 Well, hello and welcome to this semester's ADHC Talks. The ADHC Talks are conversations with folks in the ADHC community of scholars. Our talks happen on the first Friday of each month at 11 and are livestreamed and recorded on Zoom. Then they're archived on our website. These conversations are semi-structured. I have sent our guests a list of starter questions and we'll build off of those questions and let the conversation evolve organically. I'm Sarah Whitber and the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries, and today I'm super excited to be joined by Dr. Rachel Stevens. Rachel Stevens is an Associate Professor of Art History at UA's Research Centers on the Art of the American South. She recently published a book with the University of Arkansas Press entitled, Hidden in plain sight, Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture. Welcome, Rachel. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, so I'm just going to dive into my first question. I would like to hear about your research and this is always sort of my pet question. What makes you feel nerdy and excited? Well, that's a big question. I could talk forever on these things, especially the nerdy side of things. But I guess I'll talk a little bit about my research generally and then we can eventually get to what led us to Joe Minter, which is why I'm here because of the Joe Minter project being hosted by you guys so generously. But so I'm an art historian, and my area of study is, as you said, the 19th century South, particularly the antebellum period. And I am particularly interested in the ways that the environment which I study through the visual was racialized. Obviously, this is a period in which the South was deeply entrenched in the institution of slavery. And my research, which started as just like back in grad school, just thinking about what is Southern art? It's such a tiny field. There's not a lot of people that study it. And so just trying to define it for myself led me to think about the types of art that was produced, which led me to think about who all of the players were within the presence of that artistic production. And while I started thinking about white artists with European training who were painting for famous men, and in my case that was Andrew Jackson. I eventually figured out I needed to branch out from there and think about who are all the people in the room. It was just Earl and Jackson. It was Earl and Jackson and enslaved people who were working for them, even in, even enslaved people who were creating work themselves. And so that's the type of stuff I love. And it's the thing that makes me excited or nerdy, as you say, is when I can make connections like that. So when I, when I can be in the archive and figure out that it wasn't just Earl and Jackson in the room, or when I can learn the name of an enslaved person who was also a craftsperson and artist or maker. So it's, I guess, the opportunities for me to do that are far and wide in studying the American south of the 19th century, because a lot of that, those ideas that revolve around race racialization and movement haven't been talked about and are in traces in archives. And so it's the looking for those traces that excites me that the finding of a list of, oh, I can give you an example, which happened recently. I was at the Tennessee State Library and Archives and I was researching the Tennessee State Capitol buildings construction, because I had heard that enslaved people were responsible for the construction. And there in all the many records was a list of 60 names of enslaved people who did the stone cutting for the initial building. And so the names were there because it was a list of how many months they had worked so that their enslavers could be paid for their labor. But it was also exciting because it gave their first and last name and the name of the enslaver, which allows you to then kind of track their story a little bit. Yeah. So I almost just jumped out of my chair when I saw that because that's the type of stuff that helps you connections between the wider world of begin to be themselves. I can just imagine what it might mean to a person who was in that situation to know at some point in the future that somebody here that that person was even there, and we're able to name them, and finally give them credit for the skilled work and the craftsmanship that they I know I think about that. It kind of breaks my heart to hear you put it that way and my heart's broken all the time thinking about those people. But yeah just the basic idea that many of them didn't choose their name many of them were given the last names of their enslavers by their enslavers and so even the recovery of those names is so important but also like equally problematic. And, but yes I'm trying to center those folks as best I can. Okay, well, I would also like to hear about your history with digital humanities because you know the work that you've just described has has partially trans transformed itself into digital project. And I expect that we'll see more digital projects from you. So, tell us a little bit about your history with digital humanities and let's talk a little bit about your, your Joe mentor project. Sure. Okay, so let's see there's so much I could talk about I love the digital humanities. So I started here as an assistant professor 10 years ago and it was that it was then, which I think is probably about the same time that the adhc started. At least it seemed like it was kind of new when I, when I started and it was in those first year faculty trainings that I first heard about digital humanities and heard about our center and the support the libraries gives to it, and what they could do for