Declaration House

"In Declaration House, history emerges as a living, visual encounter shaped by negotiation, erasure, and presence. Through essays, interviews, poetry, and Sonya Clark's luminous field of eyes, Robert Hemmings emerges from archival silence into visual presence. This volume reminds us that American democracy is inseparable from Black life, labor, beauty, and vision. Repositioning the Declaration House as a space of visual reciprocity, this stunning book invites readers to ask: Who is seen? Who is remembered? How might we learn to look again?"—Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair in the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts, and coauthor of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Temple)

"Sonya Clark's art installation of blinking eyes recuperates the illuminating presence of Robert Hemmings, a fourteen-year-old coerced valet who witnessed Thomas Jefferson's authorship of his most famous words: 'All men are created equal.' This creative collection from Monument Lab wrestles with the profound meanings of Clark's haunting montage based on photographs of the eyes of descendants of enslaved people from Jefferson's Monticello. It invites reenvisioning the birth of American democracy, its refusals, and its embodiments as distilled in this little-known history of the Declaration House."—Tera W. Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, and author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century