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Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures
Series:
This richly illustrated collection of essays presents wide-ranging perspectives on the legacies of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade within and beyond museum walls. Contributions by curators, academics, activists, artists, and poets consider this history as reflected in the arts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Black diaspora more broadly, together illuminating how art museums may function as liberatory spaces working against systemic injustice.
Sarah W. Mallory is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta assistant curator of drawings and prints at The Morgan Library & Museum. She previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and Harvard Art Museums. She is completing her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, where she focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, environmental histories, and colonial legacies.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2018 and held the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums from 2018 to 2022. Previous projects include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels at The Frick Collection (2017) and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape at the Harvard Art Museums (2022).
Rachel Burke is a PhD candidate in art history at Harvard University studying Henry “Box” Brown, who created a moving panorama following his escape from slavery in 1849. Her dissertation examines Brown’s use of popular nineteenth-century landscapes, tracing how antebellum representations of the American environment reinforced programs of white supremacy.
Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Working at the intersection of art history, visual culture, and Black studies, her dissertation focuses on ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—in contemporary visions of Black girlhood. Her writing has been published in Boston Art Review, Panorama Journal of American Art, as well as various exhibition catalogs including The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2018 and held the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums from 2018 to 2022. Previous projects include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels at The Frick Collection (2017) and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape at the Harvard Art Museums (2022).
Rachel Burke is a PhD candidate in art history at Harvard University studying Henry “Box” Brown, who created a moving panorama following his escape from slavery in 1849. Her dissertation examines Brown’s use of popular nineteenth-century landscapes, tracing how antebellum representations of the American environment reinforced programs of white supremacy.
Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Working at the intersection of art history, visual culture, and Black studies, her dissertation focuses on ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—in contemporary visions of Black girlhood. Her writing has been published in Boston Art Review, Panorama Journal of American Art, as well as various exhibition catalogs including The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework.
List of Illustrations and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
Sarah W. Mallory, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Rachel Burke and Kéla Jackson
1 New Curatorial Practices? Representation, Continuation, and Change in Slavery Exhibitions
Anthony Bogues
2 Here: Black in Rembrandt’s Time and Slavery: Two Exhibitions about Invisible Histories
Maria Holtrop, Stephanie Archangel and Eveline Sint Nicolaas
3 Widening Circles: Collective Processing of Colonial Inheritances in Under Cover of Darkness
Carine Zaayman
4 A Litany for Homegoing
Toni Giselle Stuart
5 New Narratives at the Amsterdam Museum: Curating Natasja Kensmil among Dutch Masters
Imara Limon
6 The Elephant in the Room: Some Afterthoughts on the Golden Coach Exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum
Margriet Schavemaker
7 Implicating the Dutch Metropole: Visualizing the History of Slavery in the Netherlands
Nancy Jouwe
8 Debates about the Future National Museum of Slavery in the Netherlands: Attending to the Dutch Transatlantic and Indian Ocean Slave Trades
Pepijn Brandon
9 Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlantic—the Making of an Exhibition at the RISD Museum
Jane’a Johnson
10 Slavery at Home and Overseas: Lessons from New England and the Netherlands
Justin M. Brown
11 Recovering Identity, Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Julien Hudson’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White
Natalia Ángeles Vieyra
12 Breaking Silence: Inclusivity in Dutch and Flemish Art
Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Adam Eaker, Michele L. Frederick, Alexandra Libby, Jessie Park and Diva Zumaya
13 Imagining Otherwise, an Ongoing Proposal
La Tanya S. Autry
Touchstones
14 Reggie Black, No Records, 2020
Meredith S. Horsford
15 Smuggle Gold and Cyclonic Hair: Transformative Power in the Work of Romauld Hazoumè
Kymberly S. Newberry
16 Titus Kaphar’s Shifting the Gaze
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
17 Black Pete and Slavery
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
18 Balthasar van den Bossche, A Painter’s Studio: the Kunstkammer and the Spectacle of Slavery
Sarah W. Mallory
19 Slavery and Still Life: the Historical and Ongoing Capitalist Legacies of Pronk Still Life Historiography
Diva Zumaya
20 Creating the Visual Memory of Slavery in Dutch Brazil: Frans Post and Albert Eckhout Exhibited
Carolina Monteiro and Mariana Françozo
21 The Plantation Worldscape of Colonial Dutch Brazil
Angela Vanhaelen
22 Spaces of Enslavement: Indigenous Resistance and Colonial Cartography
Carolyn Arena
23 Textiles and Trade in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhout’s African Man and African Woman and Child
Carrie Anderson, with contributions from Marsely Kehoe
24 From Cartography to Marine Art: Ships, Seafaring, and Depictions of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
Andrea C. Mosterman
25 Ebony & Old Masters: Blackness and Representation in the Dutch Republic
Claudia Swan
Touchstones
26 Caspar Barlaeus’s Rerum per octennium in Brasilia (1647)
Elizabeth Sutton
27 Jacob Marrel, Four Tulips, ca. 1637–45
Rachel Burke
28 Maria Sibylla Merian in Suriname
Olivia Dill
29 A Surinamese Calabash Bowl
Justin M. Brown
30 Andrés Sánchez Gallque, Portrait of Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons Don Pedro and Don Domingo, 1599