faculty both in teaching and in research, and I got really excited about it. Honestly, I'm a little bit of a Luddite. When it comes to technology like I've never been super naturally inclined with it at all. I'm still not. But actually I found that because you guys exist. And because did people who specialized in the digital exist that even people like me can help, can have ideas for their research that then can, I can use experts to help translate it to make it more, more accessible and that's what I love about digital humanities as accessibility. I love writing books I love writing long stories and academic jargony stuff that's buried in volumes in the archives of the library somewhere. But, you know, obviously I think those ideas are important so when I can take some bit of them and make them publicly accessible. That's just like so invaluable what you guys do. So anyway, I went when I first came and started hearing about digital humanities. I just met with the digital humanities librarian at the time and talk to her about what was even possible she just she was just asking me like what are you doing classes. And what, you know what might you want to do with a class in regards to digital humanities so the first thing I ever did was, I was teaching an American architecture class. And I just asked the students to each pick a building in Alabama to research it to write essentially a blog post about it but like a mini research project about it, gather as many images as they could and then the digital Humanities Center built out a little WordPress site, train the students and how to make the posts and that little page still exists. I've done several similar things for different projects and actually it's so exciting because people, you know, especially because my subject area is Southern art and architecture. There's not a lot of information about that stuff. So I've had people reach out to me like random people out in the world who have stumbled upon those those sites through the adhc and wanted to learn more about whatever content the students had researched. So it's exciting. It's exciting for me as a teacher, exciting for the students that accessibility is great. I'll talk about one other little digital humanities project before I move to Joe mentor but there's something there's a hub digital humanity site. And I haven't talked to you about it Sarah but I want to talk more about it sometime now and later. It's called locating slavery's legacies, and it's hosted by the University of the South and they got a big grant several big grants to build out this hub digital humanity site, and then they've invited other campuses to partner with them. And they're calling us campus partners I say us because I'm one of them. They're building out spoke sites for us in their massive omega site. So, I will have a little sub site. So my American architecture class now that I'm teaching is each each student for their research is selecting a site on campus that contains the legacy of enslavement here and in one way or another. So, right, things that deal with the Confederacy things that deal with enslavers. And be we don't have like traditional Confederate monuments here but we certainly had some month, some Confederate Memorial type things. We also have just you know that the whole shell of our university is a legacy of enslaving here which happened for many decades within the institution itself. So they've selected various portraits and building names and specific buildings and memorials and they're researching those, and they will each write, likewise an entry with pictures and archival records that talk about those histories and they say the lost cause monuments are a legacy of slavery. So, that's, that's been exciting to, to, yeah, with like inter institutional digital humanity stuff. And I imagine when the, so the the UA task force on enslavement there, they will soon publish their large omega site and I imagine, because it has records of enslaved people here that your students will be able to use some of that record that you think that has already been established. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you know that I'm on the task force. Oh, I did not know. Yeah, and so this has been four or five years. Yeah, and the site, thanks to the work of many of the task members, especially Jenny Shaw. Yeah, and so a number of graduate students who did on the boots research locating the stories. On the ground research I should say, um, it's a beautiful website and I want to tease it. Because it's an incredible and the university hasn't put it out yet. And we are getting impatient with it. But we're hoping for the release public release of it. January 22nd. Okay, yeah, I know that I've been working on the back end to get it all ready for the release. Thank you. We're anxiously anticipating it because it is so important. But because this is, it's really sensitive information that I think university doesn't quite know what all of our community partners will and constituents and alumni and trustees and everything will how they will be able how they will react to it. We're proceeding cautiously but also with the full acknowledgement that this is critical information for us to get it. However, however, intentionally that that happens. Well, I am just so excited. I've, I have back end access to it and I've looked at it is beautiful. I'm so excited and it's just such such detailed work. Yeah, it kind of gives me chills thinking about it because but when it comes out as you know, it tells the stories of the lives of the people that were enslaved on our campus which are stories that we don't know. And so it's just like it's so incredibly powerful. Yeah. Oh, well, I can't wait to