As the Georgia Musuem of Art reinstalls its permanent collection galleries, an ongoing project, curators are trying to find new ways to tell American stories. One gallery that recently got a refresh holds mostly eighteenth-century American portraits, but it also includes an abstracted portrait by Black artist Ellis Wilson painted around 1950. Why is this more contemporary work housed in a gallery of portraits from the 1700's? Wilson’s painting, which is titled “Dusk,” shows the simplified silhouettes of a Black family and points to the people not represented in the other paintings in the room. Born in Kentucky, Wilson set out to document the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants living and working in the South. The anonymity of the people in Wilson’s painting makes us think about how the commissioned portraits around the gallery of predominately affluent white families kept enslaved people invisible.
Ellis Wilson
