The Auburn Avenue Research Library, in partnership with the Baton Foundation, Inc.,will host a lecture about Black imagery in Antebellum art.

This presentation will address the ways that supporters of slavery used art to justify their beliefs. Art not only reflected the rhetoric of pro-slavery apologists by representing slavery optimistically, but also, it worked to undermine the powerful use of visual culture applied by abolitionists. Illustrating many examples of pro-slavery artworks, Stephens reveals the aggressive backlash of pro-slavery supporters in response to anti-slavery activism and artworks.

Rachel Stephens is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama. During the spring semester of 2019, she served as a fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Her first book, Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture was released in 2018 (University of South Carolina Press). Her talk, The Family Black and White: Pro-Slavery Visual Art and the Cult of Justification, comes from research on her current book project, Hidden in Plain Sight: Slavery and Suppression in Antebellum American Art.

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