Portraits of a People Examines Images of Nineteenth Century African Americans and Their Role in Establishing Racial Identity

The Addison Gallery of American Art presents Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, a critical examination of images made of and by African Americans and their role in establishing and fostering racial identity during a period of radical social change. On display January 14 through March 26, 2006, the exhibition features more than seventy portraits in various media, ranging from paintings, photographs, and silhouettes to book frontispieces and popular prints.

Andover, MA (PRWEB) January 12, 2006 -- The Addison Gallery of American Art presents Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, a critical examination of images made of and by African Americans and their role in establishing and fostering racial identity during a period of radical social change.    On display January 14 through March 26, 2006, the exhibition features more than seventy portraits in various media, ranging from paintings, photographs, and silhouettes to book frontispieces and popular prints.

The exhibition includes images dating from the beginning of the American Revolution through the close of the nineteenth century when the Supreme Court upheld the 1896 decision that ended the era of post-Civil War political gains by establishing state’s rights to legal segregation of the races. These remarkable images are often unexpectedly candid about the aesthetic desires and social goals of both their makers and their sitters.

From the anonymously engraved frontispiece portrait of African-born poet Phillis Wheatley, often attributed to the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead, to Thomas Eakins portrait of student and fellow painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, Portraits of a People presents the ways that creative African Americans were imagined. The many moderately priced portraits of middle-class African Americans by painters such as William Matthew Prior reveal the frequency with which the invisible borders between the black and white worlds were crossed by sitters seeking to demonstrate common bourgeois ideals and social aspirations. Photographs of abolitionists, including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, provide examples of the ways that inexpensive, mechanically produced portraits could be mobilized in the services of moral and political goals, just as images of leaders in the African American church and politics reveal sophisticated usages of the visual rhetoric of power and prestige.

“This exhibition will change the way we view the images of African Americans in the nineteenth century,” explained Brian Allen, Director of the Addison Gallery. “In recent years, a number of cutting edge African American artists have tackled issues of race and American identity in their work. They very often relied on the use of historical source material and the subversion of archaic media. The Addison’s scrutiny of this little known, yet uncannily familiar, racialized imagery creates a new interest in the politics of nineteenth-century American art and the role of race in our visual vocabulary.”

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and guest curated by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. It will be on display at the Addison Gallery January 14 – March 26, 2006 and will then travel to the Delaware Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art through November 2006.

The Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Sunday 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Monday. Admission is free to all. The Addison Gallery also offers free education programs for teacher and groups. For more information, call 978-749-4015, or visit the website at www.addisongallery.org.

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