Discussing the history and art of José Antonio Aponte

José Antonio Aponte was a free black man in nineteenth-century Havana. He was also a visual artist and a revolutionary. In fact, he used his art as a way to think about and plot revolution. In 1812, authorities hanged him for his leadership of a failed antislavery rebellion, and sometime after that his major work of art—a “book of paintings” with 63 images disappeared. Ferrer will speak about the process of writing about a visual artefact no modern scholar has ever seen, and about an unusual collaboration between historians, art historians, and artists that reimagines Aponte’s art for the present.