Dr. Adrienne Childs presents her new book, "Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts."
Date: Thursday, August 7th, 2025
​Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery at Featherstone Center for the Arts
Fee: Free

Ornamental Blackness is a book project that creates a framework for understanding how the decorative arts figure into the larger discourse of representing blacks in European visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  This book is the first of its kind to survey a range of diverse objects that employed the “blackamoor” as a decorative motif and develops a critical language for interpreting a brand of luxury objects that has little or no attention in these terms.  The vogue for representing the African body in European luxury items served to disseminate tropes of blackness throughout spaces of wealth and refinement in Europe and beyond, becoming increasingly popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Objects such as porcelain figurines, clocks, light fixtures (torchères), furniture and more  represented not only the aristocratic taste for exoticism but a physical manifestation of the black laboring body in the guise of fashion and décor. My work investigates the tensions inherent in the system of codes in which the black body - enslaved, reviled, feared, subjugated, and assaulted- is also the symbol of  luxury and opulence. Ornamental Blackness employs a diversified approach to the role of the symbolism in decorative arts and speaks to how the ideas presented by these objects operated in the theater of sumptuous living. 

Dr. Adrienne Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, publshed by Yale University Press. She is currently co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection. She recently co-curated The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2020.

In April 2022 The High Museum of Art awarded Childs the 2022 Driskell Prizein recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history.

Childs co-curated The Black Figure in the European Imaginary at The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in 2017. She is co-editor of the volume essays Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, Routledge. She also contributed an essay on art and activism to Volume V, part II of The Image of the Black in Western Art edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and David Bindman.

As former curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland she curated many exhibitions including Her Story: Lithographs by Margo Humphrey; Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie Pogue; Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell and Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art.

Childs holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MBA from Howard University and a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Maryland.

Dr. Childs joins us in conjunction with the exhibition Interiority, on view from  July 27 until August 17 in the Francine Kelly Gallery at Featherstone.

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