José Antonio Aponte was a free black man in nineteenth-century Havana. He was also a visual artist and a revolutionary. In fact, he used his art as a way to think about and plot revolution. In 1812, authorities hanged him for his leadership of a failed antislavery rebellion, and sometime after that his major work of art—a “book of paintings” with 63 images disappeared. Ferrer will speak about the process of writing about a visual artefact no modern scholar has ever seen, and about an unusual collaboration between historians, art historians, and artists that reimagines Aponte’s art for the present.

Cosponsored by the departments of Art, Art History, History, and the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World.