In my paper, I explore John James Audubon’s (1785-1851) The Birds of America through the lens of his portraits. These portraits, depicting Audubon not with the tools of an artist or naturalist but with those of a hunter, provide a narrative that recasts the bird illustrations as scientific achievements and trophies of his hunts. Hunting and posing his avian subjects, using wires for a life-like representation, reveals a duality in Audubon’s relationship with nature, walking the line between reverence and conquest. These portraits are the visual evidence that supports the argument that Audubon’s collection transcends its merit, serving as a visual record of his mastery over the creatures he pursued. This perspective challenges traditional views and compels us to reconsider the legacy of “The Birds of America” as a symbol of Audubon’s hunting skills. The paper includes Audubon’s portrayal by other artists such as John Woodhouse Audubon and George Alexander Healy, who captured him in the light of a hunter, further substantiating the notion that Audubon projected himself as a figure of prowess in the wilderness. By presenting him with hunting gear and dogs, these artists contribute to the narrative that Audubon saw himself and wished to be remembered as a masterful huntsman. I invite a reexamination of The Birds of America and argue that the collection could be seen as Audubon’s exhibition of conquests, where each bird represents a moment of scientific inquiry and a triumph of the hunt. This reframing offers a complex understanding of Audubon’s works, where the intersection of science, art, and sport reflects a deeply entwined narrative of beauty, brutality, and the human desire to capture and control the wild.

Between 1832 and 1834, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied undertook an expedition into the American Interior, second only to Lewis and Clark. Unlike the Corps of Discovery, Maximilian employed a Swiss landscape painter, Karl Bodmer, to produce a visual record of Indigenous North Americans. A resulting atlas, housed at Cornell University, is my research focus. My research unsettles the traditional discourse of Bodmer’s works within subliminal and romantic cannons by foregrounding his positionality within a European Enlightenment paradigm. Accordingly, dimensions of colonialism and settler colonialism behind the creation of the atlas need to be addressed, such as the military occupation of Indigenous homelands, which supported federal commercial and territorial interests in the region. By introducing the language of ‘military occupation,’ I acknowledge the subjection of many Indigenous people in the 19th c. to tactics of dispossession and containment. My work also leverages that of Gillian Ross and Elizabeth Edwards to shift norms of scholarship within colonial archives as an approach to decolonizing methodologies. This theory provides space for self-reflection in scholarship and a means to read against the archival grid. Further, I unpack Bodmer’s imposition of European gender imaginaries on Indigenous people. The proportional lack of female representation speaks not only to access, but also to European conceptions of gender and power. Critical attention to the Indigenous warrior male body reveals European anxieties of Indigenous masculinity which Bodmer misrepresents. Likely unintentionally, Bodmer does preserve certain Indigenous representations of gender. These moments of Indigenous expression subsequently resist and subvert the publication’s authority. Through a variety of theoretical approaches, I hope to provide a new framework to approach Bodmer’s work in the present, particularly one that centers the atlas in the ongoing Indigenous experience with settler colonialism.

The Voyage of Life is a stunning series of four paintings completed by Thomas Cole in 1842, each depicting a different stage of a man’s life. The paintings Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age (all held by the National Gallery of Art) show the same man sailing on a boat down a river, with an angel presiding over the scene in various degrees of prominence. While on the surface this painting series appears to be about a man’s relationship with God over the course of his life, examining Cole’s political and social opinions allows another meaning of these works to be revealed. Cole’s musing on the political climate of the time, as well as his views on nature, are well documented in his personal journal. This paper argues that for Cole, the male protagonist featured in The Voyage of Life represented the changing American ideals of the antebellum period. In the mid-nineteenth century, the American populous was seized with a fervor for westward expansion and technological advancement, coupled with the rejection of the natural landscape Cole viewed as beautiful and sacred. The darkening sky and increasingly tempestuous surroundings as the series progresses serve as Cole’s warning against this path of ruin and destruction.

Francis William Edmonds explores the complexities of American women’s consumerism in the 19th century in his painting The New Bonnet. Set in a middle-class family’s home, Edmonds skillfully portrays the contrasting expectations surrounding the ideal “republican mother” and the rebellion of a young daughter against these norms. Edmonds, a former bank cashier turned artist, understood both the artistic and economic realms of 19th-century America. In classic American genre painting traditions, Edmond’s depicts a moment in which a daughter proudly displays her extravagant bonnet, while her mother symbolizes the frugal and modest republican. The painting reflects societal shifts as domestic roles for women evolve into a consumer-oriented focus. The daughter becomes a symbol of unbridled consumerism, challenging the traditional virtues upheld by her mother. The critique of the daughter’s extravagant purchase is humorously highlighted by the worried expressions of her parents, reflecting societal concerns about excessive spending. The artwork also addresses the lack of power women held, attributed to their inability to vote. Shopping becomes an outlet for women to express themselves in a society dominated by men. The New Bonnet encapsulates the conflicting societal expectations placed on American women’s consumerism during this transformative period. Through nuanced depictions and societal critiques, Edmonds provides a canvas that illustrates the intricate interplay between individual choices, societal values, and the evolving landscape of consumer culture in America.

This presentation delves into Ford Madox Brown’s 1854 painting Cordelia Parting from her Sisters, now housed at the Cleveland Museum of Art. A visual interpretation of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the painting serves as a critical commentary on the societal and moral landscapes of 1850s England. Madox Brown employs the Pre-Raphaelite style to communicate his fervent criticism of Victorian values. By juxtaposing elements from medieval art alongside Christian symbols and contemporary critique, Madox Brown creates a layered narrative that transcends its temporal origins. Examined through this liminal context, the painting becomes a powerful commentary and prompt for meditation on the social struggles of Madox Brown’s time. Moreover, because the painting was created during a period of political instability and under the looming specter of imperialism, Cordelia Parting from her Sisters also stands as a poignant visual representation of the artist’s protest against Victorian corruption.

