In law, an “artificial person” is a non-human legal entity—not a single human being, but an organization, such as a corporation, that the law recognizes as a “fictitious person.” But what exactly is that? This talk begins to address that question and its history, taking the acclaimed work of contemporary British-Guyanese artist, Hew Locke, as an occasion to illustrate a set of legal historical, cultural, and aesthetic claims. Locke’s multimedia work helps us explore theories of artificial, expansive personhood—for trees, fetuses, elephants, and AI—and we will see how those theories emerged out of corporate personhood, the original model of artificial personhood. More surprisingly, these ideas developed from a combination of theories of business enterprise, the state, and legal thinking about the status of free African Americans. The talk thus develops the argument, first, that current understandings of artificial, expansive personhood retain that historical origin, albeit obscured; and, second, that both the origin and its obscuring support a natural-seeming process that removes power from government and the public and onto property and capital. The historical development of expansive personhood continues to impact the way artificial personhood functions, while also obscuring its failures