committed to memory the art of the slave ship icon

Many visual artists use the image to make points about contemporary issues, such as on posters protesting the prison industrial complex and the rise of global capitalism. Since the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the image has been a touchstone for African-American poets, writers and artists, according to Finley, who have transformed the image into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance and film. In “Committed to Memory,” Finley discusses “mnemonic aesthetics,” a process of ritualized remembering that undergirds contemporary art about slavery. Over the last 230 years the icon has become “a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors,” Finley writes.

London Committee, Description of a Slave Ship, 1789, wood engraving, 24 × 19 inches “There’s an appeal at the end of the description for everyone who reads it and sees it to support the abolition of the slave trade.” “It was the first image to expose people to the barbarism of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, showing its high level of violence in the way it visualized human suffering,” said Finley, associate professor of history of art in the College of Arts and Sciences. The image was easily reproduced by the end of the 18th century, as many as 200,000 had been circulated, printed on handbills and broadsides, in newspapers and in books. The schematic was originally intended to influence legislators regulating slave ships and eventually helped to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, then the institution of slavery itself. In her new book, “Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon,” art historian Cheryl Finley provides the first in-depth look at the influence of the 18th-century slave ship schematic and how it became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity and remembrance.Ĭreated by British abolitionists based on evidence collected from ships, the original wood engraving depicts the human cargo hold of a slave ship, with annotations describing how much space was allotted to each person how they were separated by sex and how male captives were shackled “to discourage insurrection” during the four- to eight-week voyage. In the fight to end slavery, the 1788 image of a slave ship had an outsized impact on legislators and the public. Image: Quilt by Sanford Biggers from the Cartographer’s Conundrum, MASS MoCA, 2012, 77 x 70 inches

Committed to memory the art of the slave ship icon