Museum exhibitions are traditionally about objects. But in a provocatively commentated show of Black portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries, the Met confronts itself.
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast centers on Why Born Enslaved!, the bust Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux modelled in 1868 and produced in popular editions thereafter. Life-size, she is bound at the chest with rope, glowering upwards in knowledge and pain – a captive with no doubts of the crime she’s been dealt.
