American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and circulated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in image technologies—daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes-de-visite, and steam printing presses—enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for Black rights. Dr. Aston Gonzalez will speak about understudied Black artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington who produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, Black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Their networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for Black people in the Atlantic world.
Dr. Aston Gonzalez is a scholar of African American history, politics, and visual culture during the long nineteenth century. As an associate professor of history at Salisbury University, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on African American history and U.S. history. His first book, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. He has published articles and book chapters on early African American portraiture, picturing Black citizenship during the Civil War, the creation of African American archives, and images of escaped slaves. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan and earned bachelor’s degrees in history and English from Williams College.