Art denotes strategy, ingenuity, and imagination. While slaveholders and vigilantes threatened and attempted to control Black bodily autonomy in various ways across the Atlantic world, enslaved people and their allies artfully countered this malevolence via everyday and more formally coordinated kinds of resistance. With a principal focus on American and British efforts, this exhibition highlights how slavery abolitionists used a diversity of art, including rebellion, speeches and pamphlets, novels, slave narratives, newspapers, poetry, music, and the visual arts, to agitate for enslaved peoples’ right to liberty and equality. Subversion & The Art of Slavery Abolition is curated by Dr. Michelle D. Commander, Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery.

About the Lapidus Center
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery—funded by a generous $2.5 million gift from Ruth and Sid Lapidus matched by The New York Public Library—is the only facility of its kind based in a public research library. The Center's mission is to generate and disseminate scholarly knowledge on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery pertaining to the Atlantic World. The Center also supports the work of researchers with long-term and short-term fellowships.

Open now. Ends December 5th, 2020.Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Latimer/Edison Gallery