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Attempts to ossify conceptions of race by creating visual affinities between race and bodies emerged as a motif during the Enlightenment era. Our studies of art, visual, and material culture depend on racialized constructions and assumptions about the human form such as Winckelmann's analysis of beauty that is grounded upon enwhitened sculptures of Greek boys. As Anne Lafont has recently argued, the study of visual and material culture is a “remarkably efficient tool” for understanding race. While Lafont’s research focuses primarily on depictions of the human, she also gestures toward the ways in which longer histories about color, light, shape, and depictions of fabrics played important roles in attempting to create race-based iconographies. Taking race less as a fixed iconography than as an elusive process that matters over time, this panel aims to investigate how objects and pictures that may not even be directly about race at all can problematize the relationship between race and the human form. How can the study of images and objects problematize or unsettle the triangulation about race, the human body, and the black/white binary? How does race matter, and how does it operate independently from the human figure?