"Portraits of Resistance," portrait miniatures

Episode No. 588 features author Jennifer Van Horn and curator Elizabeth Kornhauser.

Van Horn is the author of "Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery," which was recently published by Yale University Press. The book investigates American portraiture, a discipline which until recently was dominated by European-American artists and their wealthy, self-image-creating clients. The book discovers within some of these portraits and the artists who made them histories of Black resistance, agency, viewership, and even iconoclasm. While the book primarily focuses on the era before the Civil War, it also reaches well into the twentieth century. Amazon and Indiebound offer "Portraits of Resistance" for about $60.

Kornhauser discusses a new installation of portraiture miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American galleries. Portrait miniatures -- often tiny watercolor pictures on ivory -- were popular in the US in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The production of portrait miniatures was one form of production particularly open to women artists.