Educational Series

Afro-Atlantic Histories

Teaching the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Its Legacies
Lois Mailou Jones, The Green Door, 1981, watercolor over graphite on wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund), 2015.19.2951

Essential Questions

  • How have histories of Black communities in the Atlantic world been told over time? Who has told them?
  • How did cultural traditions in the Atlantic world evolve from the impact of the Middle Passage?
  • How are contemporary artists telling today’s essential stories of Black life in the Atlantic world?

Student Outcomes

  • Students will understand the reach and impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the formation of Black Diasporic communities in the Atlantic world.
  • Students will be able to analyze visual depictions of Black individuals and communities and consider the perspective and historical context of the artist.
  • Students will make comparisons between works of art and textual sources to draw conclusions about a given subject matter or event.
  • Students will explore and understand how the visual arts can function as a form of activism.

This resource presents a variety of artworks, from the 17th century to the present, that highlight the presence and experiences of Black communities across the Atlantic world (the relationships between people of the Americas, Africa, and Europe). Using these artworks can help students to consider the many and continuing legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Use the image set below to engage your students in conversation about the many narratives of everyday life, enslavement, and resistance that have been told through art.

Classroom Activities

This resource is drawn from the content of the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was developed in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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We look across and down into a valley with a person sitting near a tall tree and a train puffing smoke beyond, all enclosed by a band of mountains in the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Closest to us, several broken, jagged tree stumps are spaced across the painting’s width. A little distance away and to our left, the person wears a yellow, broad-brimmed hat, red vest, and gray pants. He reclines propped on his left elbow near a walking path beside a tall, slender tree with golden leaves. The green meadow stretching in front of him is dotted with tree stumps cut close to the ground. Beyond the meadow, puffs of white smoke trail behind a long steam locomotive that crosses a bridge spanning a tree-filled ravine, headed to our left. The ravine creates a diagonal line across the canvas, moving subtly away from us to our left. The train has climbed out of the valley, away from a cluster of brick-red buildings. The most prominent structure is a train roundhouse, a large building with a high, domed roof to the right of the tracks. Smoke rises from chimneys on long, warehouse-like buildings, and a steeple and smaller structures suggest a church and homes to our left. Hazy in the distance, a row of mountains lines the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The sky above deepens from pale, shell pink over the mountains to watery, pale blue above. The artist signed the work in tiny letters in the lower left corner: “G. Inness.”

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Educational Resource Series:  19th-Century America in Art & Literature

In the United States, the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous growth and change. The new nation experienced a shift from a farming economy to an industrial one, major westward expansion, displacement of native peoples, rapid advances in technology and transportation, and a civil war. In these lessons, works of art from the nineteenth century are paired with written documents to be used as primary sources for students to reconstruct the influence of technology, geography, economics, and politics on daily life.