Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade

This richly illustrated collection of essays presents wide-ranging perspectives on the legacies of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade within and beyond museum walls. Contributions by curators, academics, activists, artists, and poets consider this history as reflected in the arts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Black diaspora more broadly, together illuminating how art museums may function as liberatory spaces working against systemic injustice.

Sarah W. Mallory is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta assistant curator of drawings and prints at The Morgan Library & Museum. She previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and Harvard Art Museums. She is completing her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, where she focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, environmental histories, and colonial legacies.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2018 and held the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums from 2018 to 2022. Previous projects include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels at The Frick Collection (2017) and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape at the Harvard Art Museums (2022).

Rachel Burke is a PhD candidate in art history at Harvard University studying Henry “Box” Brown, who created a moving panorama following his escape from slavery in 1849. Her dissertation examines Brown’s use of popular nineteenth-century landscapes, tracing how antebellum representations of the American environment reinforced programs of white supremacy.

Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Working at the intersection of art history, visual culture, and Black studies, her dissertation focuses on ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—in contemporary visions of Black girlhood. Her writing has been published in Boston Art Review, Panorama Journal of American Art, as well as various exhibition catalogs including The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework.