Charmaine A. Nelson has been a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 2022. She is the Founding Director of Slavery North, an initiative that supports scholarship and research creation on Canadian Slavery and slavery in the US North. She is also the founder and editor-in chief of the award-winning Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national magazines or platforms directed at black Canadians. Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies.

She has published nine books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007),  Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024), and Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery (2025).

Nelson has given over 330 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, and the USA, and in Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Central America, and the Caribbean. She is also actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, BBC One, CBC, CNN, CTV, and PBS. She has blogged for the Huffington Post Canada and written for  The Walrus.

Nelson has held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California Santa Barbara (2010). She was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and a Fields of the Future Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). In 2022, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of  the American Antiquarian Society. She received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2024.

Title: “When the Sitter was Enslaved: Slavery, Portraiture, and Power”

Image of 1777 newspaper clipping that begins with with "Ran away from the Printing-office in Quebec, on Saturday evening the twenty-second instant, A Negro Lad named JOE, born in Africa, about twenty years of age, [continues]
THE PRINTER (William Brown), “RANAWAY from the Printing-office, Quebec Gazette, 27 November 1777, no. 639, p. 3.
Abstract: Portraiture has been a revered genre of western “high” art for thousands of years. However, to the extent that it has been a vehicle for the representation of society’s elites, it became a domain through which wealthy and powerful white people – emperors, kings and queens, prime ministers, presidents, corporate leaders, and celebrities – consolidated and flaunted their power. The economic relationship, structured as a commission between artist and patron, is a linchpin of the genre, asserting pressure on the portraitist to create not just a likeness of the sitter, but a flattering one. The use of portraiture by white enslavers served to amplify their colonial reach and celebrate their whiteness. Such images are characterized by enslaved sitters represented as aesthetically inferior, compositionally marginal, and subservient in action, attitude, dress, and pose. Clearly then, slavery (or the representation of enslaved people as “high” art portrait sitters) disrupted or remade the traditional relationships and meanings of portraiture. This talk uses an understanding of the representation of enslaved people in historical western “high” art portraiture as a jumping off point for the contemplation of fugitive slave advertisements as a popular, “low” art form of portraiture. Fugitive or runaway slave advertisements became ubiquitous across the Americas and in Europe and were produced in newspapers and as broadsides wherever slavery coincided with the printing press. These printed advertisements were typically placed by enslavers or their surrogates (like overseers, sheriffs, and jailers) to hunt and re-enslave freedom-seekers who resisted through flight. Sometimes containing standardized icons, the advertisements were mainly comprised of unauthorized textual descriptions of enslaved runners (not sitters), which required visual translation by readers to identify the enslaved fugitive. Illuminating the stakes of this conceptual reframing, the talk explores the eighteenth-century case study of an enslaved African-born man called Joe who became the pressman of the Quebec City printing office of William Brown and Thomas Gilmore, the printers of the Quebec Gazette newspaper. What does it mean that Joe, who was hunted in a series of six fugitive advertisements published for five escapes across nine years (1777-1786) was also forced to print such notices as a part of his unpaid labour as the Gazette’s pressman?