This digital art history project is a case study on sensitive artwork digitization and image sharing, set against the backdrop of generative AI. It conducts a cross-disciplinary analysis of
The New Union Club (1819), a provocative and overtly racist British political caricature on antislavery made by George Cruikshank and Frederick Marryat and available online through open-access digital collections. From a standpoint of ethical reflexivity, the article addresses concerns around representation, recordkeeping, and description, and how they impact the legibility of this artwork as a cultural asset across time. This both problematizes and reconsiders what the work offers the larger endeavor to recuperate African-diasporan presences and experiences from the documents of art history. The article and accompanying interactive feature propose annotation as a curatorial method for critical contextualization and artwork networking, demonstrating how this highly complex print operates, through reproduction online, as a Digital Black Atlantic record.
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