The Expert Guest for "BUTTON" was TK Smith

The smallest thing we've looked at so far this season has a big story to tell. Little enough to fit in the palm of your hand, it transports us from Caribbean battlefields to a prison in France. Along the way, it tells us about the enduring power of portraits--especially for Black revolutionaries like the one who allegedly wore this BUTTON.

TK Smith is an award-winning writer, curator, and cultural historian focused on modern and contemporary art. He has served as Curator of Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum and as Assistant Curator at the Barnes Foundation. His research examines performance and identity in Black portraiture, asking how representation both reflects and constructs power. Smith is currently working in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware on his dissertation, “Granite, Power, and Piss: The Shifting Position of a Confederate Symbol.”

For more on TK Smith visit his website.

For more on the button:

Button, attributed to Agostino Brunias, Italian, ca. 1730-1796, Cooper Hewitt

Other things:

Haitian Winter Olympics Uniforms

Image 1 of Toussaint Louverture

Image 2 of Toussaint Louverture

Portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama

Photographs of Frederick Douglass

Image of Sojourner Truth

Thoms J. Price, "Grounded in the Stars"

Further Reading:

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/agostino-brunias-and-depicting-people-of-colour-in-the-colonial-caribbean

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-mystery-in-miniature-175686099/

https://www.journal18.org/issue21/finding-william-lee-a-black-founder-in-early-american-portraiture/

See also Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and work of scholars Marlene Daut, Laurent Dubois, Julia Gaffield, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Ashli White.