Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Enduring Truths
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/person/1639609-darcy-grimaldo-grigsby * http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/One-woman-s-search-for-Truth-photographs-6603219.php
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nr 92022395
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nr92022395
HEADING: Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo
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373 __ |a University of California, Berkeley |2 naf
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400 1_ |a Grimaldo Grigsby, Darcy
670 __ |a Author’s Liberty’s fragmented body, 1989: |b t.p. (Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby)
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PERSONAL
Born in the Panama Canal Zone.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, A.B. (history of art), 1978; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, M.A. (history of art), 1989, Ph.D. (history of art), 1995, Women’s Studies Certificate, 1990.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor 1995, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities, 2015—.
AWARDS:Recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, 2002, 2008; a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, 2003; a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2005; and the Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, edited by Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan, J. Paul Getty (Los Angeles, CA), 2013; Edges of Empire, edited by Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Blackwell Press, 2005; Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, edited by Beth S. Wright, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Scale and American Art, Art Bulletin, Art History, Special Issue: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual, Parallax, Representations, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities and professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century French and American art and visual and material culture that relates to colonialism, slavery, and constructions of race. Her academic and teaching interests include visual representation and gender; the history of photography; orientalism; the history of engineering; the history of money; the Civil War; and Haiti and the African diaspora. She holds a Ph.D. in history of art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Grigsby has written several books on painting and fashion in France and Europe, and she writes academic papers on sculpture, photography, engineering, and the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies. She also curated the Sojourner Truth, Photography and the Fight Against Slavery exhibition, a collection of her own Civil War photographs given to the Berkeley Art Museum. Additionally, she conducts seminars on archaeology, photography, Mayan ruins, Creole politics, and the French Revolution. In 1996 Grigsby published Mamelukes in Paris: Fashionable Trophies of Failed Napoleonic Conquest, a University of California, Berkeley, Morrison Library Inaugural Lecture.
Extremities
In 2002 Grigsby wrote Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, in which she examines six paintings from four artists active following the French Revolution between 1794 and 1826: Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa; Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa; Eugène Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios and Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi; and Anne-Louis Girodet’s lesser-known works Portrait of Citizen Belley and Revolt of Cairo. These paintings featured horrific and erotic subject matter, such as slavery, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction. Present in France’s colonial endeavors in places like the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece, these terrible conditions might well have reflected France’s mastery and control over the populations and governments.
Grigsby contends, however, that the degradation depicted in the paintings reflects the failure of France’s colonialism. The painters were expressing the loss of morality in colonialism and contrasted the claims of French national liberty with images of slavery. Grigsby explores how young male artists at the time dealt with cultural and racial differences in faraway lands, and how in some ways they were able to use images of degradation to answer the needs of the government and opposition parties in France. Although Grigsby’s research demonstrates a superb understanding of the historical and cultural environments of the paintings, Robert Cahn explained in Library Journal that she “distances us from them by a veil of arcane theory and psychosexual assertion,” while her discussion of the painting Raft “is befogged by lucubrations on cannibalism” and descriptions of sexuality.
Enduring Truths
Grigsby next published Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance in 2015. In the nineteenth century, runaway slave Sojourner Truth became an abolitionist and public speaker traveling the country making appearances. To help make some money, she sold photographic carte de visite portraits of herself. These were small calling cards consisting of photographs mounted on cardboard. She sold them at her lectures and through the mail. Although Truth was illiterate, she had “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth” printed on the cards. She also copyrighted the cards at a time when the photographer usually retained the rights to the photo.
Grigsby explains how Truth created her own public persona by using her image on the cards as publicity and to bring attention to her abolitionist cause. Truth depicted herself in the photographs knitting, which Grigsby explains created an image of middle-class respectability and a means of economic mobility. According to Journal of Southern History writer S.R. Robinson: “This book reinforces the necessity of studying visual sources on their own terms, rather than merely as a tool to be used in conjunction with, not as illustrative of, the printed word.”
Truth’s cards became inexpensive collectibles for people. She also utilized the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. In the book, Grigsby presents the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published. A Michigan History contributor commented that Grigsby “establishes a range of important contexts for Truth’s Portraits.” She puts Truth’s portraits, photographs, copyright, and politics into context, and explains that sales of Truth’s cartes de visite as well as federal banknotes were both created to fund the Union cause.
