Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is an important contribution to the growing literature on race and visual representation in American culture. The beautifully illustrated catalogue includes three essays by guest curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania), two of which expand upon the ideas in her first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). It also contains an introduction by Karen C. C. Dalton (Director of the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Archive at Harvard University) and thirty-nine object entries written by Shaw and Emily K. Shubert (Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow at the Addison). Together these authors take a close look at portraits of and by free African Americans, examining them within their personal, socio-historical, and aesthetic contexts. Through in-depth research and wide-reaching analyses, they show us how images of black sitters functioned as visual evidence of raced, classed, and gendered identities, as well as visual expressions of individual subjectivity and agency, in a period of profound social...