Join the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a virtual Fellow's Forum with Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
During the period of 1740 to 1810, artists increasingly used optical technologies and perspective machines when painting portraits and landscapes. This technological shift in artistic practice coincided with enslavers’ growing use of scientific technologies—like clocks or telescopes—to monitor and control the people they enslaved. Intersections between art and technology in the artist’s studio and plantation landscape provide an entry point for understanding how art responded to enslavement. Thomas Jefferson’s overlapping interests in optics, horology, and art make him an ideal candidate for studying how enslaved people informed the creation of, and directly contributed to, the production and display of portraits, landscapes, prints, and sculptures in which they rarely appeared.
Enslaved people rarely appear in art of the period, even though wealthy enslavers commissioned most artworks made in the early US South. Due to this deliberate omission, American art history has yet to fully understand the direct contributions of enslaved people and broader impact of slavery within the formation of early American visual culture. Their absence removed the possibility of visualizing their resistance to enslavement, whereas the increased inclusion of clocks and telescopes in portraits of enslavers suggested enslavers’ increased oversight. Understanding how these technologies were used helps us understand how enslaved people influenced, informed, and contributed to early American artistic practice in the US South.
About the Speaker:
Michael Hartman is the Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA in art history and German from the University of Arkansas; an MA in the history of art from Williams College; and is completing his PhD in art history at the University of Delaware. He has previously held positions at the Biggs Museum of American Art; the Clark Art Institute; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Winterthur Library, Museums, and Gardens. At Monticello, he is working towards the competition of his dissertation, Art, Technology and Aesthetics within Landscapes of Enslavement in the Colonial South, 1740-1810.
