Enfilade

Rufus Hathaway, A View of Mr. Joshua Winsor’s House &c., Duxbury, Massachusetts, ca. 1793–95, oil on canvas⁠ (New York: American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian, 2013.1.19). From the museum’s Instagram account, “This iconic folk painting has typically been interpreted as its eighteenth-century patron, Joshua Winsor, would have expected: as a chronicle of his wealth and property as a merchant and shipbuilder in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Usually unremarked upon is the figure of a Black woman in the lower left-hand corner of the scene. With her back to the viewer, the woman is faceless, evoking the limited details known about early African American lives. Census records provide small clues. Was she the one free person of color recorded in the Winsor household in 1790, a few years before this painting was made? ⁠ Likely attending to many aspects of the Winsors’ domestic lives, this enigmatic figure was one of the many unnamed Black residents of New England whose underrecognized labor paved the way for their employers’ or enslavers’ prosperity.”

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Karen Rosenberg’s review of the exhibition recently appeared in The New York Times (21 December 2023) . . . .

Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North
American Folk Art Museum, New York, 15 November 2023 — 24 March 2024
Flynt Center of Early New England Life, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1 May — 4 August 2024

Curated by Emelie Gevalt, RL Watson, and Sadé Ayorinde

Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North is on view at the American Folk Art Museum until 24 March 2024. As a corrective to histories that define slavery and anti-Black racism as a largely Southern issue, this exhibition offers a new window onto Black representation in a region that is often overlooked in narratives of early African American history.

Through 125 remarkable works including paintings, needlework, and photographs, this exhibition invites visitors to focus on figures who appear in—or are omitted from—early American images and will challenge conventional narratives that have minimized early Black histories in the North, revealing the complexities and contradictions of the region’s history between the late 1600s and early 1800s. A 300-page scholarly book with contributions from Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Jennifer Van Horn, and several other authors, is available for purchase.

The exhibition is co-curated by Emelie Gevalt, Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art, AFAM; RL Watson, Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Lake Forest College; and Sadé Ayorinde, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A free digital guide on Bloomberg Connects is available here.

Please be advised that this exhibition contains complex, challenging, and racist imagery.

Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2023), 300 pages, $75.

Catalogue contributors are scholars and researchers with expertise in American art history, material culture, African American history and literature, and other related topics. The book includes a foreword by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Jason Busch. Contributors include the exhibition’s curators as well as Virginia Anderson, Kelli Racine Barnes, Michael Bramwell, Christy Clark-Pujara, Anne Strachan Cross, Jill Vaum Rothschild, Jonathan Michael Square, Lea Stephenson, Jennifer Van Horn, and Gordon Wilkins.

r e l a t e d  p r o g r a m m i n g

7 December 2023
Virtual Insights: Reasserting Black Presence in the Early American North

11 January 2024
BlackMass Responds to Unnamed Figures: Tour with Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell

14 February 2024
Notes on Style: A Discussion with BlackMass on Portraiture and Personhood

23 February and 28 March 2024
‘The Picture Is Still Out There’: Reframing Black Presence in the Collections of Early American Art and Material Culture | 2024 Elizabeth and Irwin Warren Folk Art Symposium

18 March 2024
Autobiographical Landscapes: Gary Tyler in Conversation with Allison Glenn

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Note (added 4 January 2024) — The posting was updated to include Historic Deerfield as a venue.