Elizabeth Keckley (frontispiece to "Behind the Scenes")

Reproduction of evening bodice and skirt made by Elizabeth Keckley

Mary Lincoln's Dress

Cabinet card of Mary Jane Hale Welles in a funeral dress by Elizabeth Keckly

Dress sewn by Rosa Parks

Brown and black striped silk moiré bodice and skirt

Dress made by an unidentified enslaved woman

Printed floral skirt worn by Lucy Lee Shirley as a child

Teal blue dress and cropped jacket designed by Ann Lowe

Dress designed by Ann Lowe

Singer sewing machine and table from Mae's Millinery Shop

Six colors of thread from Mae's Millinery Shop

Hat box filled with tools and materials from Mae's Millinery Shop

Black beaded dress designed by Zelda Wynn and worn by Ella Fitzgerald

Cream sleeveless dress and jacket designed by Zelda Wynn

Blue and green dress with jacket by Zelda Wynn

Skirt worn by an enslaved ancestor of Janett Sharee Galloway

Costume dress for Lady in Red from for colored girls... on Broadway

Costume dress for Lady in Purple from for colored girls... on Broadway

Costume dress for Lady in Orange from for colored girls... on Broadway

Clothing label for Mae Reeves from Mae's Millinery Shop

Twenty receipts and a business card from Mae's Millinery Shop

North Sixtieth Street Association membership certificate issued to Mae Reeves

Carte-de-visite of Hubert Gideon Welles in outfit sewn by Elizabeth Keckly

African-American women have long been an integral part of the fashion system. Passed down through generations, the art of sewing was a skill many enslaved African-American women knew and used to create clothing for themselves, their families and their enslavers. This was often used as a “selling point” when promoting enslaved women for sale. Many enslavers appreciated enslaved women for their skill in tailoring clothing for their spouses and children, but they were not credited for their work. The handcrafted garments that survive in museums today are archived not by the names of their makers, but simply as garments made by enslaved people. As a class they were recognized for their skills, but only to advance a system that kept them trapped. Over time, African-American women circumvented this system and used their abilities to sew as a way to free themselves from slavery and make a living. In 1855, Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman, successfully purchased the freedom of herself and her son for $1,200 (approximately $40,000 in today’s money) with the help of her dressmaking clients. A hundred years later, Rosa Parks worked as a professional seamstress in an Alabama department store. She had been sewing a dress for herself, which she was carrying, unfinished, in her bag on the day she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus in 1955. The yellow and grey dress featured in this collection is the very same dress, which has been repaired and conserved by the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute. African-Americans also used their sewing abilities to create enterprises that shifted them from being unnamed makers to named fashion designers. Elizabeth Keckley was able to move north where she opened a dress shop, established herself as a designer for the elite, and tailored dresses for many wives of politicians. It is rumored that Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, ordered about 15 dresses from her each season. She even wrote an autobiography, titled Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, that features a likeness of her in the frontispiece. The volume is collected by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian. And Keckley was not an anomaly; African American women opened dress shops and millineries that allowed them to frame the narrative around their work. In the 1940s, the rise in national African-American media outlets, like Ebony and Jet, contributed to the rise in nationally recognized African-American women designers. These magazines profiled African-American life and celebrities, which included the women who made their clothes. Couturier Anne Lowe and fashion designer Zelda Wynn Valdes were highlighted when celebrities like actress Dorothy Dandridge and singer and songwriter Eartha Kitt were showcased wearing their designs. African-American women not only helped define fashion in this country, they used their skills to define themselves and ensure that they were acknowledged and seen.

African-American Women Designers

Iceberg Fantasy

Iceberg at Twilight, Canada

Iceberg at Midnight, Labrador

Icebergs at Sunset, Canada

Iceberg and Ice Flower, Canada

Icebergs near Cape St. John, Canada

Icebergs at Sea near Newfoundland, Canada

Aurora Borealis

Iceberg

The Story of the Iceberg

An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay

Among the Ice Floes

Arctic Regions: Hunting by Steam in Melville Bay, The Party after a Day's Sport Killing Six Polar Bears within the Twenty-Four Hours

Arctic Regions: Page 33, no. 39, Iceberg with an Arch in It, Which,When Connected with the Glacier, Will Give the Reader to Understand How the Water Flows from the Glacier through these Arches, Causing the Rapid Current

