This richly illustrated collection of essays presents wide-ranging perspectives on the legacies of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade within and beyond museum walls. Contributions by curators, academics, activists, artists, and poets consider this history as reflected in the arts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Black diaspora more broadly, together illuminating how art museums may function as liberatory spaces working against systemic injustice.
Sarah W. Mallory is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta assistant curator of drawings and prints at The Morgan Library & Museum. She previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and Harvard Art Museums. She is completing her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, where she focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, environmental histories, and colonial legacies.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2018 and held the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums from 2018 to 2022. Previous projects include Divine Encounter: Rembrandtâs Abraham and the Angels at The Frick Collection (2017) and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape at the Harvard Art Museums (2022).
Rachel Burke is a PhD candidate in art history at Harvard University studying Henry âBoxâ Brown, who created a moving panorama following his escape from slavery in 1849. Her dissertation examines Brownâs use of popular nineteenth-century landscapes, tracing how antebellum representations of the American environment reinforced programs of white supremacy.
Part 1: In and beyond the Museum: Recent and Ongoing Undertakings in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States
1 New Curatorial Practices? Representation, Continuation, and Change in Slavery Exhibitions
âAnthony Bogues
2 Here: Black in Rembrandtâs Time and Slavery: Two Exhibitions about Invisible Histories
âMaria Holtrop, Stephanie Archangel and Eveline Sint Nicolaas
3 Widening Circles: Collective Processing of Colonial Inheritances in Under Cover of Darkness
âCarine Zaayman
4 A Litany for Homegoing
âToni Giselle Stuart
5 New Narratives at the Amsterdam Museum: Curating Natasja Kensmil among Dutch Masters
âImara Limon
6 The Elephant in the Room: Some Afterthoughts on the Golden Coach Exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum
âMargriet Schavemaker
7 Implicating the Dutch Metropole: Visualizing the History of Slavery in the Netherlands
âNancy Jouwe
8 Debates about the Future National Museum of Slavery in the Netherlands: Attending to the Dutch Transatlantic and Indian Ocean Slave Trades
âPepijn Brandon
9 Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlanticâthe Making of an Exhibition at the RISD Museum
âJaneâa Johnson
10 Slavery at Home and Overseas: Lessons from New England and the Netherlands
âJustin M. Brown
11 Recovering Identity, Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Julien Hudsonâs Portrait of a Young Woman in White
âNatalia Ãngeles Vieyra
13 Imagining Otherwise, an Ongoing Proposal
âLa Tanya S. Autry
Touchstones
14 Reggie Black, No Records, 2020
âMeredith S. Horsford
15 Smuggle Gold and Cyclonic Hair: Transformative Power in the Work of Romauld Hazoumè
âKymberly S. Newberry
16 Titus Kapharâs Shifting the Gaze
âJoanna Sheers Seidenstein
17 Black Pete and Slavery
âJoanna Sheers Seidenstein
18 Balthasar van den Bossche, A Painterâs Studio: the Kunstkammer and the Spectacle of Slavery
âSarah W. Mallory
Part 2: New Research in the Visual and Material Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade
19 Slavery and Still Life: the Historical and Ongoing Capitalist Legacies of Pronk Still Life Historiography
âDiva Zumaya
20 Creating the Visual Memory of Slavery in Dutch Brazil: Frans Post and Albert Eckhout Exhibited
âCarolina Monteiro and Mariana Françozo
21 The Plantation Worldscape of Colonial Dutch Brazil
âAngela Vanhaelen
22 Spaces of Enslavement: Indigenous Resistance and Colonial Cartography
âCarolyn Arena
23 Textiles and Trade in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhoutâs African Man and African Woman and Child
âCarrie Anderson, with contributions from Marsely Kehoe
24 From Cartography to Marine Art: Ships, Seafaring, and Depictions of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade
âAndrea C. Mosterman
25 Ebony & Old Masters: Blackness and Representation in the Dutch Republic
âClaudia Swan
Touchstones
26 Caspar Barlaeusâs Rerum per octennium in Brasilia (1647)
âElizabeth Sutton
27 Jacob Marrel, Four Tulips, ca. 1637â45
âRachel Burke
28 Maria Sibylla Merian in Suriname
âOlivia Dill
Academic libraries, graduate students, museum professionals, specialists of the history of slavery and colonialism, transatlantic histories, art and history of the Atlantic world, Netherlands / Dutch Republic, United States, Brazil, Suriname, South Africa; African-American studies, contemporary art, especially art of the Black diaspora, museology, curatorial studies, critical race theory. Keywords: slavery; colonialism; racism; museology; transatlantic; seventeenth-century; contemporary art; Black diaspora; Netherlands; Dutch Republic; Amsterdam; Brazil; Suriname; Frans Post; Rembrandt; Jamaica Kincaid; Rosana Paulino; Remy Jungerman