Ashley Williams

Just as unfree labor forged the modern United States, unfree artistic labor has played a key role in U.S. art and material culture. Enslaved people worked in almost every trade—from painting to embroidery—and incarcerated people have produced an astonishing number of objects, including furniture, textiles, and baskets. The settler home has been furnished with such objects, as well as those made on Native reservations, in unregulated factories, and other exploitative settings. Economic, legal, and labor historians have illuminated the deep connections between unfree labor, colonization, and capitalism in transforming the U.S. into a global power. However, unfree artists and their objects have traditionally been overlooked in art historical scholarship.

This dissertation investigates the intersections of art, colonialism, racial formation, and unfree labor from the final years of formal slavery in the 1850s to the creation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1930. I examine stoneware vessels made by enslaved potters in newly-annexed Texas through the Civil War; ledger drawings made by Kiowa and Cheyenne prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, in the 1870s; and wicker chairs made by incarcerated weavers at Bilibid Prison in Manila after the Philippine-American War. These case studies trace a series of forced migrations along the borders of the expanding U.S. empire, in which material entanglements with the land—clay, paper, and rattan—mirrored artists’ own precarity of place. And yet, this project also attends to the ways that unfree artists navigated these constraints to assert their desires, agency, and humanity. This dissertation provides the first comparative analysis of unfree artistic labor in the U.S., establishing it as inextricable from histories of U.S. art and material culture.