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In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanization that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealization or outright erasure of enslaved life.
 
In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.
 
Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.
 
Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.
 

For too long, the visual culture of the American South has been framed through narrow lenses: elite patronage, regional nostalgia, and selective narratives that privilege whiteness while overlooking the complexity of the region’s artistic production. Reading Southern Art: Essays on the Visual Arts in the United States from the Colonies to Today intervenes decisively in this tradition, illuminating the vast visual and material history of the South through works produced by a variety of artists across the region. 

Edited by Rachel Stephens, this collection examines Southern art from the seventeenth century until today, covering a diverse variety of media, from traditional fine arts to material and visual culture, ephemera, and public monuments. Analyzing an array of works, from portraits to vernacular traditions to contemporary artistic practice, Reading Southern Art considers how histories, visual and otherwise, are constructed and revised and how the art of the American South has shaped, and been shaped by, such contested histories.