Unseen New England: Re-envisioning Black Presence through Early American Art and Material Culture
Speaker: Dr. Emelie Gevalt, Curatorial Chair for Collections & Curator of Folk Art American Folk Art Museum, New York City
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
10 to 11:15am
UMass Amherst, Integrative Learning Center
Room N101 (ground floor)
650 N Pleasant St, Amherst, MA 01003
Limited seating available
About the lecture:
Drawing on material from her dissertation and the recent exhibition Unnamed Figures at the American Folk Art Museum and Historic Deerfield, Gevalt will focus this talk on a series of depictions of early African Americans in New England, frequently compositionally sidelined by white artists and further marginalized by later histories of interpretation. An examination of images illuminates white artists’ and patrons’ conflicted relationships to slavery and Black presence, while simultaneously opening a window onto the lived experience of Black New Englanders. Through the inclusion of little-known Black stories in relationship to these objects, this talk brings the supposed periphery into the center and aims to restore in some small measure the realities of New England’s multicultural history amid a predominantly white visual record that has all but erased it.
About Dr. Emelie Gevalt:
Gevalt received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University, her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. Her two decades of art-world experience include positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Christie’s, New York.
