Beginning a search for answers
Gevalt, who is a student in UD’s Art History Curatorial Track program, co-curated Unnamed Figures with RL Watson, an assistant professor at Lake Forest College, and Sadé Ayorinde, a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Museum. They and other scholars contributed to the show’s catalog, which includes an essay written by Gevalt’s dissertation adviser, Jennifer Van Horn, associate professor of art and art history at UD.
When they began their work in 2020, Gevalt worried there wouldn’t be enough artifacts to fill an exhibit space. She needn’t have been concerned.
“We cast a wider net to bring in objects not always positioned as works of art, such as stoneware, dolls and needlework, and it was exciting to see the wealth of material out there, especially when you ask questions about absence,” she said.
The curators easily found portraits of white families including Black attendants but had to dig deeper to find representations of Black residents where it might not be expected.
“We found an unpopulated landscape from Connecticut demonstrating the wealth and power of the white family who built the home in the painting,” Gevalt said. “The default is to think only of the wealthy white family, but after our research, you find all the Black families who used the street to get to a local shop and recognize they contributed to the agricultural labor; you look past the original intentions of that type of representation to probe deeper and to ask how these implicit stories can be brought into the center through examination.”
One of the exhibition’s highlights, and an example of the growing Black middle class, are portraits of William and Nancy Lawson painted in 1843 by William Matthew Prior, a Black portraitist. As an example of his subtle symbolism, Nancy Lawson is holding a book and marking the page with a finger, indicating that she was literate.
Some of the exhibit’s needlework includes the makers’ names signed in thread, thereby identifying themselves, including a sampler embroidered by Sarah Ann Major Harris around 1826, spelling out her family’s genealogy.