talk more about the swanee project. And I'm so happy that this project has come up. Because even though you're not building it out, you have been involved on a higher conceptual level. Seeing that it watching it unfold and being a voice in it though. Tell me about Joe mentor. Okay, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. Okay, so Joe mentor obviously Joe mentor is a current living artist he's a contemporary artist in Birmingham. And so you're automatically probably thinking oh that's a little outside of your wheelhouse Rachel well it definitely is. And, however, all of the stuff that I've been talking about with my own personal research in the 19th century, and the legacies of slavery and all that is just essential to his work so I'm automatically inclined to have an interest in it. But also because he's such an important living artist who lives in our region, who's not really getting the type of recognition that he should. So it was really important for me to do whatever small piece I could in joining forces with Eric Corsayne who really was responsible for spearheading the project on our campus to figure out what we could do to provide some digital access to his work. So the foundation that that contacted Eric is souls grown deep, and their nonprofit, both collector and funder of African American art in the south. And they're trying, they have a number of initiatives but one of them is to acknowledge and to serve as a point of study, and to even preserve the work of these aging often often self taught artists in the south, Joe mentor among them. They have collected a number of his pieces but more than that they're just working to, to preserve his work and to give access. So they were responsible for curating a major show of African American work that included Joe mentor that was held in the spring at the National Academy in London, and had to think about that for a minute. Also recently appeared at the major show at the Ackland Art Museum in North Carolina. Okay. But anyway, so they approached Eric Eric approached me as someone who's interested in these issues to think about how we might catalog his work digitally, because the issue is, he's 80 something years old early 80s, and his work is site specific. And there's a concern that his work will, you know, after he passes away, it will not be able to be preserved and saved. And so we wanted to document it inside plus it's very important where it's located is also a very important part of his story. It's in his yard at his house on his family's land and that's, that's part of it. So, and that's his workshop and that's his studio and that's his, his exhibition space all in one. So those around you contacted us and said, can y'all think about ways of documenting this work. And so Eric, who's the geospatial person in the geography department did first drone flyovers of the site. But then he took it much deeper to do these 3D. Like three dimensional renderings of them, which I can, I can point you guys to, and I can, I can show I don't want to demonstrate it because I'm afraid it's going to crash the zoom, but I can show you what it looks like. So Eric was responsible for capturing that end of it and what me and my team did was interview Mr mentor, trying to get as many of his own words and descriptions about his life his work what it's about specific works we just tried to just document we have an enormous amount of data that we have collected. So we talked to him and we videoed those interviews, and they're very powerful. We photographed as much of the work as we could. And we tried to catalog it so we put in a cataloging system, and we described it and, and attach the photographs to the descriptions and attach that to his words when we could. And this is very much like a very slow long process and a work in progress, but we, we have stuff up on our website that the adhc built out for us. And it's the, the whole goal of it is just to provide public access to mentor's work because it's not open to the public. You can go there and he's very open and happy to show people around if they show up at his house but he's not always there he's, you know, it's not it's not easily accessible place. But you go to the website you can kind of get a sense of the work. Yeah. So I can share the screen if you want. Yeah, go ahead and do that. I'm just, I'm super fascinated at the documentation style. We have, we have very timely, I think, your project and we have several other 3d modeling projects and I am very interested in sort of the, the metaverse or the virtual reality aspects of this documentation. And as you were saying a little earlier, sort of the making accessible of these things that other people would not be able to. And I think in Joe mentor's case. First of all, when I think of Southern art, this is, this is like the first type of art that comes to mind this very. This is quintessentially Southern in my brain. And it is what I expect to be when I, when I am told that there will be a Southern art exhibit, this self taught, beautiful, sophisticated expression. That doesn't look like anything else anywhere. You know, that's specific to our region too, I think. Yeah. But the, the, I think the temporal aspects of his collection, where it is the fact that he's not making things and then selling them to a museum. He's not like they're meant to be displayed in this space in this time. And as you were saying before that becomes lost after, after a certain it's almost like it has an ephemeral in a way that's nature, you know, it expires because he is human. And he is a part of his collection. And so the documentation of the oral histories juxtaposed with the renderings of his work is just. I think just such a lovely