Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of black resistance, identity, and remembrance
One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was--shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity, and remembrance.
Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film―and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.
Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

Arts & Photography

Finley, Cheryl

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance\nOne of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was―shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance.\nFinley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film―and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.\nBeautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History (Regional)

Published in cooperation with Carnegie Museum of Art With an introduction by Deborah Willis The famous faces of Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and John F. Kennedy appear among the nearly eighty thousand photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998). But it’s in the images of other, ordinary people and neighborhoods that Harris shows us a city and an era teeming with energy, culture, friendship, and family. In jazz clubs, Little League games, beauty contests, church functions, boxing matches, political events, protest marches, and everyday scenes, Teenie Harris captured the essence of African American life in Pittsburgh. Harris’s career began as America emerged from the Great Depression and ended after the civil rights movement. As a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers, Teenie hit the streets to record historic events and the people who lived them. The archive of Harris’s photography, part of the permanent collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, represents one of the most important documentations of twentieth-century African Americans and their communities. Today, even as Teenie Harris’s photography stands alongside that of Harlem’s famed James VanDerZee, his work in Pittsburgh’s Hill District surpasses that of all other photographers in its breadth and rich portrayal of black urban America.

Trotter Jr., Joe William

Glasco, Laurence

University of Pittsburgh Press

A century of Harlem, through the eyes and lenses of some of the most important artists and photographers of the twentieth century. The vibrant and bustling neighborhood occupying the upper reaches of Manhattan has been at the crossroads of the artistic, literary, and political currents of the African-American community since the early days of the twentieth century. Home to writers and revolutionaries, artists and agitators, Harlem has been both subject and inspiration for countless photographers. This sweeping photographic survey includes nearly two hundred images that tell the story of Harlem - its distinctive landscape and extraordinary inhabitants - throughout the twentieth century. Featured artists include: Gordon Parks, James VanDerZee, Eve Arnold, Alice Attie, Cornell Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Chester Higgins, Jr., Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, Bruce Davidson, Roy DeCarava, Leonard Freed, Carl Van Vechten, and Weegee. The book features essays by leading scholars of African-American studies and art - including Deborah Willis, Cheryl Finley, Elizabeth Alexander, and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - which are paired with the work of eighty artists and photographers, affording this enclave the richest chronicling in its history.

Harlem: A Century in Images

Alexander, Elizabeth

Willis, Deborah

Photography & Video

Skira/Rizzoli

The first complete monograph and retrospective on the sixty-year career of Frank Stewart, photographer of an astonishing range of intimate and empathetic images of Black life, music, and culture.\nFrank Stewart’s Nexus presents an overview of the career of this noted photographer, who since the 1960s has captured spontaneous and sensitive portrayals of African American culture in many forms, including art, food, dance, and music—especially jazz. Best known for his work as senior photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stewart produced energetic street scenes and profound landscapes on his worldwide travels with the orchestra. The intimate and subtle relations between and among people are at the heart of Stewart’s art, whether shot at a Manhattan jazz concert, in the studio of artist Romare Bearden, or during a sacred rite in an African village. This sweeping survey of 103 images, with an artist interview and texts by multiple critical voices, illuminates the evolution of a remarkable career.\nExhibition Itinerary:\nThe Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.: June 10–September 2, 2023\nArtis–Naples, The Baker Museum, Naples, FL: October 14, 2023–January 7, 2024\nTelfair Museums, Savannah, GA: February 9 – May 12, 2024

Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer's Journey, 1960s to the Present

Moten, Fred

Fine, Ruth

Marsalis, Wynton

Schmidt Campbell, Mary

Rizzoli Electa

A new consideration of extraordinary art created by Black artists during the mid-20th century My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists working throughout the southeastern United States. These paintings, drawings, mixed-media compositions, sculptures, and textiles include pieces ranging from the profound assemblages of Thornton Dial to the renowned quilts of Gee’s Bend. Nearly 60 remarkable examples are illustrated alongside insightful texts that situate them in the history of modernism and the context of African American experience in the 20th-century South. This remarkable study simultaneously considers these works on their own merits while also making connections to mainstream contemporary art. Art historians Cheryl Finley, Randall R. Griffey, and Amelia Peck illuminate shared artistic practices, including the novel use of found or salvaged materials and the artists’ interest in improvisational approaches across media. Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney provides a thoughtful consideration of the cultural and political history of the American South, during and after the Civil Rights era. These diverse works, described and beautifully illustrated, tell the compelling stories of artists who overcame enormous obstacles to create distinctive and culturally resonant works of art.

My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South

Pinckney, Darryl

Griffey, Randall

Peck, Amelia

Metropolitan Museum of Art

An attractively produced, thoughtfully prepared history, generously illustrated with well-selected photos and featuring profiles of ground-breaking musicians as well as a narrative survey of the blues, jazz, swing and bebop, rhythm &amp; blues, and the emergence of soul. A companion to the author's From Cakewalks to Concert Halls . 9.25x11.25" Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

From Swing to Soul: An Illustrated History of African American Popular Music from 1930 to 1960

Barlow, William

Music

Elliott & Clark Pub

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