Four of Joscelyn's lithographs were exhibited in Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-century
Atlantic Britain, curated by Hazel
V. Carby and Heather Vermeulen, at The Lewis Walpole Library Gallery, Yale
University, New Haven, CT, USA, from Nov 1, 2014 – May 1, 2015.
The Yale university Calendar states: "The exhibit explores the notion of
empire’s “prospects”—its gaze upon bodies and landscapes, its
speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land
and labor, as well as its failures to manage enslaved persons and unruly
colonial ecologies. It reads latent anxieties in the policing of bodies
and borders, both in the colonies and in the metropole, and examines
the forces that empire mustered to curtail perceived threats to its
regimes of power and knowledge. In addition to the focus on material
from the long eighteenth century, the exhibition features a selection of
four lithographs from Joscelyn Gardner’s series Creole Portraits III:
“bringing down the flowers” (2009-11), a recent joint acquisition by the
Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Gardner’s work mines the eighteenth-century Jamaica archive of white
English immigrant, overseer, slave owner, and pen-keeper Thomas
Thistlewood, one of whose diaries is on loan from the Beinecke."
