WILMINGTON.- The Delaware Art Museum presents the exhibit Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century looks critically at images made of African Americans, by black and white artists, and the role those images have played in establishing and fostering racial identity during a period of radical social change. The portraits are of specific individuals, and the viewer is encouraged to consider how the artists established the identity of their sitters by including elements of the world in which they lived.

This landmark exhibition, and its accompanying publication, features approximately 75 works ranging from paintings, photographs and silhouette profiles to book frontispieces and popular prints. It was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and is guest curated by Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

At its heart Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is about exploring the ways that freeborn and freed African Americans used portraiture to establish public and private identities. The works exhibited in the adjacent galleries reveal the ways that people who had been systematically denied self-determination used art to further personal and group ambitions.

Beginning in 1619 when Africans first arrived in America as indentured or enslaved workers they struggled with issues of identity and selfhood that set them apart from the Europeans who had brought them to the New World. Although historically present in the legal record, as individuals they remained absent from the visual record for the first century of colonization. By the beginning of the 18th century unnamed, enslaved African Americans began to appear as attendants in portraits of slave owners, but it is not until the 1770s that portraits of individual, identified African Americans appeared.

The images presented here date from the beginning of the American Revolution through the close of the next century with the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 sanctioning segregation of the races. The images are remarkable and often unexpectedly candid about the aesthetic desires and social goals of both their makers and their sitters. From the anonymously engraved frontispiece portrait of the African-born poet Phillis Wheatley to Thomas Eakins's portrait of his student and fellow painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, we see the ways that creative African Americans were imagined. The many moderately priced portraits of middle class African Americans by the painter William Matthew Prior reveal the frequency with which the borders between the black and white worlds were crossed by sitters seeking to demonstrate common ideals and social aspirations. Photographs of abolitionists, including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, provide examples of the ways that inexpensive, mechanically reproducible portraits could be mobilized in the service of moral and political goals, just as images of leaders in the African American church and politics reveal sophisticated usages of the visual rhetoric of power and prestige.

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is about more than the name and the biography of the individual sitter. By casting new light on their portraits we can better understand how a world of constantly evolving media and new strategies of representation came to the aid of people who had so often been denied individuality. Ultimately, these remarkable portraits reveal the creation of a visual space in which such people could compel an audience to recognize them as dynamic and ambitious during a century of profound change.

With the start of the American Revolution, African Americans experienced a newfound visibility as they were called to serve the cause of independence. African American men who fought bravely in the Continental Army, including James Armistead, were rewarded for their service and some were celebrated in easily reproduced prints that featured both their portraits and a description of their accomplishments.

During the early republican period some white artists sought to better understand and establish the composition of the new nation by painting images of racial and cultural difference, exemplified by the portrait of the aged Yarrow Mamout, an African-born Muslim living in Georgetown. In a similar vein, the portrait of George Washington's cook Hercules reveals a desire to represent the valuable professional skills that had been acquired by enslaved sitters, as well as to demonstrate the tenuous relationships that they maintained with the people to whom they were legally bound.

The ambivalence found in relationships between the owners and the owned may be seen in the silhouette portrait profile of the mixed-race Moses Williams, which has been attributed to the son of his former owner, and that of the man known to us only as "Mr. Shaw's Blackman," which was cut by Williams himself. These images, in contrast to more fully realized portraits, remind us of the challenges that a minimalist medium like silhouette presents in the reading and revelation of racial identity.