Visualizing Equality

“Extends the prehistory of the Black Arts movement—as well as the Harlem Renaissance—to a critical period in the middle of the nineteenth century, when imagery was central to the fight against slavery. . . . Illuminates a vital period in the development of African American visual culture.”—Black Perspectives

“Visualizing Equality successfully demonstrates how early African American visual artists developed ideas and practices of image making linked to politics impacted by their understanding of the intersections of race and images. Meticulously researched, Gonzalez’s text focuses our attention on Black artists empowered by their positions as activists in free Black communities in the North.”—caa.reviews

“[Gonzalez] narrows his lens to offer rich biographies of his leading characters, opens the aperture to reveal the local contexts and activist networks in which they worked, and then widens it further to show the transnational reach of their work.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Gonzalez’s thorough research sketches out the reticulation of physical, social, and interpretive pathways through which Douglass’s work passed, establishing a groundwork for future scholars.”—Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

“Visualizing Equality meticulously pieces together archival traces to enliven the stories of Black printmakers, printers, and photographers whose aesthetic practices were inextricable from their political convictions. . . . Gonzalez has modeled a mode of studying US history and visual culture that meaningfully engages with the many nodes of the Black diaspora in the Atlantic world and avoids the US-centrism that frequently hampers scholarly and political discourses.”—Imprint, Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society

“Many scholars have eagerly awaited a book like this — one that centers nineteenth-century black activism anchored in artwork and visual culture produced by black Americans. Visualizing Equality bridges the fields of African American history, visual culture studies, and material culture studies — a truly unique and impressive contribution for any scholar. Gonzalez has done a masterful job of mining source materials and presenting exciting arguments.” — Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University

“This is an indispensable, pathbreaking book. The writing is crisp and clear, the research is broad and deep, and the conclusions are ramifying and resounding. Thanks to Aston Gonzalez, we have an authoritative examination of black artists, lithographers, and photographers in nineteenth-century American and Atlantic society that deepens our understanding of the uses and meaning of black visual culture.” — Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

“In 1855, Frederick Douglass declared, ‘I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me.’ Over 150 years later, Aston Gonzalez’s inspirational study, Visualizing Equality, bears witness to black image-makers’ insistence that they ‘must visualize just the image that seemed to them the image to be visualized by them.’ A call to arms, Gonzalez’s trailblazing history of black activist-artists’ radical and revolutionary practices of reclamation, re-creation, and reimaging testifies to their endorsement of the ‘power of images’ as a weapon of liberation in the ‘battle for black rights.’ For the first time, Gonzalez does hard-hitting justice to the lives and works of black artists who sacrificed, struggled, and survived not only to visualize but to create and re-create ‘the world they envisioned.’” — Celeste-Marie Bernier, University of Edinburgh