Skip to main content
Exhibition History“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art”, New York State Museum, Albany, NY, August 28, 2009 – January 14, 2010; Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, NY, August 23, 2008 – December 31, 2008.
“Folk Art and American Modernism,” American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY, July 8, 2015 – October 1, 2015; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, September 18, 2014 – December 31, 2014.
Artist
Unidentified Artist
(American)
Stereotypical Carving of an African American Man
Date1830-1850
MediumWood and oil paint
DimensionsOverall: 45 × 18 × 19 in. (114.3 × 45.7 × 48.3 cm)
Object numberN0538.1948
Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Stephen C. Clark
Photograph by Richard Walker
Label TextOriginally titled Dancing Negro, this wooden carving found in Charleston, South Carolina, may have been an outdoor sign in the nineteenth century, used to advertise a product or entice customers into a shop. Or, the figure may have been intended to represent a minstrel show. The early nineteenth century was the era of the original Jim Crow, a character popularized in the minstrel music of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, known as “Daddy Rice.” Minstrelsy, a popular form of entertainment, involved white performers in black face presentations that portrayed Black people as comic fools. Minstrel shows endured well into the mid-twentieth century. This sculpture’s small stature and animal-like appearance reinforced nineteenth century ideas about black people as subhuman and beast-like. For European Americans involved in any way in slavery, promoting the idea that Black people were inferior helped to justify the enslavement of other human beings.Exhibition History“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art”, New York State Museum, Albany, NY, August 28, 2009 – January 14, 2010; Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, NY, August 23, 2008 – December 31, 2008.
“Folk Art and American Modernism,” American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY, July 8, 2015 – October 1, 2015; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, September 18, 2014 – December 31, 2014.
On View
Not on view
