A Talk with Dr. Jonathan Square on Black Visuality and the Archive
Tue, Aug 12
|Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Join Dr. Jonathan Square to explore how Black visual culture and archives reveal Philadelphia’s antebellum Black communities.
Time & Location
Aug 12, 2025, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust St, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA
About the event
Join Jonathan Michael Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design, for an illustrated talk exploring the lives of free and enslaved Black communities in antebellum America.
Drawing from visual culture—portraits, fashion, ephemera—and archival documents, Square will share how these materials help us better understand, reconstruct, and imagine the complex realities of Black life in Philadelphia and beyond during the 18th and 19th centuries. Through this lens, participants will consider both the known histories and the silences that remain—and how art and archives together illuminate stories long overlooked. Dr. Square is the guest curator for Almost Unknown: The Afric-American Picture Gallery, currently on view at Winterthur Museum through January 4, 2026.
About the Speaker:
Jonathan Michael Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He is also currently a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.…