"Pictorial Record Should Issue from the South": Art and Visual Culture of the Slavery Defense -- "Tyranny without Mercy": Proslavery Destruction in Response to Abolitionism -- "Concealed by Some of Their Negroes": Sarcastic Indictments of Slavery and Southern Concealment -- "The Family White and Black": Antebellum Photographs of Enslaved Women -- "Entire Secrecy Had to Be Preserved": Adalbert Volck's Confidential Work for the Confederacy -- "Whatever Is Un-Virginian is Wrong": Loyal Slaves, Confederate Heroes, and Lost Cause Ideology in the Art of Confederate Virginia.
Summary:
"A long-overdue study of the depiction of slavery in nineteenth-century American art and visual culture, Hidden in Plain Sight investigates the relationship between proslavery politics and the visual record. By examining a vast array of Civil War-era artworks that champion the institution of enslavement and connecting them with the abolitionist materials to which they respond, Rachel Stephens traces themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera and explores how the visual canon of high art was used to cover up, control, and reshape the discourse surrounding the United States' most odious institution"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.