Art & Aperitifs: Hohenburg Lecture
March 22 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm CDT
Join us for an illuminating afternoon as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art welcomes Rachel Stephens, the University of Memphis’s 2025 Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History, for her talk, “Tennessee Gentleman?: Renegotiating Andrew Jackson’s Legacy through Portraiture.” Stephens will explore the fascinating artistic relationship between Ralph E. W. Earl and Andrew Jackson, a partnership that shaped the visual identity of one of America’s most polarizing presidents.
Working as Jackson’s personal artist across two decades, Earl produced scores of portraits—including the Brooks’ own 1833 painting of Jackson, the artist’s personal favorite. Through a critical reexamination of these works, Stephens situates them within the context of Jackson’s role in Indigenous removal and enslavement, inviting a deeper reflection on how portraiture both shapes and obscures historical legacies.
Rachel Stephens is a Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama, where she has served on the faculty since 2013. A specialist in the art of the antebellum South, she is the author of Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture (2018) and Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture (2023). Her current research investigates antebellum painting in Tennessee and its intersections with enslavement and Indigenous displacement.
This event is free and open to the public. Lecture will be followed by a cocktail reception.
