Sculpture At the Ends of Slavery

"A wonderfully written book exploring the creation and circulation of iconic antislavery images. Beach reveals the climate surrounding the production and popularity of sculptures like Forever Free and Abolition of Slavery while bringing the canon of art history to contend with interdisciplinary scholarship about Blackness and racial capitalism. Revelatory and teachable, this book uncovers a long history of art making in the fight for racial justice."--Jasmine Cobb, author of Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

"Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery takes a refreshingly expansive approach to sculpture as global commodification of Black bodies. Drawing from an impressive array of art-historical, theoretical, and political sources, it forges salient insights into the complexities of sculpture's engagement in the fractured rhetoric of slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century."--James Smalls, Professor of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

List of contents

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction. “Within a Few Steps of the Spot”: Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism

1. Grasping Images: Antislavery and the Sculptural 
2. “The Mute Language of the Marble”: Slavery and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave
3. Sentiment, Manufactured: John Bell and the Abolitionist Image under Empire
4. Relief Work: Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster
5. Between Liberty and Emancipation: Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery
   Coda. “Sculptured Dream of Liberty”
   
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

About the author

Caitlin Meehye Beach is Assistant Professor in Art History and Affiliated Faculty in African and African American Studies at Fordham University.

Product details

• Authors: Caitlin Meehye Beach
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.11.2022
• EAN: 9780520343269
• ISBN: 978-0-520-34326-9
• No. of pages: 240
• Series: The Phillips Collection Book Prize Series
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; USA, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, The arts: general issues, ART / History / General, HISTORY / United States / 19th Century, History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, History of Art, Modernism, United States of America, USA, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, History of the Americas, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus, Black & Asian Studies, HISTORY / African American & Black, ART / American / African American & Black, The arts: general topics, Relating to African American / Black American people