From Cane Field to Tea Cup: The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Art and Design

23 - 24 February 2007

Biographies

Zoe Whitley

Zoe Whitley, curator of Uncomfortable Truths, is Curator of Contemporary Programmes at the V&A. Her primary area of interest is the cultural politics of art and design. She was previously assistant curator in the Word & Image Department, where she started at the V&A in 2003. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the RCA with the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Through Design (CETLD). A previous visiting lecturer position was held at Kingston University. Zoe graduated from the V&A/Royal College of Art History of Design MA in 2003.

Cheryl Finley

Cheryl Finley is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the History of Art Department at Cornell University as well as an art critic, columnist and curator specialising in photography, African American art, and the politics of memorialisation. She is the author of many books, articles and essays, including Harlem Guaranteed: The Photographic Legacy of James VanDerZee (2002). Dr. Finley is the co-founder (with Dr. Laura Wexler) of Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale University in 1998. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. Dr. Finley is completing a manuscript on the cultural history of the slave ship icon as well as a monograph on the artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Helen Mears

Helen Mears is (HLF) African Diaspora Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she researches objects of relevance to the African diaspora held within its permanent collections. Previously she was Curator of World Art at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Her research interests lie in the potential of imperial/colonial museum collections to support investigations into Black and minority histories.

Anne-Marie Eze

Anne-Marie Eze is currently undertaking a collaborative doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts. Her research topic is the Anglo-Italian trade in Italian illuminated manuscripts during the Risorgimento. Her other main research interest is the presence of Black Africans in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Previously, she worked as an Assistant Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, most recently for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries Project. She trained as a librarian at Trinity College Library, University of Cambridge, read Classics (BA Hons.) and Library and Information Studies (MA) at University College, London and also studied at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Geoff Quilley

Dr Geoff Quilley is Curator of Fine Art at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He has published articles on various aspects of British art and the maritime nation, co-edited An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2003) and Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c.1700-1830 (Ashgate, 2005) and co-convened the major conference Art and the British Empire at Tate Britain in 2001, of which he has also co-edited the forthcoming book (Manchester University Press). He was curator of the international exhibition William Hodges 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration (Greenwich, New Haven and Auckland, 2004), and is curator of the present NMM exhibition, Art for the Nation: the Oil Paintings Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich 2006). He is currently completing a monograph, From Empire to Nation: Art and the Visualisation of Maritime Britain 1768-1829.

Gillian Forrester

Gillian Forrester is Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and a specialist in British print culture. Her exhibitions include The Romantic Print in Britain (Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2004), The Romantic Print in the Age of Revolutions (Yale Center for British Art, 2003), Ruskin: Past: Present: Future (Yale Center for British Art, 2000), and Graphic! British Prints Now (Yale Center for British Art, 1999). Her publications include ‘Turner’s Drawing Book’: The Liber Studiorum (Tate Gallery, 1996) and The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century (Yale Center for British Art, with Scott Wilcox, 2001). She is currently curating, with Tim Barringer and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, an exhibition on the visual culture of emancipation in Jamaica, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds, which will take place at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven from September 27 – December 31, 2007, and at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol, February-April, 2008.

Thomas Loftfield

Ø  Born Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 26 January 1946.
Ø  BA History College of William and Mary in Virginia 1968
Ø  MA Anthropology University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1970
Ø  Ph.D. Anthropology University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1975
Ø  Taught archaeology/anthropology at University of North Carolina at Wilmington 1975 until retirement in 2000.
Ø  Teaches part-time University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados
Ø  Deputy Director, Barbados Museum and Historical Society
Ø  Research interests in archaeology: dynamic interaction of Europeans and Africans in the New World setting, 17th century colonisation in the New World, prehistoric adaptations to the coastal environment.

Tim Barringer

Tim Baringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art and holds degrees from Cambridge, NYU and Sussex. He has published widely on British art and visual culture, art and empire, and on American art. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites and Men at Work:Art and Labour in mid-Victorian Britain. He is editor of Colonialism and the Object (with Tom Flynn) and Frederic Leighton.

Professor Barringer was curator ( with Andrew Wilton) of America Sublime (London, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, 2002). Future exhibitions include (with Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz) Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes and his Worlds (Yale 2007, Bristol 2008).

