Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia, and completed her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Professor Arabindan-Kesson's research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She also has interests in British, South Asian and Australian art. Her first book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, is available from Duke University Press.
Created as the Civil War was coming to an end but at a time when all Americans were not yet equal citizens, this painting invokes an idealized landscape, with references to both past and present.