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Image Not Available for French Toile...Negro Toil
French Toile...Negro Toil
Image Not Available for French Toile...Negro Toil

French Toile...Negro Toil

Artist (Born in London, England, 1963)
Date2016
MediumFabric print
Dimensions37 × 57 inches (94 × 144.8 cm)
ClassificationsTextile
Credit LineGift of Mark Sloan and Michelle Van Parys in honor of Trevor Schoonmaker
Object number2016.13.1
Collections
  • MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
Label TextColin Quashie creates highly charged conceptual art that frequently explores the legacy of slavery and plantation culture in the United States. He blends dark humor with past events and contemporary fads to investigate human behavior as it relates to lingering racism, particularly in the South, where he lives. French Toile…Negro Toil is part of a series that ironically reimagines plantation living through toile, an eighteenth-century European fabric print still popular today. Many of the leisure scenes suggested in common early toile patterns were financed by the toil of enslaved people. By manipulating the silky fabric’s standard imagery, Quashie challenges the romantic vision of white plantation life by presenting viewers with the torturous realities of slavery. The five repeating scenes on French Toile…Negro Toil illustrate the vicious cycle of acquisition, sale, discipline, domestication and revolt, or freedom of the enslaved.