Grigsby also delves into the photochemical limitations at the time in photographing people with different skin tones. Noting how “this study shines a light on an interesting aspect of an important historical figure,” L.M. Bliss commented in Choice that Grigsby also presents parallels to today’s celebrities and their use of social media to present an image to the public.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, L.M. Bliss, review of Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance, p. 1161.
Journal of Southern History, Volume 83, number 1, 2017, review of Enduring Truths, p. 171.
Library Journal, September 1, 2002, Robert Cahn, review of Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, p. 173.
Michigan History, Volume 100, number 3, 2016, review of Enduring Truths, p. 58.
ONLINE
Interdisciplinary Studies Field, http://live-isf.pantheon.berkeley.edu/ (April 1, 2017), description of author’s professional work.
SFGate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (November 1, 2015), Jessica Zack, author interview.
University of California, Berkeley, History of Art Department, http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/ (April 1, 2017), author faculty profile.
Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
Grigsby is the author of Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (2002); Colossal. Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012); and Enduring Truths. Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her current book-in-progress, Creole Looking. Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, examines France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas. She is also curating Sojourner Truth, Photography and the Fight Against Slavery, an exhibition of her collection of civil war photographs given to the Berkeley Art Museum (July 27-October 23, 2016).
Grigsby is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships (2002 and 2008), a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2005), a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, 2003 and The Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley (2012). Her seminars have included Creole; Daumier, Medium, Caricature and Politics; Photography, Archaeology and Mayan Ruins: the Frenchman Désiré Charnay in Mexico; A Race Workship; Debating Degas; Sojourner Truth and Civil War Photography; Visualizing Labor in 19th-century France; Photography and Empire; France’s Orientalisms; Monuments and Ruins; The Politics of Desire: Delacroix and Ingres; Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution; and Géricault and the Body Politic. Undergraduate lecture courses include Art and Colonialism, Histories of Photography, Art and of Revolution, the Spectacle of Modernity and the Introductory Survey.
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is Professor of History of Art and author of Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 2002) and Colossal. Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal (Periscope Publishing, 2012). Her forthcoming book, Enduring Truths. Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) concerns Sojourner Truth’s sophisticated use of cartes-de-visite during the American Civil War. Grigsby is now writing a fourth book called Creole Looking. Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century that examines France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas. Her scholarship and teaching concerns the history of art and material culture in France and the United States from the 18th to the early 20th century especially inrelation to colonialism, slavery, and constructions of race. Other research and teaching interests include visual representation and gender; the problem of scale; the history of photography; orientalism; modernization; the history of engineering; the history of money; the Civil War; Haiti and the African diaspora.
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One woman’s search for Truth photographs
By Jessica Zack Updated 3:11 pm, Sunday, November 1, 2015
UC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby holds one of the photographs she has collected of Sojourner Truth. Her new book has the most extensive collection of images of the slave turned abolitionist. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
UC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby holds one of the photographs she has collected of Sojourner Truth. Her new book has the most extensive collection of images of the slave turned abolitionist.
Buy this photo
It turns out academics, just like everyone else, turn to shopping on the Internet when an object or artifact sparks their curiosity. UC Berkeley art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby had no idea she was about to launch an eight-year-long research and book project the first time she went online to search for a Civil War-era photograph of Sojourner Truth.
Grimaldo Grigsby, 59,the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities, says she first came across a small sepia “carte de visite” (19th century calling card) photo of Sojourner Truth in a book about the famous runaway slave-turned-abolitionist. “I was just stunned by the intelligence of the caption on the photo: ‘I sell the shadow to support the substance.’ How striking that she was seizing the first-person,” she said during a recent morning interview in her sunny, book-filled office in Berkeley’s Doe Library.
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“The next thing I did was get on eBay, wondering if there were more out there, and thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to get one,’” says Grimaldo Grigsby, whose newly published book “Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance” (University of Chicago Press) features the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published. The book is a fascinating exploration of Truth’s surprisingly savvy use of her own copyrighted image.
Grimaldo Grigsby remembered that several years ago, a graduate student had alerted her to the importance of eBay “as a research tool, since art history had moved from a discipline that is all about canonical paintings to investigating the broader history of material culture,” investing family photo albums, souvenirs and otherwise overlooked collectibles with possible art historical value.