way to give someone a sense of that space and the work and sort of a just what what it means like, like down in the very definition of it. You know, absolutely. I love the ways you're describing it and more than anything too. Yeah, it allows access. It's wonderful, but also just like having so intentionally done this work. I hope says this is important. Yeah, and having this website dedicated to it shows the level of significance that work like this needs to have in United States society or study or history or whatever. So I love that side of it too just just that it exists gives it a love a level of. I don't know. Significance that absolutely. Yeah, if we go back to something like Derrida archive fever, you know the archive is the seed of power and the things that are archived represents the things that are important. And in the end the documentation that exists at last gives us a sense of what is important and if this is what is documented this becomes the thing that is important because it took effort to preserve and it lasts. Yeah, I love that. And then talking about archives and documentation. The there's this, you know, current awakening since, you know, 2020 that archives are one sided. And I love the statement that the Alabama Department of Archives and History put out in 2020. They put out a statement from their board that said we acknowledge that our institutional collections history is lopsided that it ignored African American elections in our state that it privileged it privileged the Confederacy and all things associated with it. And essentially they said we were wrong. And there are holes, and now our collection reflects a lopsided history. So I just kind of believe that they put that out and I was just like, thank you for acknowledging all suspected, but to just as it was at least a baby step. There's a huge trend that is probably about my knowledge of it goes back about two decades of archivist dating that archives are not neutral. They're not neutral spaces, but I think that, you know, historically the culture of the archive or the perception of the archive is that that's where the facts are. And if it's a fact, it's a fact, like, that's what's there. But the, the, the human bias of collection, and political bias of collections and the societal bias of collections is such that archives cannot be neutral. And they're very, and they're very core. They are a human endeavor. Right. Yeah, I didn't know our conversation would lead us here but that's very no it's so interesting I love to think about it and I. I think our little Joe mentor project here is, you know, taking steps toward acknowledging what's the types of things that have not been archived that need to be. Yes. I learned very, I learned very this very clearly in my book project you mentioned before, I have this book hidden in plain sight. That is about the representations of enslaved people in the south and the ways that they basically the different ways they were shown or not shown it's about a lot of concealment but it was years in the archives and trying to learn the story there and but what you learn anybody that tries to learn about enslaved people as I was talking about earlier realizes that the they have to look for the traces of the enslaved people through the archive of the enslaver because whatever the remnants of that enslaved person weren't saved. It was the enslavers stuff that was saved and when you can find the rare mentioning of those people through the words of the enslaver you have to recognize that it's a biased. Recollection, but that that's the only way in sometimes. Yeah, I mean, we could ramble off onto a huge rabbit trail here because then I'm just thinking of city of Hartman's work of trying to recreate, you know, these big pictures of these little tiny pieces and fragments that she finds in the archive. And yeah, I think that's fascinating. There's so much of that but that that's what happened like the the intervention that Joe mentor is is that it is not just a fragment or a newspaper article mentioning something or, you know, just this little clip it it is the as full of the picture that enters the artist and the artist's work as possible. Yeah, that's really what we tried to do we tried to in the catalog descriptions of the work. If he had talked about in the interviews we included that. Let me just show I can show a little bit and tease the website which is publicly open and available for anyone to check out but it will be in the caption for like the description of this talk will have the public link. Oh, good. Yeah, and it's just African African village.ua.edu. Yeah, and African Village in America is the title he's given to a vast portion of his property. This house is right in the middle of what you can see here as a bird's eye view of the work and the bird flyover is interesting it doesn't do it as much justice as the 3D model, because you can be on the ground kind of seeing the individual works, but you can see just how much he's he's put into this it's found objects that he use uses with spray paint and other forms of storytelling to piece together a variety of histories he's very interested in history. African history, African American history, civil rights in particular, but there's a lot of themes that come out dotted across this entire landscape. So this is the website we have started creating. And when you get to the landing page you can play the 3D flyover tour here. But then we have different pieces of it as well and let me tell you who worked on this. Like I mentioned my team earlier and they're really the ones that did so much of the actual work doing the collecting. I missed a couple of our early interviews with him they were actually there on the