Hidden in Plain Sight

Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture

Rachel Stephens

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781682262337
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610757980
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanization that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealization or outright erasure of enslaved life.
 
In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.
 
Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker's confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.
 
Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Pictorial Record Should Issue from the South”: Art and Visual Culture of the Slavery Defense
• 2. “Tyranny without Mercy”: Proslavery Destruction in Response to Abolitionism
• 3. “Concealed by Some of Their Negroes”: Sarcastic Indictments of Slavery and Southern Concealment
• 4. “The Family White and Black”: Antebellum Photographs of Enslaved Women
• 5. “Entire Secrecy Had to Be Preserved”: Adalbert Volck’s Confidential Work for the Confederacy
• 6. “Whatever Is Un-Virginian is Wrong”: Loyal Slaves, Confederate Heroes, and Lost Cause Ideology in the Art of Confederate Virginia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author