BINGHAMTON, NY  – The Binghamton University Art Museum will host an opening reception at 7 p.m.  Saturday, Oct. 13 to highlight, “Plantation Places: Cotton, Sugar, Coffee and the Making of Nineteenth-Century Slaveries.” The exhibition, featuring reproductions of over 130 pieces of material and visual culture, will remain on display through Saturday, Dec. 15. in room 213 of the Fine Arts building. Both the exhibition and the opening reception are free and open to the public.

The exhibit focuses independently on slave plantation landscapes in the United States South, Cuba, and Brazil. Together, each of these sites saw the massive redeployment of slave labor and an unprecedented production of cotton, sugar, and coffee, respectively, as a result of industrialization and the expansion of the world economy.

The plantation landscape integrates environmental, economic, social and culture histories in unrelated locations, allowing a reinterpretation of slavery in the Atlantic world. Funded by the Getty Foundation, scholars studied paintings, engravings, lithographs, photographs, and architectural drawings, and interpreted these materials to produce a visual history of plantation slavery in the Americas.

The exhibition is the result of a collaborative international research project by several individuals, including guest-curator Dale Tomich, professor of sociology and history and deputy director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University.

Tomich was recently named as one of nineteen 2012-13 fellows for The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

For more information, contact the Binghamton University Art Museum at 607-777-2634 or visit artmuseum@binghamton.edu.