ABSTRACT
The works are groundbreaking in that they all play with the dialectical tensions that exist between black/white—as colors and as racial identities, invisible/visible, and object/subject. For the field of African American and American art history the Wheatley portrait is groundbreaking—an entry point for African Americans into the European tradition of portraiture and a starting point in the visual construction of the black intellectual. Where the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s popularized an urban chic black identity, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s ushered in another new form of black identity, one that was politicized and at times radicalized. Engraved in Boston, printed in London, and then read on both sides of the Atlantic, the Wheatley portrait offered an alternative public black identity at a time when African-descended bodies still circulated as property.