The Arctic Regions: No. 36. The Glacier As Seen Flowing Or Being Forced Down Between The Hills, Ploughing Up A Moraine Of Earth And Rocks, Twenty To Thirty Feet High

Arctic Regions: Page 34, No. 41, Enlarged View of No. 33

USFC Steamer "Albatross" Survey of Fishing Banks from Newport to Newfoundland, 1885

Platter (Alaskan scene)

Pitcher (Alaskan scene)

Goblet (Alaskan scene)

Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.––Elizabeth Bishop, The Imaginary Iceberg (1935) Nineteenth-century explorers described icebergs as gothic cathedrals, mountains of jewels, and vast ruined cities. Enormous yet ephemeral, the iceberg defied visual representation. How does one create an "objective" image of an object that drifts, refracts, and melts away as it is being observed? This collection traces how American artists and image-makers attempted to stabilize ice, communicating newfound scientific knowledge to general audiences back home and transforming these troublesome entities into commodities that could be possessed. The collection opens with field sketches produced by Frederic Edwin Church during his 1859 voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador, situating the iceberg within the nineteenth-century tradition of the sublime. Church created these intimate oil studies in situ, fastidiously recording the shifting appearance of icebergs at twilight, at midnight, in the Arctic summer's strange continuous light. These were working documents, never intended for exhibition. They reflect the repetitive observational labor underpinning Church's celebrated monumental canvases. Notably, pure white pigment is largely missing from these wondrous, prismatic images. Church's Aurora Borealis (1865), painted from sketches by polar explorer Isaac Israel Hayes, brought the Arctic to the American public at the height of the Civil War. The shimmering, multi-colored light of the Aurora was read by contemporary viewers as either a terrible portent or the promise of a better unified Republic. William Bradford's massive exhibition paintings were also informed by field studies conducted on his 1869 Greenland voyage. Bradford was accompanied by photographers John L. Dunmore and George P. Critcherson, whose works were published in the landmark folio Arctic Regions (1873). Read in concert with one another, Bradford's paintings and the Dunmore &amp; Critcherson photographs depict icebergs as aesthetic objects, scientific specimens, and fruitful hunting grounds. One folio plate title explains the hydraulics of glacial arches for the purpose of public science education. Another records the killing of six polar bears within twenty-four hours. This collection closes with three pressed glass objects — a matching platter, pitcher, and goblet — manufactured by the Crystal Glass Company of Bridgeport, Ohio, in 1867. Critically, this was the year of the Alaska Purchase. These crystalline scenes of polar bears, seals, and icebergs rendered in frosted glass brought the Arctic to the American dinner table. The iceberg, once the privileged domain of the heroic explorer, had become a thing to be bought, sold, and displayed by American consumers.

"All Light and Brilliant": Icebergs in the Nineteenth-Century American Imaginary

Two Nude Models

Two Women Friends Reclining

Damned Women (Femmes damnées)

Women Dancing in a Brothel

Two Male Nudes

Spout Vessel Depicting Two Skeletal Figures in Erotic Scene Attached to Handle

Shallow bowl with Hercules overcoming Antaeus

The Sofa

The son of the king of Babylon sees the Brahman transformed into a woman bathing and falls in love with her, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Thirty-fifth Night

The Bath

Album d'Études–Poses

Created by Noa Rui-Piin Weiss. 
This collection focuses on queer art in its most obvious form: depictions of same-sex intimacy. Some of these pieces were created by artists who had documented gay relationships, like The Bath by Charles Hasselwood Shannon, a scene of nude men conversing intimately in a spa. Others, like the excerpt from the Tuti-nama or Rodin’s Damned Women, were made under the cover of portraying mythological or historical themes, often for straight audiences. While some museums have retroactively labeled these works as gay, lesbian, or queer, most pieces in this collection are not explicitly described in terms of same-sex love. Yet visual signs of homosexual behavior are the lowest common denominator of this selection of queer art.