day that I was in the hospital giving birth to my baby Mac. So I didn't pick the trip, but they collected so much information that then we could then work with and they are Emily Bibb, who is the curator of the Paul R. Jones Museum of American Art here on UA's campus. She put together the whole cataloging schema for the site. And there was a postdoc here for a couple years in the history department named Jasmine Howard. She is a specialist in oral histories and show she's the one that gathered the oral histories. And a lot of work was done by an MA grad student in art history named Emily or I'm sorry Lizzie Orlowski. And then we also had a number of interns undergraduate interns from both inside and out across across the work as well. So the page is pretty basic, but it does exactly. I hope it does exactly what I said it would. A few little landing sites, you can look at selected works and these are the works that he talks the most about that are the biggest or the best known. So the Birmingham jail is a really powerful piece as as for little girls and Martin Luther King Jr. The slave ship is a giant portion of the African village. And Hilda he talks about Hilda all the time who's his late wife that passed a couple years ago. Much of the work is dedicated to her. And she was just an integral kind of artistic partner with him. She didn't create the work. She, he just felt like his work wasn't possible without her. And so that's a really sad part of the story. We have 59 objects cataloged now, and you can click on the each of the objects to see the photographs that we took of them. And you can enter among them. And then basic information is cataloged there's a lot here because this is a big one but yeah, then the basic pieces described and cataloged and linked with other types of the same object so you could click on this to see other objects and there's a lot of assemblages within the whole whole collection. Yes. Interviews with with Mr mentor are also here. We've clipped out small segments of what we thought were the most powerful sections of lots of his interviews. And then Eric's 3d tour is here as well. So I don't want it to play I'm afraid it's going to crash us it takes a very large amount of memory so I'm going to skip off of it, but you can see he does 3d tours of that goes on and on to see like, yes, much of the site. Yes. And then we've just got a biography a brief brief bit about him and his story, and a bibliography of sources. If you want to read more. I'll particularly point you to the souls grown deep website which is here linked here. A lot of rich resources there on mentor if you want to learn more. Very nice. I'll stop sharing just so we can talk again but I can talk a little bit about the struggle of figuring out how to do that. I had never done anything like this from a drone flyover is how it started, but then realizing he needed more richness and depth. And it took me. I won't bore you with the details but I know it took him a lot of time to figure out what technology to use what. Yeah, maybe you know more about that than even I do because I wasn't involved in that side of it. I, I do not know. It was a lot of trial and error. There are a lot of failed attempts he'll he will be the first to tell you that they had to try lots of different things and lots of different technologies to figure out what. And I think that's kind of true across digital humanities a lot you probably see that a lot Sarah don't you. I think that yeah it's a lot of trial and error. As you are as you reference at the beginning of this talk. It's a lot of people with a vision that lack the specific technical know how to execute their vision and just, you know, this journey of finding collaborators and getting people to buy into your vision or people who share your vision. And sometimes it can take a very long time to figure out how to execute it, which I think also can be really frustrating for, for the scholar who's working on it because a things feel like they're going very slowly and be digital project have an undeniable shelf life. Where the technology, you know, expires and is inaccessible and some of these, these formats becoming inaccessible. One of the things that I'm very interested in making sure that we consider as we're setting off onto projects now is considering what the preservation aspects of your project are. And what the presentation aspects of your project are right so that the data that you're collecting is meeting preservation standards, even if the project that you build out presentation wise is no longer functional at a certain time. Right. Because then using new technology, you can take those preservation standard files and build out a new presentation of the materials. And I think, I think that that is something that I've been thinking quite a lot about. Yeah, that's like critical to keeping the accessibility that we talked about. Yeah. I will say that, working in the digital humanities for me as someone who's, who's in the traditional humanities who's always done work by herself in her office with her head in books and in notebooks and her computer that it is, it does require a shift in, in the ways you think in the ways you work and so much of it for me and I'm sure this is the same for everybody is kind of like, it's trial and error but it's also for me it was figuring out how to work on a team. I had never worked on a team before I'm a team of one. I'm not a scientist lab who's working with lots of, of folks. So that was a, that was actually a huge challenge for me, because it takes all of that teamwork and collaboration and like it that's just required and doing this stuff. If you want to want to get a big vibrant site because you need to