Elizabeth Keto

My dissertation explores the art history of Reconstruction. I argue that images and objects played an active role in contests over political rights and social order in the long aftermath of war and emancipation in the American South. I develop the dissertation’s arguments across four chapters, each focused on a site or scale at which the reconstruction of Southern society took place. The first chapter examines Black and White women’s work with textiles: flags, uniforms, dresses, and quilts that evidence struggles over labor and respectability, kinship and possession, and memory and mythmaking. The second chapter considers the material and visual culture of domesticity in this period, using furniture and architecture to think through the concrete and symbolic meanings located within spaces that enabled freedom-seeking in everyday life: homes, schools, and churches. The third chapter examines the post-emancipation plantation and White tourism in the former slaveholding South, tracing the reimagination of the picturesque landscape in painting, photography, and print. The fourth chapter turns to the imagined and literal geography of cities in the “New South,” from emancipated settlements and “freedom colonies” to imperial fantasies such as the cotton expositions held in New Orleans and Atlanta at the century’s end.  

Reconstruction brought to the surface of American life questions of representation, materiality, and the politics of labor and making, questions that can only be fully understood through images and objects. Yet, this era is notably under-researched in the history of American art. Informed by critical race theory and the methods of material culture studies, my dissertation works across media to illuminate enslavement’s afterlives and the quotidian work of reconstructing the nation.