Artist-in-Residence Shelley Miller shares her current research on how rural New England residents contributed to the plantation economy.
Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5 from 2:30 – 3:30 pm (EDT)
Location: E501 Tower Room, 5th Floor, South College, UMass Amherst, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, USA, 01003
Directions: https://www.umass.edu/humanities-arts/facilities/tower-room
Online via Zoom:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/99887438512
Meeting ID: 998 8743 8512
Speaker: Shelley Miller, Artist-in-Residence Fellow, Summer 2025
Moderator: Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson, Provost Professor of Art History & Founding Director, Slavery North
Lecture: The Economics of Complicity: How Rural New England Profited from the Plantation Economy
Lecture abstract:
Shelley Miller shares her research on how rural New England residents contributed to the plantation economy through farming and cottage industries such as the making of garments, shoes and palm-leaf hats destined to be worn by the enslaved on southern and island plantations. She will discuss her primary research findings, including family archive papers and material objects in local historic house museums, and provide an overview about how she uses her sugar azulejo works to critique sugar’s long history of colonization and slavery.
Bio:
Shelley Miller is a Montreal-based visual artist whose practice spans public art, ephemeral street interventions, and community engagement.Renowned for her innovative use of sugar as a medium, her work investigates themes of desire, consumer culture, and the colonial legacies embedded in sugar production. Through intricate sugar tile murals that reinterpret traditional azulejos, Miller critiques colonial power structures, a focus that began in Brazil and has since extended to postcolonial contexts in Canada. She holds an MFA from Concordia University and has exhibited internationally, including in Brazil and India. Her practice has been supported by numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Québec Arts Council. In 2025, she contributed a chapter titled “The Azulejo as Symbol of Colonial Power Structures” to the academic anthology (Post)Colonial Ports: Place and (Non)Place in the Ecotone.
