'Haunting echoes': Histories and exhibition strategies for collecting nineteenth-century African-American crafts

Nineteenth-century American painters and sculptors generally portrayed African Americans in marginal or subservient roles. Conversely, collectors of vernacular crafts made by black artisans for African American use provide distinctive insights into how blacks represented their cultural values to themselves. This dissertation examines three private collection of such nineteenth-century African American art and crafts.;Private collectors have often preceded public institutions in authoring visual narratives of a culture, in the absence of specific criteria for authenticating ethnographic objects. Part I of this dissertation explores the interpretive strategies of ethnographic collecting and surveys the historiography of research into nineteenth-century African American vernacular crafts.;Part II examines Miriam B. Wilson's and Judith Wragg Chase's Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, Carroll Greene's Acacia collection in Savannah, and Derrick Beard's traveling exhibition, Sankofa. These private collectors transcended the limitations of available scholarship in their interpretations of nineteenth-century African American vernacular artisanry. Their collections represent slave craftsmanship, "make-do" aesthetics, and free black entrepreneurship. This dissertation examines how the collectors developed differing interpretive strategies for representing early African American culture.;Prevailing scholarship and curatorial criteria for assessing objects did not significantly influence the collectors' efforts to ascertain the authenticity of interpret the encoded meanings of African American artifacts. The primary factors determining the pedagogic outcomes of these collections' representations of nineteenth-century African American culture were the collectors' individual personalities and didactic intentions, the availability of objects, and differing field research methods.;This research examines how vernacular objects may be authenticated and interpreted with greater accuracy. Authenticity here is the measure of representational congruity of a collection's interpretation of artifacts, in comparison with what is known of the artisans' and users' understandings of the encoded iconography and meanings of the objects.;Part III acknowledges that early African American culture had syncretic influences on other cultures. This work concludes with recommendations for assessing artisanal authenticity and enhancing the interpretive authority of collections of nineteenth-century African American vernacular crafts. The dissertation contains illustrations and an annotated bibliography.