Displays of Homosexuality

keondra bills freemyn is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a DMV-based archivist, writer, Wikipedian, and former diplomat originally from South Central, Los Angeles. keondra serves as Archives Director at Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists and operates the small press 67th Street Storytellers. A poet, essayist, and scholarly writer, she is author of the poetry collection _Things You Left Behind_ and is founder of Black Women Writers Project, a digital archival initiative highlighting the contributions of Black women and gender-expansive writers to the literary canon. Her research interests include digital archiving, memory work, and Black cultural production.

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A sepia tone carte-de-visite of a young woman, captured at the Ball & Thomas Photographic Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Standing in front of an elaborate outdoor backdrop, a dark-haired woman poses before the camera, slightly smiling, dressed in a floor length checkered dress with her hair styled in a chignon. She holds a feathered dark hat in her proper left hand, with her proper right hand resting on the high back of an ornate wooden chair. The front of the chair, which faces the camera, features a patterned fabric seat, scroll and floral carvings, and an oval painting of a man and child on the chair’s back.

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Bearing Witness: James Presley Ball, Black Image Making, and the Promise of Freedom in the American West

Abbad is a 2023 Curationist Critic of Color. He is a free knowledge enthusiast who contributed to the Wikimedia movement for about fifteen years. As a volunteer, he contributed to thousands of articles on the Arabic language version of Wikipedia, co-founded and chaired Wikimedia Levant, and led Arabic language translation efforts on Khan Academy. He currently works as a Knowledge Manager with the Wikimedia Foundation, helping implement the Wikimedia 2030 strategy. He authored two e-books in Arabic: "Story of Wikipedia" (2017), and "Art of Translation" (2021). In his free time, he writes on his blog and works on the manuscripts of novels, yet to be published! 

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The Phoenix: A Universal Mythical Bird?

Reina Gattuso is a content writer on the Curationist team, and an independent journalist covering gender and sexuality, arts and culture, and food. Her journalism connects analysis of structural inequality to everyday stories of community, creativity, and care. Her work has appeared at _Atlas Obscura_, _The Washington Post_, _Teen Vogue_, _The Lily_, _POPSUGAR_, and more. Reina has an MA in Arts and Aesthetics (cinema, performance, and visual studies) from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, where her research focused on sexuality in Hindi film. She writes and teaches writing to high school students in New York City.

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In this intimately scaled crucifix, the artist depicted Christ alive on the cross, an iconographic type known as Christus triumphans.

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Women Artists and the Divine

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A work made of gilt bronze with gemstones and pigments

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Yoga in the Archives

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is a Taiwanese-American artist/curator and writer based in Kamberri/Canberra, Australia. Her research and interdisciplinary practice is informed by her heritage with a focus on contested histories and collective memory. She is interested in varying forms of creative collaboration and the use of text as visual material. 

Liu is Publication Manager at _Art Monthly Australasia_, Australasia’s flagship visual arts publication, and the Events & Collections Officer at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University (ANU), where she manages the centre's gallery and collection.  

She holds a Master of Museum and Heritage Studies and a double degree with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts (French & International Relations) from the ANU. Liu studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris on exchange in 2019. 

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Illustrating Taiwan: Travelogues and Their Visual Narratives

Mi'Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, Ed.D. is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist who moves between realms of oral history, art, media & ritual to produce forward-facing cultural projects and events. As a Huntington Library Short-Term Fellow, Mi'Jan is researching Octavia E. Butler's archives. She is also a 2023 Fulbright Specialist Awardee, a 2023-2024 New America Us@250 inaugural Fellow, and an expert speaker for the U.S. Department of State. 

Previously, Mi'Jan curated and hosted Unfinished Network's 2022 salon on the theme of multiracial democracy with CNN's Van Jones and MSNBC's Maria Teresa Kumar, and led the Gloria Steinem Initiative's public policy digital storytelling pilot at Smith College.

One of Mi'Jan's greatest joys is connecting to audiences through her story-rich talks at a range of institutions, from Carnegie Hall to the Institute of American Indian Arts to SXSW. Making history contemporary, personal and futures-dependent, she surfaces the stories that need to be heard.

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A small tin box with a sliding lid, partially opened to reveal a piece of paper covered in handwriting.

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Free Black Women’s Private Pleasures and Rest

Woman before a Mirror

Man-Bird Effigy Ocarina

Leaf from a Kalighat album: Sheetaladevi: The Smallpox Goddess (recto); Durga (verso)

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