Exploring the role the decorative arts played in the representation of Black people in European visual and material culture
 
This revelatory look at European decorative arts addresses the long-ignored implications of the depiction of Black bodies on luxury objects from the Baroque period through the nineteenth century. Adrienne L. Childs traces the complex history of the vogue for representing the Black body as an ornamental motif throughout spaces of wealth and refinement. Objects such as furniture, porcelain, clocks, silver, light fixtures, and more conveyed the taste for exoticism and portrayed the laboring Black body in the guise of décor. These objects also express larger ideas about the concept of race, romantic notions of distant lands, the harsh realities of slave labor in the colonies, the presence of Black servants in wealthy European households, and the culture of luxury consumption.
 
Ornamental Blackness demonstrates how seemingly benign decorative objects can embody the complexities of race, slavery, and representation. Childs examines the tensions inherent in the system of codes in which the Black body can be enslaved, reviled, feared, subjugated, and assaulted on one hand and a symbol of opulence on the other. In this important volume she establishes a framework for understanding the racialized aesthetics of luxury.

“This highly original book—written by an exceptional scholar of great breadth, depth, and generosity—has the capacity to fundamentally change the field of European decorative arts.”—Iris Moon, author of Melancholy Wedgwood

“Ornamental Blackness is a much-needed study, not only for art historians, but also for scholars of the political, economic, and literary history of Europe and the Atlantic world.”—Paul Kaplan, Purchase College, SUNY

Adrienne L. Childs is an art historian and curator.