Portraits of Resistance

“An argument for a new kind of American art history . . . a textbook for the future of the field.”—Mia L. Bagneris, caa.reviews

2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize Shortlist, sponsored by CAA

“A model of method, an investigative tour de force that fluidly mixes laborious archival research and time-honored art historical savvy.”—Paul Staiti, author of Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes

“Jennifer Van Horn accomplishes something that others have hardly imagined, relating a story of African American participation in and resistance to Euro-American visual culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”—Susan Rather, author of The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era

“In this groundbreaking study, Jennifer Van Horn rightly defines production, viewing, representation, preservation, and destruction as acts of subversion that expand our understanding both of the lives of the enslaved and the multivalent ways in which early American portraiture functioned.”—Steven Nelson, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art