draw in different people skills and expertise. Absolutely. And so that was, it was really valuable and rewarding but also it was like a learning curve I had to figure out how do I lead a team and what is management like and how are we going to collaborate and all that stuff was, it was challenging but it was good in the end. Yeah. I mean you start drawing from the skill set that you use in the classroom but then you're like but these are not my students these are my colleagues and so how do I, how do I make that adjustment but like, but I'm in charge of making these decisions but I'm not their boss. I know it was, it was, it was hard. It was really hard for me and I, it sort of did teach me that I'm not a great leader, like I'm much better. I'm much better as a team of one, but, but together we worked it out. It requires and that I mean that's just it's part of the excitement and also the difficulty digital humanities I think. Yeah. So, my last question is what are your aspirations beyond this current project. So, with the mentor project or beyond. With the mentor project or with the mentor project, either way, like, what, what would you like to see happen with the mentor project that isn't really on the table yet. Yeah, we want to keep building. I mean, we only have 59 entries on the website. And we have hundreds of pieces that need to be documented. So, we hope to revamp and continue building that out. It's just a side project for everybody that's working on it so it kind of gets the backseat a lot of times. Yeah, but to keep building that out souls grown deep would love for people that are working on this campus with it to publish either academic or public history or anything about it. Just to continue helping Joe mentors work reach a number of audiences. So, I'm going to the publication to someone else because it's not my area of expertise. But, yeah, I would love it if interested parties were interested, even if they're undergraduate or graduate students who might be interested in thinking more about him I would love to help help those. So, yeah, just continue expanding and continue, hopefully, helping it get an audience and get support for Joe's work is the ultimate goal. Yeah, I think it would be really interesting to see some, some 3D modeling of some of the larger pieces, some of the areas, like the slave ship, it actually was modeled out in a rendering. So that you could turn things around and see textures and see fittings and things like that. That is a very technical thing to do. But I can imagine how exciting it would be to find those on your site. And not every piece can be done that way. But I wonder if some of them, the larger intricate pieces could be, could be modeled out. That is, that is awesome. I had actually never thought about that, but I need to talk to Jamie Grimes because he's been talking to his students he's a sculpture professor here in our department. He's been doing 3D modeling all the time and he would, I know his students are interested in these ideas so that's another, well that's another thing about digital humanities too is the collaboration interdisciplinary collaboration that it often involves and our, our project certainly was an interdisciplinary team. Yeah, that's the kind of work that Jennifer Feltman is doing. And it's also the kind of work that her research partner over in anthropology, Alexander Covenin is doing and he does it down in Mexico with Mayan sculptures so monuments, so very different pieces, very different architectural pieces. So very large scale pieces. I think when we think of 3D modeling we think of fragments or like these smaller things but his work is on a very, like, real life, large scale. So, that's awesome. I find that really exciting. And I've actually put on Jennifer Feltman's AI goggles before and walked through the Gothic cathedral. And what if you, what if you could don some goggles and walk through Joe Mentor site when it's no longer. Right. Right. So there's definitely opportunity there that's exciting to think about man you have a fun job Sarah. I was joking with somebody the other day that I'm a big picture person who has big ideas that I voiced on to other people to do. That sounds great. As far as me my future work. You know I said I like to write books I like to tell the long story so I just finished this book and I'm just work starting work on another book project. It's going to be a really annoying academic right now who says I actually have two projects going on right now. But I have two big ideas that I want to that I'm kind of working on simultaneously just based on when I have access to various parts of them. Yeah, your research time or whatever so the one project I'm calling well it's about some of those ideas that I was talking about earlier. I think about the ways that enslaved people and indigenous people were responsible or involved in artistic creation, despite not being pictured. So, antebellum Southern are that, you know, almost exclusively at least if we think about art and the fine art definition of the ways we define our history oil on canvas paintings and that kind of stuff. The Euro American perspective of what art history is almost always excludes people of color. So if we look at say a portrait of Andrew Jackson and the on his plantation land in front of the hermitage, it doesn't include enslaved people and it certainly doesn't include the Cherokees who were removed from that land before he came. And so I want to figure out a way to think about those people to talk about how they are actually integral to that work of art, even though they're not pictured or, you know, directly involved in creating it. So I'm doing a series of case studies of those types of works in