Scott (Michigan) and Jean Hébrard
(EHESS). Her current book length project is Overturning Dred Scott: Everyday Life at the Intersection of
Race and Law in an Antebellum City. Jones is co-curator of the exhibition Reframing the Color Line,
with Clayton Lewis of the Clements Library.
ELISE LEMIRE is the author of two books on race in the antebellum Northeast. “Miscegenation”:
Making Race in America, originally published in 2002, was recently reissued in paperback by the
University of Pennsylvania Press. Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts was
published this past spring, also by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is the recipient of
several fellowships, including two year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Educated at Yale and Rutgers and now Associate Professor of Literature at SUNY
Purchase, Dr. Lemire is currently working on a book about the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts
history, which took place when Vietnam Veterans Against the War attempted to camp on the
Lexington Battle Green.
SAMUEL OTTER has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley
since 1990. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is
particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary
excess, and the ways in which close reading also can be deep and wide. He has published Melville’s
Anatomies (1999), in which he analyzes Melville’s concern with how meanings, particularly racial
meanings, have been invested in and abstracted from human bodies. He recently finished a book
entitled Philadelphia Stories, in which he examines the narratives about race, character, manners,
violence, and freedom that unfold across a range of texts written in and about Philadelphia between
1790 and 1860.