James Walvin

James Walvin is Prof. Emeritus at the University of York and has written
extensively on slavery. His recent books are A Short History of Slavery
(Penguin) and The Trader, The Owner, The Slave (Cape), both 2007. He is
currently historical advisor for Parliament's exhibition on the abolition of the slave trade, Westminster Hall, May-Sept 2007.

Marcus Wood

Marcus Wood is a performance artist, painter and film maker. He is also
Professor of English at the University of Sussex. For the last twenty
years he has been working in a variety of forms and media about issues
relating to the memory and cultural construction of the Atlantic slave
diaspora. He is currently finishing a documentary film concerning the
memory of slavery in the black community in Baltimore, focused on the
Great Blacks in Wax museum and putting the finishing touches to a book The
Horrible Gift of Freedom: Fictions of Emancipation in slave societies .
His recent publications include Blind Memory: Visual Representations of
Slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (Manchester UK, and Routledge USA
2000); Slavery Empathy and Pornography (Oxford, 2003); and The Poetry of

Slavery and Anglo American Anthology 1760-1865 (Oxford, 2004).

Emma Poulter

Emma Poulter is a Museology Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester. Her research is based on the biographies of objects in the West African collections at the Manchester Museum.
Emma has recently worked as a freelance researcher on the project Revealing Histories: the impact of slavery in Greater Manchester, a collaboration between eleven museums and galleries in partnership with MLA North West and the Manchester Consortium of Museums. This project has examined the collections at the participating institutions in order to make links between museum collections, the social and economic history and industrial heritage of Greater Manchester and the transatlantic slave trade.
Emma graduated in 2004 with a MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at the University of Manchester, having gained a BA in Archaeology at Southampton University in 2000.She has worked at several institutions including the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston and Manchester Art Gallery.

Ulrich Lehmann

Ulrich Lehmann studied Philosophy, Sociology, Modern Literature and Art-History in Frankfurt a.M., Paris and London. His research interest is the material history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is research professor at the University College for the Creative Arts in Rochester and fellow in the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Christina Shannon

Christina Shannon studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (BA Fine Arts) and Manchester Metropolitan University (MA Art & Design: Design for Printed Textiles).
A designer for the Printed Textile industry over a period of twelve years, Christina’s Interest in historical textiles began whilst working at the Museum of Printed Textiles, Mulhouse. Her research into the subject of Les Indiennes de Traite (Textile Designs produced under the Traite De Negres, or Black Code) was the starting point for a day of remembrance in collaboration with UNESCO commemorating the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition in 2001.
Christina joined the V&A in 2005, as manager for Drop In Programmes.

Cybele Gontar

Originally from New Orleans, Cybele Gontar currently works in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She is the author of The Campeche Chair in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol. 38, 2003) and is a contributing author to The Furniture of Louisiana: Colonial and Federal Periods, Creole and Vernacular, 1735-1835 (forthcoming, 2008). Research for her chapter titled A Forest of Ships: Furniture Importation at the Port of New Orleans, 1800-1835 led to a study about Dutreuil Barjon, Sr. and his business partnership with German-born retailer Christophe Voigt to ship furniture from Hamburg and Berlin.
Ms. Gontar earned a Master's degree in the History of European Decorative Arts at the Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt MA Program in 2001. She has lectured on the subject of Louisiana furniture at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City and for the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Cybele Gontar is currently working on the TMS Project, Department of European Sculpture and the Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Debra Jackson

Debra Jackson is an independent scholar and museum administrator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her most recent published work (Fall, 2004) in the journal New York History explores the abolitionist activities of black journalists Robert and Thomas Hamilton, publishers of the newspaper the Weekly Anglo-African in New York City during the American Civil War, 1861-1865.
Jackson’s presentation for ‘From Cane Field to Tea Cup’ combines research in several areas of personal interest, including classical ballet, the visual arts and interracial dancing in the context of 18th and 19th century New World slave societies. She has lectured on these themes most recently in New Orleans in 2003, where she participated as a guest speaker during The New Orleans International Ballet Conference ‘Dancing Through History: The Roots of Dance in Louisiana, 1750-1830’.
Jackson’s current scholarly projects include biographies of Thomas and Robert Hamilton for the African American National Biography, forthcoming in 2008 from Oxford University Press