Join Curatorial Track Ph.D. students in conversation with Dr. Jami Powell, Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College. Contact klwood@udel.edu or visualresources@udel.edu to register.
Deborah Willis, a practicing artist, renowned scholar, educator and curator, will deliver the University of Delaware's Paul R. Jones Annual Lecture. The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Willis has shaped the study of Black photography across the globe. A University Professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU), she has an affiliated appointment with NYU's College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity and cultural histories visualizing the Black body, women and gender.
As part of Penn State's Harold E. Dickson Lecture Series, Professor Jennifer Van Horn will present, "Painted Afterlives: Enslavement and Representation in the Antebellum South."
Portraits from the antebellum South form a racialized visual archive; white enslavers had access to representation and enslaved people did not. Yet a handful of depictions of enslaved sitters produced in 1840s Mississippi and Louisiana complicate this claim. Portraits of Delia, Frederick and Homer Ryan-an enslaved maid, butler and driver-were commissioned by their enslavers and displayed in plantation parlors. These representations invite us to question the material and visual afterlives of enslavement. they spur us to ask whether such ghosts in the archive, paintings made without a person's consent that trafficked their personhood, can ever be redeemed.
Please contact Professor Van Horn for registration information.
