William Matthew Prior (1806-1873), “Mrs. Nancy Lawson,” 1843, oil on canvas, 30 by 25 inches. Courtesy Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt.

The Long Beach Museum of Art will present “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” an exhibition of images made of, and in some cases by, African Americans and their role in establishing and fostering racial identity during a period of radical social change. On display August 25 through November 26, the exhibition features more than 60 portraits in various media, ranging from paintings, photographs, and silhouettes to book frontispieces and popular prints.

“Portraits of a People” includes images dating from the beginning of the American Revolution through the close of the Nineteenth Century when the Supreme Court upheld the 1896 decision that ended the era of post-Civil War political gains by establishing state’s rights to legal segregation of the races. These remarkable images are often unexpectedly candid about the aesthetic desires and social goals of both their makers and their subjects.

From the anonymously engraved frontispiece portrait of African-born poet Phillis Wheatley, often attributed to the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead, to Thomas Eakins’ portrait of student and fellow painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, “Portraits of a People” presents the ways in which creative African Americans were imagined. Portraits of middle class African Americans by painters such as William Matthew Prior reveal the frequency with which the invisible borders between the black and white worlds were crossed by sitters seeking to demonstrate common bourgeois ideals and social aspirations.

Photographs of abolitionists, including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, provide examples of the ways that inexpensive, mechanically produced portraits could be mobilized in the services of moral and political goals, just as images of leaders in the African American church and politics reveal sophisticated usages of the visual rhetoric of power and prestige.

“Portraits of a People” was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and guest curated by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, associate professor of history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.

Located on a magnificent bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Long Beach Museum of Art is at 2300 East Ocean Boulevard. For more information, call 562-439-2119 or visit www.lbma.org.