My first book, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, charts the changing roles of African American activist-artists who shaped representations of African Americans during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These activists, and the individuals who circulated their images, intended to change not only what people saw when they saw race, they also instructed them about how they should see it. Understudied or nearly forgotten artists produced images that subverted popular stereotypes of African Americans. Some of the images produced by these individuals underscored the brutalities of slavery, visualized black respectability, and celebrated black leadership.