That first online auction search led Grimaldo Grigsby to 80-year-old William Heald of Sanger (Fresno County), who sold her a photo that his grandmother Ann had bought at one of Truth’s lectures in West Branch, Iowa, in 1870. “It was the only picture of a non-family member in the Heald family album, which I’ve since found was often the case with Sojourner’s cartes de visite,” says Grimaldo Grigsby.
‘Creative response to slavery’
She points to that first cherished photo displayed on her desk alongside other 1860s and ’70s images she has since acquired: freed slave children, a mockery of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis in a woman’s shawl and a valuable photo of Frederick Douglass — “so precious.”
(Douglass is, coincidentally, the subject of a new book, “Picturing Frederick Douglass” (Liveright/W.W. Norton), which explores his own commissioned portraits and views on the social importance of photography.)
Grimaldo Grigsby has purchased a total of seven photos of Truth (for a few hundred dollars each, although they now sell at auction houses for up to $12,000), as well as more than 80 related Civil War images.
Upon completing her book, she donated them to the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, which will display the full collection in July 2016 in the exhibition “Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery.”
“Truth’s cartes de visite are a brave and powerfully effective creative response to slavery,” says BAM/PFA assistant curator Stephanie Cannizzo. “We are thrilled with this important gift of Civil War-era photos which, combined with Grimaldo Grigsby’s new book of scholarship, will provide an invaluable asset for students, teachers and researchers on campus and beyond.”
UC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby looks over a few of the more than 60 19th century photographs of former slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth she has collected. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
IMAGE 1 OF 4 Buy PhotoUC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby looks over a few of the more than 60 19th century photographs of former slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth she has collected.
“Enduring Truths” is a highly readable examination of how Truth — who was born a slave named Isabella Baumfree in upstate New York and ran away from her owners at the age of 30 (renaming herself Sojourner Truth at age 46) — went on to embrace the new technology of photography to support her causes. She campaigned on behalf of the abolition of slavery, as well as for suffrage for women and African Americans, and even the desegregation of streetcars and the elimination of capital punishment.
Available to masses
Cartes de visite were small (usually 2.5 by 4 inches), affordable and easily reproduced albumen prints, mounted on thick stock and, in the late 19th century, copiously traded and mailed around the U.S., making the dissemination of one’s image suddenly available to the masses.
Even into her 80s, Truth had them printed by the hundreds and sold them (for approximately 40 cents each, including postage) at lectures and and anti-slavery events, and by post.
“My students are living in the time of the pervasive selfie, but this was an early moment when everybody first thought they could have their own images taken,” says Grimaldo Grigsby. Her two previous books, “Extremities” (2002), about art in post-Revolutionary France) and “Colossal” (2012), about monumental engineering projects, were also, she says, “motivated by a need to talk about colonialism, slavery and representation.”
“The urgency of this work is only increasing,” she says, citing a connection she feels as both a scholar and a mother (to an adopted Haitian American teenager) between her research and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing “alternative views to the sense of the black body being so much at risk.”
UC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby holds one of 19th century photographs she has collected of former slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who often wore simple Quaker garb for the snapshots. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
UC Berkeley Professor of art history Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby holds one of 19th century photographs she has collected of former slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who often wore simple Quaker garb for the snapshots.
Buy this photo
Grimaldo Grigsby has found evidence of Truth’s sittings with approximately 15 photographers, resulting in 28 different portraits. Dressed most often in prim Quaker garb (white bonnet, white shawl), Truth stares forthrightly into the camera. She copyrighted the images in her own name at a time when photographers (even of the formidable Douglass) typically retained all rights.
Powerful tool for ex-slaves
Truth was the “strategic author of her public self,” Grimaldo Grigsby says. “People aren’t aware that, despite being illiterate, she controlled the visual narrative of her life in this way. She was deeply committed to the cause of her people, and these photographs played a role in making that work possible.
“Photography was an extraordinary technology for ex-slaves,” says Grimaldo Grigsby. “It could be used against them, like Harvard’s Agassiz photos (famously depicting ex-slaves in demeaning daguerrotypes), but once they could finally put it to use as autonomous subjects who owned themselves, it was an exceptional tool to do that.”
