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Speaker: Adrienne L. Childs: Senior Consulting Curator, The Phillips Collection
This presentation is based on Childs's forthcoming book Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts. It is the first academic book of its kind to survey decorative objects depicting Black people from laboring servants to jeweled exotics popular from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. She contends that this fashion amounted to a wholly Western project that grafted false identities on to Black figures and was nourished by Atlantic slavery and colonial pursuits and scaffolded by European domination and power. These luxury objects adorned spaces of wealth and refinement that were often far removed from the horrors of slavery, yet dependent on the wealth it generated. She will discuss some of the mechanics and vagaries of venturing into new scholarly territory as well as other intriguing findings.