Nashville right. Nashville my hometown Nashville is a place that has very little art history associated with it and so I'm just interested in it so I've picked up a handful of Nashville paintings that I'm writing about as case studies for a book project, all along those ideas, but tying them also to enslaved makers and the types of work that enslaved people and also indigenous people were doing simultaneously. So it's kind of the big picture of that but it's exciting research. Super fun and I can't wait till the summer when I can actually dive in and and spend lots of hours working on it. Yeah, conceptually it makes me think of, you know, we have the commercials now with the new Adobe. Oh, I can't remember what it's called but it's similar to Canva and then we have Canva, and you can. And now just like on your iPhone or your Google Pixel you can take a picture and then you can erase everybody who's in the picture that you don't want in the picture. Like, like with a push of the button, and it's like that was done in the work that you're talking about intentionally, like they didn't push a button they just never put those things in. And, and now we can just take them out, we have the technology to retroactively take them out so we have this, this choice of representation and censorship of like what was really there. So is this a true picture of, of what was happening around them while we took this picture of them this, this art is so subjective, you know, and that's exactly right I love that analogy so much Sarah. I was, I had taken a picture of my son who's now to in his cowboy costume, because Halloween just happened this week. I was looking at it and I, I didn't know about this thing that you're talking about but I guess my finger lingered on a little long and it made the little light around his little body, and then it said copy, and then I could paste his little self anywhere. Facebook, a text, save it. So I don't know what it's called, but my iPhone did that it like intuitively I did that without even knowing it existed, but it's crazy and it allows for a specific amount of focus on whatever you want to do. But you're right that's exactly what was happening back in the day I'm working on a one of the portraits of a Nash, like an elite, Nashville family and attorneys family who are named the fosters who painted, who had commissioned a portrait of the members of their family. When you read fosters records, of course, he enslaved, you know, dozens of people in the home that I'm sure were in the room when the painting was happening, or at least some of them are. And we do we know their names and we know information about them from his will because he bequeathed those people to his children. And there's just, yeah, there's just this bigger picture that is omitted from the painting and therefore art historians haven't considered it but I think it should be considered. Yeah, I've always been obsessed with the tin type hidden mother pictures. Oh, I know. And if you, I mean, I've, I've obsessively read about them enough to know that, and I have I have several artists books of them, where you know that the people that are covered up are not actually the mothers to the case caretakers and often they're the African American, either the enslaved or the hired nanny care child caretaker, because you can see, you know, the hands often or like little, little pieces of skin and often it's just like their face has been taken out but you know that they're the ones holding the child and they're called the hidden mother but they're, they're the caretaker, and they've been completely erased from the picture because of because of that. Yeah, I'm very, I'm very obsessed with those. So, I'll have to talk to you more about these because I don't really know much about that tradition but. Oh yeah. Was it just because did it become a thing because they wanted to just have a picture of the baby but the baby couldn't still. Yeah. Yeah, I'll send you some stuff about them. Thanks. That's, it's fascinating. One of the chapters of my book is about those photographs of enslaved women with the children that they cared for but there's also a tradition of not hiding those women. But I sort of argue that maybe they were sort of seen as invisible anyway. Yeah. In the pictures that I'm talking about, they literally put like rugs over them and you can see like creepy. So the falls or like, like sometimes they have like pieces of furniture set on them. It's bizarre. That's like funny not funny if I've ever heard an example of that it's awful. It's amazing 10 types, of course it's such a long process. And so that's, that's what I was thinking with those the photographs that have, you know, the enslaved so called Mammy holding the white child. I thought, you know, there's a lot of layers of that onion that we could peel back in terms of why they exist and what the power dynamics were, but I honestly thought that maybe it was that woman who the baby was most familiar and comfortable with. And like for the logistics of the having to sit still for a minute. I know I couldn't, I couldn't get my little two year old to sit still for a minute for a photo. And so maybe that was the story is that's the person who most often was carrying them around and that's why they were able to get the photo. Yeah. This has been such an amazing conversation and you've been so generous with your time and we've just, I've just thoroughly enjoyed this, this talk. This has been really fun. Thank you I know I want to go to lunch now and talk some more. I know we need to plan it. Well, I'm going to go ahead and end the podcast and I just want you to know how much I appreciate your taking this time. Thanks for having me. It was great.