Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery

July 27–October 23, 2016

Photographic carte de visite self-portraits by abolitionist, feminist, and orator Sojourner Truth.

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Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, 1863; albumen print mounted on cardboard; 4 x 2 1/2 in.; BAMPFA, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby.

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Past Events

Friday, October 7, 7 PM
Sojourner Truth Reading Group: Regina Mason

Regina Mason discusses the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, the first American fugitive slave memoir, written by her third great-grandfather.

BAMPFA

Programmed by David Brazil
Saturday, September 17, 1 PM
Black Activism and Photography from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

Join a conversation with UC Berkeley professors Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (History of Art) and Leigh Raiford (African American Studies) and photographer/photography historian Makeda Best of the California College of the Arts on the uses to which photography has been put in the African American struggle for political change.

BAMPFA

Roundtable Discussion
Saturday, September 17, 5 PM
Sojourner Truth Reading Group: Frank B. Wilderson III

Join writer, poet, and UC Irvine professor Frank B. Wilderson III for a screening of his 2005 film Reparations . . . Now, followed by a group conversation about the issues raised by the film.

BAMPFA

Programmed by David Brazil
Saturday, September 10, 11:30 AM-1 PM & 1-2:30 PM
The Story of Sojourner Truth

After a guided viewing of Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery, make collages with artist Kaya Fortune using reproductions of historic photographs, autographs, and stamps from the Civil War period.

BAMPFA

Family Fare
Sunday, July 31, 2 PM
Carte de Visite Workshop

Create your own personal carte de visite inspired by those on view in Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery.

BAMPFA

Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery

July 27–October 23, 2016

Download the exhibition brochure (PDF).

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator. This exhibition showcases the photographic carte de visite portraits of Truth that she sold at lectures and by mail as a way of making a living. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were a new mode of mass communication in the 1850s that quickly became relatively inexpensive collectibles. Truth could not read or write, but she had her statements repeatedly published in the press, enthusiastically embraced new technologies such as photography, and went to court three times to claim her legal rights. Uniquely among portrait sitters, she had her photographic carte de visites copyrighted in her own name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to...

Download the exhibition brochure (PDF).

In her most famous captioned photographs, Truth looks out at us with a confident and level gaze. Seated in the photographer’s studio next to a table, she holds knitting in her hands, its thread winding its way across her lap. Scholars have long seen the knitting as a sign of Truth’s aspiration to middle class gentility, but she saw knitting as sign of industry and a useful skill to be taught to the recently emancipated field slaves living in the Freedmen’s Village of Washington D.C. where she worked tirelessly from 1864-1867.

This exhibition reconstructs the flood of paper—federal banknotes, photographs, letters, autographs, stamps, prints, and newspapers—that created political communities across the immense distances of the nation during the Civil War. Like the federal government that resorted to the printing of paper currency to finance the war against slavery, Truth was improvising new ways of turning paper into value in order to finance her activism as an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights.

Since the US Treasury announced the decision finally to put a woman on the ten-dollar bill last year, Sojourner Truth has rightly been considered a candidate, but Truth did not await such a decision. One hundred and fifty years ago, she independently authored her own currency.

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Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery is organized by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley and author of Enduring Truths. Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015), with the assistance of UC Berkeley undergraduate Ryan Serpa. The photographs included in the exhibition were a recent gift from Professor Grigsby to BAMPFA.

Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery

July 27–October 23, 2016

Past Events

Sojourner Truth Reading Group: Regina Mason

Black Activism and Photography from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

Sojourner Truth Reading Group: Frank B. Wilderson III

The Story of Sojourner Truth

Carte de Visite Workshop