Art History Faculty Lecture | Akela Reason, UGA History Department

“On Quincy Adams Ward’s sculpture The Freedman”

Join us for our Art History Faculty Lecture Series. Associate Professor of History and Director of the UGA Museum Studies Certificate Program Akela Reason presents “On Quincy Adams Ward’s sculpture The Freedman” on March 3rd. This lecture will take place at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in room N100 at 5:30 pm.

About the artwork

Ward began modeling ‘The Freedman’ shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, freeing more than 3.5 million enslaved people in the Confederate states. The broken shackle in the figure’s clenched hand and the one remaining on his left wrist offer succinct commentary on the era’s chief political and moral topic. Although emancipated and gazing ahead, the Black man is represented seated and seminude, reinforcing a transitional status between enslavement and full standing in citizenship and humanity.

–Metropolitan Museum of Art

Speaker Bio

Akela Reason is a scholar of American visual and material culture. She is also director of the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Museum Studies. She teaches courses in material culture, urban history, and museum studies. Her first book, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (U. Penn Press, 2010), won the 2011 Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication. Her most recent book, Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York (Yale University Press), examines the complex politics that shaped New York’s Civil War soldiers’ monuments. Click here to see a StoryMap about the project.

Dr. Reason has also published articles and essays on American art and visual culture. In addition to teaching, she has worked at several museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art. She also runs the Maymester Museum Studies Program in Atlanta.