- Sponsor
- Department of History
- Speaker
- Jennifer Chuong
- Contact
- Department of History
- history@illinois.edu
- Views
- 73
- Originating Calendar
- History Department Public Events
Please join us for a lecture with Jennifer Chuong, an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of the transatlantic world as they relate to histories of environment and race.
The Opheliagraph: Dox Thrash and the Labor of Invention
This lecture examines the invention of carborundum mezzotint by the African American artist Dox Thrash (1893-1965), arguing that the technique's significance lies not only in its aesthetic effects but in the labor surrounding its discovery and production.
Like traditional mezzotint engraving, carborundum mezzotint produces rich, velvety tonal images, but it replaces the tedious, repetitive work of "rocking" the plate with a quicker grinding process. Thrash's repeated emphasis on his use of a flatiron—a domestic tool associated with African American women's laundering work—to prepare the plate invites us to reconsider the relationship between artistic and domestic labor.
Drawing on Thrash's conflicting accounts of carborundum mezzotint’s origins, his images of laundry and washerwomen, and his proposed name for the technique (the "Opheliagraph,” in honor of his mother), this lecture develops the concept of "ancillary labor": preparatory, surface-working actions historically devalued as a result of their association with feminized and racialized domestic labor.
More broadly, the lecture argues for a close attention to the actions of art-making as a means of recovering forms of labor, skill, and knowledge that traditional accounts of making—whether of art, craft, or other domains—have systematically overlooked.