Lorna Simpson's Fabricated Truths

Computer Vision Applications for Art History: Reflections and paradigms for future research

“…Visual culture images that form the African diasporic culture and identity when found in artworks are used to study how images are transmitted and impact African Americans' perception. Examples of such visual culture images are Aunt Jemima (a brand and trademark of the Quaker Oats Company) and runaway slave advertisements (Elder 2018); the "I AM A MAN" signs held up by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 (Copeland & Thompson 2017); and iconic photographs of the Soweto Uprising in South Africa (Young 2017).…”

“…Recognising types of clothing and their material can also infer temporality as well as the class and status of depicted persons. The cotton dress a woman wears is associated with the trade of textiles (Elder 2018). In the same work, the formal qualities of a dress -unfinished, untailored, and uniform-are associated with the enslaved on plantations in the colonial period.…”