“Enduring Truths” includes a quote from Truth that ran in an 1870 issue of the “New York World” newspaper, saying that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby: Egypt's Pyramids and Representation
Evening lecture
Organized by the Max-Planck-Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The cross-cultural Lives of Things"
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, author of Colossal. Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal (2012), will share her work on the representation of Egypt's pyramids from the Napoleonic Description of Egypt to photographic stereoviews. Besides discussing the specific formal challenges posed by representations of the Great Pyramids in different media, she will foreground their centrality to modern conceptions of scale as well as labor.
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race, slavery and colonialism. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
She is the author of Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (2002); Colossal. Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012); and Enduring Truths. Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her current book-in-progress, Creole Looking. Portraying France's Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century (in negotiation with Penn State University Press) examines France's relationship to the Caribbean and Americas. She is also curating Sojourner Truth, Photography and the Fight Against Slavery, an exhibition of her collection of civil war photographs given to the Berkeley Art Museum (July 27-October 23, 2016).
Her recent articles include: "Blow-Up! Dynamite, Photographic Projection, and the Sculpting of American Mountains," in Jennifer Roberts, ed., Scale, University of Chicago and Terra Foundation, 2016; "Still Thinking about Olympia's Maid," Art Bulletin, December 2015; "Cursed Mimicry: France and Haiti Again (1848-1851)," Art History, February 2015; "Loss and the Families of Empire. Thoughts on Portraits painted in India by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey," in Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ed., Irish Orientalism, forthcoming, Ashgate, 2016; and "Two or Three Dimensions? Scale, Photography and Egypt's Pyramids" in Ali Behdad, and Luke Gartlan, eds., Photography's Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty, 2013, pp. 115-128.
Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France
Robert Cahn
Library Journal.
127.14 (Sept. 1, 2002): p173.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Yale Univ. 2002. 392p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-300-08887-6. $65. FINE ARTS
It is Grigsby's notion--not surprising on the face of it--that some of the great French paintings of the period between 1794 and 1826 ought to be
examined against the hectic background of national colonial aspirations and the politics of slavery. Along with extended studies of Gros's
"Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa," Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," and Delacroix's "Massacres of Chios" and "Greece on the
Ruins of Missolonghi," there are equally elaborated essays on Girodet's lesser-known "Portrait of Citizen Belley" and "Revolt of Cairo." Each of
these six investigative meditations manifests the author's superb understanding of the historical and cultural environment in which the paintings
was executed and a real sensibility to its figurative properties. Yet at the same time the author distances us from them by a veil of arcane theory
and psychosexual assertion. Thus, for example, Grigsby (history of art, Berkeley) forges a nuanced reading of the politics and art criticism
surrounding Gros's "Plague" victims while propounding an array of dubious notions about its latent eroticism. Similarly, the exfoliation of
Gericault's "Raft" is illuminated in terms of contemporary colonial and racial ideology and yet is befogged by lucubrations on cannibalism and
bizarre intimations of sexuality. In short, a volume destined for controversy and yet requisite for advanced art history libraries.--Robert Cahn,
Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Cahn, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cahn, Robert. "Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2002, p. 173. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA91474242&it=r&asid=8efaa463661a7791e509bd0fab5c4723. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
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Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance
S.R. Robinson
Journal of Southern History.
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p171.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance. By Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Pp. x, 229. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-19213-0.)
Sojourner Truth has received scholarly attention from a number of talented historians over the past two decades. A northern slave who escaped,
she later became an active member within the abolitionist and the early feminist movements. Along with her autobiography, first published in
1850, Truth used the still relatively new medium of photography--in particular, cartes de visite--for political ends. In the Civil War era Truth's
photographs became not only a central part of her campaign to end slavery but also a means to support herself financially.
In Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's work. Truth's political use of photography receives the much-needed scholarly attention that it deserves. In this
wonderfully illustrated book, Grigsby provides a fascinating study of Sojourner Truth's use of photography as an instrument of her own agency.
The author contends that while Frederick Douglass has been credited with shaping his own image through autobiography and photography,
historians have been less keen to do the same for Truth. Grigsby has found twenty-eight original photographic portraits of Truth; however, the
author notes that there may be more yet to be discovered. Organized into four sections and ten chapters, the book is structured around the visual,
material, and textual nature of these photographs. The chapters focus on a range of related topics: the evolution of copyright law, paper money,
and the photographic process. As a result, the reader gains a better understanding of the broader context and Truth's use of modern innovations in
technology.
