Contact Information
Biography Information
Adrienne L. Childs is an art historian and curator. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland with a concentration in European art, exoticism and race. Her fields of interest are race and representation in European fine and decorative arts of the 18th and 19th centuries and 20th century African American Art. For the last five years has served as curator at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland where she curated exhibitions and developed academic and public programming. She teaches European and African American art at the University of Maryland.
Recent publications include the monograph Margo Humphrey, Volume VII in the David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, and Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell. Her article “Sugarboxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain” appears in the volume The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain. She is co-editing the volume of essays Representing Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth-Century: The Spectacle of Blackness, and working on the book length project Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative Arts, 1700-1900.
Project Description
Ornamental Blackness attempts to create a framework for understanding how the decorative arts figure into the larger discourse of representing blacks and blackness in European visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Culminating in a book entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative arts, 1700-1900, this study is the first of its kind to survey a range of diverse objects that employed the “blackamoor” as a decorative motif. This book constructs a theoretical model for analysis and a critical language for discussing a brand of decorative luxury objects that has had little or no attention in these terms. Given the virtual absence of critical attention to the role of race and representation in the decorative arts of this period within the burgeoning theoretical body of literature attending to “the decorative,” this project is of particular importance.
The vogue for representing the African body in decorative arts served to disseminate tropes of blackness throughout spaces of wealth and refinement in Europe and beyond. Objects such as porcelain figurines, clocks, light fixtures (torchères), furniture, among others, operated within a multi-dimensional matrix of ideas and contexts that transcended the limits of their specific functionality. Implicated in these practices were larger social issues such as black slave labor in the colonies, notions of exoticism and primitivism and the presence of black servants in wealthy European households. Objects featuring blacks as ornamentation were in dialogue with the trope of the black servant in European art that had become a ubiquitous symbol of exoticism and luxury since the Italian Renaissance, particularly in European court culture. Even though the ornamental black was a convention in both decorative and “fine” arts, its conventionality effectively relegated the material manifestation of an enormous economic and social system of inhumanity to the ostensibly benign realm of “the decorative.” Small, utilitarian objects, furniture, wallpaper, tapestry designs and more could insidiously present the idea of black servitude or the black primitive body as normal, natural or charmingly exotic in the context of a grand table setting or an opulent sitting room. This investigation demonstrates how decorative objects can embody the complexities of race, slavery and representation in material culture.
Over the past two decades scholarship on the decorative arts has begun to expand beyond the emphasis on craftsmanship, connoisseurship and luxury production to investigate the economic, social and cultural issues embodied in the objects, their consumption and environs. This work on the black body as embellishment aims to contribute to this discourse by decoding and contextualizing the objects and by engaging the growing scholarship on the intersection of race, science, slavery and the European colonial project. The topic of race and representation is necessarily interdisciplinary and this book will be important not only to the study of the decorative arts, and the history of art, but also to studies of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and their impact on European material culture. This investigation into aestheticized black servitude in luxury objects reveals another dimension of the history of the black Atlantic system.