From Chains to Keys: Marcella and Maia as Duchess Quamino
Oil on canvas
29 X 36 inches
February 2026
Duchess Quamino (c. 1739-1804) was a formerly enslaved woman who, after gaining her freedom around 1780, became a highly respected caterer, cook, and household manager in revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island, a port city deeply entangled with the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for many years by William and Lucy Channing, a prominent white family, Quamino developed extraordinary culinary and managerial skill within their household. Following her emancipation, she continued to work for elite Newport families as a paid professional, transforming work once performed under bondage into a source of economic independence.
As a free Black woman and entrepreneur, Quamino built a successful catering and baking business, becoming known as “the Pastry Queen of Rhode Island.” Her earnings enabled her to support her children and family, a powerful achievement for a formerly enslaved woman in the late eighteenth century. Through this work, she occupied public and private spaces typically denied to Black women, moving with authority through households, churches, and community institutions.
Although Duchess Quamino was not an abolitionist leader in the later, organized sense, her life functioned as a living abolitionary argument. She was part of Newport’s free Black community that intersected with early antislavery thinkers, including Samuel Hopkins, whose abolitionist theology developed within a town where Black freedom was already being practiced and sustained by people like Quamino. Her competence, independence, and moral standing directly contradicted pro-slavery claims of Black dependency or incapacity. Her form of resistance was not petition or pamphlet, but practice: freedom enacted daily through skill, care, and economic self-determination.
Abolition Movement in Rhode Island
Rhode Island’s abolition movement unfolded within a landscape of deep contradiction, shaped by early moral opposition to slavery and continued economic dependence on it. In 1784, the state passed the Gradual Abolition Act, one of the earliest such laws in the United States, which declared that children born to enslaved women after that date would be legally free, though only after long periods of indenture, allowing slavery to persist in practice for decades. Quakers, free Black communities, and Black-led institutions in Providence and Newport pressed for education, civil rights, and full emancipation, while abolitionist societies organized petitions and public lectures. At the same time, Rhode Island’s rapidly growing textile industry, including mills like Slater Mill, relied heavily on Southern slave-grown cotton, tying the state’s prosperity to slavery even as many residents opposed it. This economic entanglement tempered abolitionist gains, delayed broader public support, and reveals how Rhode Island’s path toward abolition was marked by moral resistance operating within, and often against, the realities of industrial capitalism.
Oil on canvas
29 X 36 inches
February 2026
Duchess Quamino (c. 1739-1804) was a formerly enslaved woman who, after gaining her freedom around 1780, became a highly respected caterer, cook, and household manager in revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island, a port city deeply entangled with the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for many years by William and Lucy Channing, a prominent white family, Quamino developed extraordinary culinary and managerial skill within their household. Following her emancipation, she continued to work for elite Newport families as a paid professional, transforming work once performed under bondage into a source of economic independence.
As a free Black woman and entrepreneur, Quamino built a successful catering and baking business, becoming known as “the Pastry Queen of Rhode Island.” Her earnings enabled her to support her children and family, a powerful achievement for a formerly enslaved woman in the late eighteenth century. Through this work, she occupied public and private spaces typically denied to Black women, moving with authority through households, churches, and community institutions.
Although Duchess Quamino was not an abolitionist leader in the later, organized sense, her life functioned as a living abolitionary argument. She was part of Newport’s free Black community that intersected with early antislavery thinkers, including Samuel Hopkins, whose abolitionist theology developed within a town where Black freedom was already being practiced and sustained by people like Quamino. Her competence, independence, and moral standing directly contradicted pro-slavery claims of Black dependency or incapacity. Her form of resistance was not petition or pamphlet, but practice: freedom enacted daily through skill, care, and economic self-determination.
Abolition Movement in Rhode Island
Rhode Island’s abolition movement unfolded within a landscape of deep contradiction, shaped by early moral opposition to slavery and continued economic dependence on it. In 1784, the state passed the Gradual Abolition Act, one of the earliest such laws in the United States, which declared that children born to enslaved women after that date would be legally free, though only after long periods of indenture, allowing slavery to persist in practice for decades. Quakers, free Black communities, and Black-led institutions in Providence and Newport pressed for education, civil rights, and full emancipation, while abolitionist societies organized petitions and public lectures. At the same time, Rhode Island’s rapidly growing textile industry, including mills like Slater Mill, relied heavily on Southern slave-grown cotton, tying the state’s prosperity to slavery even as many residents opposed it. This economic entanglement tempered abolitionist gains, delayed broader public support, and reveals how Rhode Island’s path toward abolition was marked by moral resistance operating within, and often against, the realities of industrial capitalism.
