Paul Kaplan

Paul H. D. Kaplan is a specialist in the political dimension of Venetian Renaissance painting, and in the representation of people of African descent in European and American art, from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. He is the author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985), Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era (2020), and African Venice (2024). He was also a contributor to volumes 2, 3 and 4 of Harvard University Press’s The Image of the Black in Western Art (new ed., 2010-2012), and served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s “Speak of Me as I Am,” an installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.