Sojourner Truth was illiterate, as were the majority of New York's enslaved population, yet that did not prevent her from having a career as an
activist. While Truth placed great significance on the spoken word, she thought about the printed word in a highly complex way, analyzing
published work in a manner that was "partly oral, partly visual, partly rhetorical" in nature (p. 110). The reproduction of Truth's scrapbook of
newspaper clippings about herself on page 111 adds another dimension to Grigsby's book, inviting the reader to think through the texts as Truth
would have done.
Illiteracy, however, meant that Truth was often isolated and reliant on others. Indeed, one of the challenges of any study of Truth is that all the
evidence has been transmitted through another party; where Truth's own views begin and end is hard to discern. Photographs were autographed
acts, the author contends, and were therefore highly significant to someone like Truth who was illiterate, because it meant that she had a degree of
control over how her image was to be (re)presented. Chapter 4, for instance, explores the political aim of these photographs through Truth's
insistence that the words "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" be included under her portrait in her cartes de visite (p. 63). The images in
this chapter are some of the most well known of Truth; however, Grigsby finds new ways of understanding them. The author argues that the
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inclusion of Truth's knitting in these particular photographs was a demonstration of middle-class respectability. Yet Grigsby goes further to
suggest that Truth was reinforcing the message she took in person to the formerly enslaved about the possibilities of knitting as an aid to
economic mobility.
This book reinforces the necessity of studying visual sources on their own terms, rather than merely as a tool to be used in conjunction with, not
as illustrative of, the printed word. It is Truth's "visual archive," as Grigsby terms it, that is essential for our understanding of the historical
importance of Truth as a historical actor (p. 11). This is an exciting book, one that will become a standard work on the subject.
S. R. Robinson
York St. John University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Robinson, S.R. "Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 171+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354155&it=r&asid=1cf20cc7c89b7a2caac92e0c69b658ca. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354155
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Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance
Michigan History Magazine.
100.3 (May-June 2016): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Historical Society of Michigan
http://www.hsmichigan.org/publications/michiganhistory/
Full Text:
Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance
BY DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, $45 press.uchicago.edu
(800) 621-2736
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Escaped slave and Michigan resident Sojourner Truth gained fame in the 19th century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator. She also earned a
living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself, at lectures and by mail. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her
photographs in her own name, adding the caption "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance." This book explores how Truth used her own
image--mass-produced and distributed via a then-new form of technology--to raise money to support her activism and the fight against slavery.
Author Darcy Grigsby, a professor of art history at the University of California-Berkley, establishes a range of important contexts for Truth's
portraits: for example, the shared politics of Truth's cartes de visite and federal banknotes, both created to fund the Union cause, and the ways that
photography processes of the day complicated the portrayal of darker skin tones.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance." Michigan History Magazine, vol. 100, no. 3, 2016, p. 58. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452051971&it=r&asid=9c8c7baa58e38114779ee9cfb9947dbf. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452051971
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Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Enduring truths: Sojourner's
shadows and substance
L.M. Bliss
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1161.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Enduring truths: Sojourner's shadows and substance. Chicago, 2015. 229p index afp ISBN 9780226192130 cloth,
$45.00; ISBN 9780226257389 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3374
E185
2014-38311 CIP
Grigsby (Univ. of California, Berkeley) analyzes the cartes de visite sold by abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth. These photographs
mounted on cardboard were made in multiples and were similar to souvenir postcards. Truth carefully managed and marketed the image she
presented to the world in these photographs, frequently posing with her knitting or holding a portrait of her beloved grandson. She insisted
photographers incorporate the phrase "I sell the shadow to support the substance" as well as her name on the cartes de visite. Grigsby reveals that
in spite of being illiterate, Truth was a prolific correspondent who relied on friends and family to write letters for her, including requests for
people to buy her cartes de visite. Grigsby also explores Truth's use of copyright at a time when it usually rested with the photographer, not the
sitter. This study shines a light on an interesting aspect of an important historical figure with parallels to today's celebrities and their use of social
media. Copious illustrations are used quite effectively through placement on the same page as the accompanying text. Summing Up: **
Recommended. General readers, lower-division undergraduate students.--L. M. Bliss, San Diego State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bliss, L.M. "Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Enduring truths: Sojourner's shadows and substance." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,
Apr. 2016, p. 1161. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661505&it=r&asid=567005853c0a9c61fccb4d136da0ab62. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661505