Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination

Fred Wilson, Metalwork 1793-1880, detail from Mining the Museum, 1992

Conference Overview

Out of Sight is a two-day conference marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, which will take place March 2-3rd at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2007. Involving scholars from various locations in the Americas impacted by the slave trade, presenters address the relationship between the visual and slavery. Art historians, museum professionals, and artists will explore the inherent difficulties involved in crafting a visual language capable of representing slavery, abolition, and emancipation. Indeed, the experience of slavery in the modern Americas has been described precisely as unrepresentable, as a visual blind spot in the memory of the African diaspora. Is slavery condemned to the realm of the unrepresentable, particularly in the visual arts, as scholars have argued? What signs, memorials, and visual technologies did different constituencies mobilize to signify the seemingly unsignifiable experience of slavery? How did these visual markers of slavery, or the lack thereof, inform the memory of slavery or its willful forgetting centuries after abolition? How can an exploration of efforts to create a visual accounting of slavery add to wider art historical considerations of the relationship between trauma and representation and between visual absence and memorialization?

Conference participants will offer a comparative analysis of the part visual images played in representing, remembering, and refiguring slavery in different societies in the modern Americas from the inception of the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary times.

The conference is free and open to the general public. Registration, by February 15, is strongly suggested. For a map, parking info, and directions to the Block Museum visit http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/visit/

Out of Sight is organized by Krista A. Thompson and Huey Copeland, Assistant Professors in Art History at Northwestern and Wayne Modest, Director of Museums at the Institute of Jamaica.

Sponsored by: The Alumnae Association, The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, The Center for African American History, The Dean’s Office of the Weinberg College of Arts and Science, The Department of African American Studies, The Department of Art History, The Department of Art Theory and Practice, The Program in African Studies, The Harris Lecture Fund, The Undergraduate School, and The Kaplan Center for the Humanities Initiatives II, generously supported by a Mellon Foundation Grant.