Blazing the Trail for Feminism: Caroline and Kylie as Catharine Littlefield Greene
Oil on canvas
2026
25 X 34 inches
Catharine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814) lived at a moment when American women were formally excluded from political power, legal autonomy, and economic independence. Yet within those constraints, she fashioned a life that consistently challenged the gendered limits of her era. Although the term feminist would not be coined for decades, Greene’s actions place her firmly within an early American feminist tradition, one defined not by manifestos, but by lived resistance.
As the wife of General Nathanael Greene, Catharine was not a passive companion to history. She was an intellectual partner, a political hostess, and a trusted confidante whose judgment was valued in elite Revolutionary circles. Her education, wit, and confidence allowed her to participate in the world of ideas at a time when women were expected to remain ornamental rather than influential. Like other elite women of the Revolutionary generation, she absorbed the language of liberty and independence, and quietly tested whether those ideals might apply to women as well as men.
Greene’s most radical acts came after widowhood, the brief period in which early American women could regain legal personhood. Rather than retreating into dependence, she managed the Mulberry Grove plantation, engaged deeply with agricultural and mechanical innovation, and played a recognized role in the development and promotion of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Her participation in technological and economic life directly contradicted prevailing assumptions about women’s intellectual and practical capacities.
Her remarriage to Phineas Miller further underscores her feminist significance. Prior to marriage, Greene secured an agreement that allowed her to retain ownership of the property she had inherited from Nathanael Greene, an explicit refusal of the doctrine of coverture, under which a husband typically assumed control of his wife’s assets. This decision reveals a sophisticated understanding of marriage as a legal and economic institution, and a determination to preserve her autonomy within it. Such arrangements were rare and required both legal acumen and personal authority. Greene entered her second marriage not as a dependent, but as an equal negotiating partner.
Women like Catharine Greene did not call for women’s rights conventions, but they created the conditions that made such movements possible. Alongside contemporaries such as Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren, and alongside free Black women who asserted autonomy under even harsher constraints, Greene helped normalize the idea that women were capable of intellectual judgment, economic stewardship, and independent decision-making. Their lives offered proof, long before formal demands were articulated, that women’s subordination was not natural or inevitable.
Oil on canvas
2026
25 X 34 inches
Catharine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814) lived at a moment when American women were formally excluded from political power, legal autonomy, and economic independence. Yet within those constraints, she fashioned a life that consistently challenged the gendered limits of her era. Although the term feminist would not be coined for decades, Greene’s actions place her firmly within an early American feminist tradition, one defined not by manifestos, but by lived resistance.
As the wife of General Nathanael Greene, Catharine was not a passive companion to history. She was an intellectual partner, a political hostess, and a trusted confidante whose judgment was valued in elite Revolutionary circles. Her education, wit, and confidence allowed her to participate in the world of ideas at a time when women were expected to remain ornamental rather than influential. Like other elite women of the Revolutionary generation, she absorbed the language of liberty and independence, and quietly tested whether those ideals might apply to women as well as men.
Greene’s most radical acts came after widowhood, the brief period in which early American women could regain legal personhood. Rather than retreating into dependence, she managed the Mulberry Grove plantation, engaged deeply with agricultural and mechanical innovation, and played a recognized role in the development and promotion of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Her participation in technological and economic life directly contradicted prevailing assumptions about women’s intellectual and practical capacities.
Her remarriage to Phineas Miller further underscores her feminist significance. Prior to marriage, Greene secured an agreement that allowed her to retain ownership of the property she had inherited from Nathanael Greene, an explicit refusal of the doctrine of coverture, under which a husband typically assumed control of his wife’s assets. This decision reveals a sophisticated understanding of marriage as a legal and economic institution, and a determination to preserve her autonomy within it. Such arrangements were rare and required both legal acumen and personal authority. Greene entered her second marriage not as a dependent, but as an equal negotiating partner.
Women like Catharine Greene did not call for women’s rights conventions, but they created the conditions that made such movements possible. Alongside contemporaries such as Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren, and alongside free Black women who asserted autonomy under even harsher constraints, Greene helped normalize the idea that women were capable of intellectual judgment, economic stewardship, and independent decision-making. Their lives offered proof, long before formal demands were articulated, that women’s subordination was not natural or inevitable.