As early as 1825, a Connecticut preacher saw fit to make the statement that “slavery never existed here to any considerable extent, and for years it has been a thing unknown.” Neither of these assertions was true. However, the speaker’s confidence was supported by a popular understanding that has remained common into the twenty-first century. Despite powerful scholarship disproving the North’s wishful thinking about its past, the presence of early Black history in the region is still commonly forgotten. Drawing on doctoral research as well as the critically acclaimed 2023-2024 exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, this talk will explore how, even in the context of such gaps in memory and the collective archive, historical images can further advance our understanding of Black experiences in the early American North. Join curator Emelie Gevalt for an in-depth discussion of a rare group of surviving portraits, overmantels, textiles, and other vernacular objects that illuminate the lives of Black Northerners in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Dr. Emelie Gevalt is Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial & Program Officer at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Her exhibitions at AFAM include the celebrated What that Quilt Knows About Me (2023), Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2023) and most recently An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles. Gevalt received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University, her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. Her two decades of art-world experience include positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Christie’s, New York, where she was a Vice President in the Estates, Appraisals & Valuations department.