Declaration House

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, which won the 2023 Historians of British Art Award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960. Paul M. Farber is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. Farber is the author or coeditor of several books including Monument Lab: Re:Generation (Temple) and A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall. Yolanda Wisher is the Senior Curator at Monument Lab. She is the author of the poetry collection Monk Eats an Afro and was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.

"In Declaration House, history emerges as a living, visual encounter shaped by negotiation, erasure, and presence. Through essays, interviews, poetry, and Sonya Clark's luminous field of eyes, Robert Hemmings emerges from archival silence into visual presence. This volume reminds us that American democracy is inseparable from Black life, labor, beauty, and vision. Repositioning the Declaration House as a space of visual reciprocity, this stunning book invites readers to ask: Who is seen? Who is remembered? How might we learn to look again?"—Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair in the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts, and coauthor of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Temple)"Sonya Clark's art installation of blinking eyes recuperates the illuminating presence of Robert Hemmings, a fourteen-year-old coerced valet who witnessed Thomas Jefferson's authorship of his most famous words: 'All men are created equal.' This creative collection from Monument Lab wrestles with the profound meanings of Clark's haunting montage based on photographs of the eyes of descendants of enslaved people from Jefferson's Monticello. It invites reenvisioning the birth of American democracy, its refusals, and its embodiments as distilled in this little-known history of the Declaration House."—Tera W. Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, and author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century