Linda Mueller
31 A Silver Spoon
Cynthia Kok
32 Pinturas de Castas
Louisa Raitt
33 Beyond Sugar: Art History, Textiles, and Archival Accountability in a Digital World
Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe
34 Monuments Made Flesh: Sojourner Truth and Nona Faustine on Performance and Place
Kéla Jackson
35 Crossing the Water: an Artist’s View
Remy Jungerman
36 History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation
Condensed and edited by Kéla Jackson
37 Selected Poems
Ariana Benson
38 Slavepool
Eugene Lange
39 What Is a Legacy?
Sarah W. Mallory
Bibliography
Index
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
Sarah W. Mallory, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Rachel Burke and Kéla Jackson
Part 1: In and beyond the Museum: Recent and Ongoing Undertakings in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States
1 New Curatorial Practices? Representation, Continuation, and Change in Slavery Exhibitions
Anthony Bogues
2 Here: Black in Rembrandt’s Time and Slavery: Two Exhibitions about Invisible Histories
Maria Holtrop, Stephanie Archangel and Eveline Sint Nicolaas
3 Widening Circles: Collective Processing of Colonial Inheritances in Under Cover of Darkness
Carine Zaayman
4 A Litany for Homegoing
Toni Giselle Stuart
5 New Narratives at the Amsterdam Museum: Curating Natasja Kensmil among Dutch Masters
Imara Limon
6 The Elephant in the Room: Some Afterthoughts on the Golden Coach Exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum
Margriet Schavemaker
7 Implicating the Dutch Metropole: Visualizing the History of Slavery in the Netherlands
Nancy Jouwe
8 Debates about the Future National Museum of Slavery in the Netherlands: Attending to the Dutch Transatlantic and Indian Ocean Slave Trades
Pepijn Brandon
9 Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlantic—the Making of an Exhibition at the RISD Museum
Jane’a Johnson
10 Slavery at Home and Overseas: Lessons from New England and the Netherlands
Justin M. Brown
11 Recovering Identity, Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Julien Hudson’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White
Natalia Ángeles Vieyra
12 Breaking Silence: Inclusivity in Dutch and Flemish Art
Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Adam Eaker, Michele L. Frederick, Alexandra Libby, Jessie Park and Diva Zumaya
13 Imagining Otherwise, an Ongoing Proposal
La Tanya S. Autry
Touchstones
14 Reggie Black, No Records, 2020
Meredith S. Horsford
15 Smuggle Gold and Cyclonic Hair: Transformative Power in the Work of Romauld Hazoumè
Kymberly S. Newberry
16 Titus Kaphar’s Shifting the Gaze
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
17 Black Pete and Slavery
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
18 Balthasar van den Bossche, A Painter’s Studio: the Kunstkammer and the Spectacle of Slavery
Sarah W. Mallory
Part 2: New Research in the Visual and Material Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade
19 Slavery and Still Life: the Historical and Ongoing Capitalist Legacies of Pronk Still Life Historiography
Diva Zumaya
20 Creating the Visual Memory of Slavery in Dutch Brazil: Frans Post and Albert Eckhout Exhibited
Carolina Monteiro and Mariana Françozo
21 The Plantation Worldscape of Colonial Dutch Brazil
Angela Vanhaelen
22 Spaces of Enslavement: Indigenous Resistance and Colonial Cartography
Carolyn Arena
23 Textiles and Trade in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhout’s African Man and African Woman and Child
Carrie Anderson, with contributions from Marsely Kehoe
24 From Cartography to Marine Art: Ships, Seafaring, and Depictions of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
Andrea C. Mosterman
25 Ebony & Old Masters: Blackness and Representation in the Dutch Republic
Claudia Swan
Touchstones
26 Caspar Barlaeus’s Rerum per octennium in Brasilia (1647)
Elizabeth Sutton
27 Jacob Marrel, Four Tulips, ca. 1637–45
Rachel Burke
28 Maria Sibylla Merian in Suriname
Olivia Dill
29 A Surinamese Calabash Bowl
Justin M. Brown
30 Andrés Sánchez Gallque, Portrait of Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons Don Pedro and Don Domingo, 1599
Linda Mueller
31 A Silver Spoon
Cynthia Kok
32 Pinturas de Castas
Louisa Raitt
33 Beyond Sugar: Art History, Textiles, and Archival Accountability in a Digital World
Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe
Part 3: Contemporary Practitioners
34 Monuments Made Flesh: Sojourner Truth and Nona Faustine on Performance and Place
Kéla Jackson
35 Crossing the Water: an Artist’s View
Remy Jungerman
36 History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation
Condensed and edited by Kéla Jackson
37 Selected Poems
Ariana Benson
38 Slavepool
Eugene Lange
39 What Is a Legacy?
Sarah W. Mallory
Bibliography
Index
Academic libraries, graduate students, museum professionals, specialists of the history of slavery and colonialism, transatlantic histories, art and history of the Atlantic world, Netherlands / Dutch Republic, United States, Brazil, Suriname, South Africa; African-American studies, contemporary art, especially art of the Black diaspora, museology, curatorial studies, critical race theory. Keywords: slavery; colonialism; racism; museology; transatlantic; seventeenth-century; contemporary art; Black diaspora; Netherlands; Dutch Republic; Amsterdam; Brazil; Suriname; Frans Post; Rembrandt; Jamaica Kincaid; Rosana Paulino; Remy Jungerman