Portrait for Portrait: Phillis Wheatley, Scipio Moorhead, and Early African Atlantic Acknowledgment Practices

• In Event: Forgotten Black Artists of the Black Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution

Abstract

What did African Atlantic acknowledgment practices look like in colonial North America? How did these acts of acknowledgment effectuate communal and collaborative memory? Phillis Wheatley’s ekphrastic poem – “To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works” – allows entrance into this conversation.
Focused on Scipio Moorhead, the enslaved African painter responsible for creating Wheatley’s now famous portrait-as-frontispiece, “To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works” is a significant and early instantiation of a reciprocal African Atlantic acknowledgment praxis.
By considering how Scipio Moorhead chose to record and preserve Ethiop’s muse in his portrait, and how Wheatley, in turn, chose to record and preserve Scipio Moorhead in her word-portrait to him, we see the building of a communal and collaborative African Atlantic praxis of acknowledgment that lived before and extended far beyond what Katherine McKittrick calls the economy of citation as “quotable value.”

Author

• Karla Zelaya, Smith College