Antislavery Medallion

Josiah Wedgwood

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1787, the Wedgwood ceramics firm issued a cameo medallion featuring a kneeling and shackled Black man with the inscription, "Am I not a man and a brother?" After its adoption as the seal of the London-based Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the image became an emblem of the antislavery movements in Britain, France, and the United States. Proliferating in printed abolitionist literature, it also appeared on a wide range of consumer goods including the carved gemstone seal depicting a kneeling Black woman with the reworked phrase, "Am I not a woman and a sister?" which also appears in this exhibition. Despite the successes of the antislavery movement, the ubiquity of the motif of the kneeling and beseeching Black figure cemented associations between Blackness, slavery, and subservience. Similar associations emerge in Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved!, which also pairs a bound Black figure with a petitioning inscription.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art