In this paper, I explore the symbolism, composition, and subject matter of Cordelia to reveal not only Madox Brown’s meticulous attention to detail, but also his alignment with the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s utopian ideals that emphasize nature and integrity over colonialism and industrialization. I underscore how the moral juxtaposition, utilization of Christian motifs, and the allegorical portrayal of Cordelia can all serve as symbols of resistance against Victorian materialism. Rich details found throughout the painting contribute to a cohesive critique of figures, actions, and societal components undertaken by characters in King Lear, reinforcing Madox Brown’s rejection of prevailing Victorian values. I show the enduring relevance of Madox Brown’s messages about sacrifice, materialism, and government corruption, which ultimately serves to urge viewers to contemplate the enduring struggle between societal virtues and the vices of materialism and power.

The tradition of sewing fabric together to create a larger piece has shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of women and continues to do so today. While quilts have been made for utilitarian purposes for thousands of years, decorative quilts began gaining popularity in the 18th Century. Quilts, like any piece of work, reflect the individual who made it and the period and climate they were created in. They become the product of historical and cultural environments. In this paper, I explore a quilt titled Album Quilt from the Saint Louis Art Museum. It was made by a group of sewers called the Ladies of Baltimore and completed in 1848. Through socio-historical analysis, I discovered that this Baltimore Album Quilt was inspired by the Election of 1848. This event would have been highly publicized during the time of this piece’s creation, even in small communities. While this is not an unusual approach to researching a work of art, not much is written about Baltimore Album Quilts in this context. This piece in particular did not have much information about the work itself despite having inscriptions of those who made it on the back. Because of this, I had to use outside context and piece information together. Between sewing and quilting culture, societal gender roles, the Mexican-American War, the life of President Zachary Taylor, local politics, and the previous failed Whig elections, this paper analyzes a variety of aspects to reach the aforementioned conclusion.

The works of French nineteenth-century artist Berthe Morisot have long been of interest to art historians. However, Morisot’s body of work, her maternal body, and the productivity of the artist reproducing the body of her daughter, Julie, still demand proper attention. While many images of Julie exist, prevailing assumptions oversimplify Morisot’s motivation, attributing it solely to her female identity. Instead, I position visual representations of Julie as a body of work within the artist’s wider oeuvre to raise the following question: What does Morisot’s gaze resting upon Julie illuminate about the connections between artistic observation and childhood exploration? On the cusp of the outside world and private interior in Morisot’s works, Julie observes and engages with material objects and her environment as a means of self-discovery. Similarly, Morisot’s own attentiveness informs her artistic technique, offering insight into her identity as a woman, artist, and mother. Images of Julie serve as a wider compendium of Morisot’s reflexive observation, echoing Julie’s engagement and informing the complex triangulation in perception among herself, her daughter, and the viewer. This case study on Morisot’s Eugène Manet & His Daughter in the Garden at Bougival (1881, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) will examine how Morisot leverages her fascination with the child’s gaze—what nineteenth-century viewers conventionally perceived as a limitation—to transform the potentially hindering figure of the child into an important aid in the artist’s practice. By focusing on Morisot’s contemplative gaze resting upon Julie to draw an analogy with the child at play, the doubling in absorption between the artist and subject extends to the viewer, amplifying similarities and differences between shared narratives of observation, creativity, and problem-solving. The experience of play—as the child encounters it—guides the viewer to explore the work/play dynamic inherent in Morisot’s paintings that constitute Julie’s childhood album.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban born artist who lived in New York City during the AIDS epidemic, created works that dealt with the AIDs crisis and its effects, but his art did not have direct political positioning, or include content that could be linked to a representation of sexual identity. Rather, he appealed to universal emotions such as love, grief, and longing, in attempts to make his works less polarizing than other artists and artist groups at the time, and more personal. Rather than highlight his Cuban ethnicity, his identity and relationship with his partner as a gay man living with the virus, Gonzalez-Torres creates works that are disembodied in their representation. Works like Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), Perfect Lovers, and the billboard Untitled subtly reference, rather than represent, the loss experienced due to the AIDS crisis, and the love that existed that made these losses so much harder to grapple with.

My presentation analyzes how Firelei Báez portrays the Black body in her paintings as a tool of radical inclusivity that foregrounds the African Diaspora as an innately fluid space that actively challenges and expands notions of latinidad and Latinx identity. The limited but thorough literature that has been written about Báez, who has gained great public regard and critical acclaim in the past ten years, has fixated primarily on the artist’s engagement with memory as resistance and an evocator of shared experience that presents alternative histories through the body. This presentation will build off of ideas of alternative histories and folkloric references that are mentioned continually throughout contemporary scholarship. However, in keeping with Tatiana Flores’ critique of the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous origins of latinidad, I argue that Firelei Báez portrays the Black diasporic body to show that the borderlessness of the identity presents a profound fluidity. Through her work, Báez transforms the African diaspora into a homeland for multifaceted identities, particularly those overlapping with latinidad which has historically excluded Blackness and indigeneity. By examining her work, specifically her painting titled Untitled (Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Navti) (2021), I posit that the Black body can simultaneously contain multiple cultures, memories, histories, and even geographies that make the African diaspora a space conducive to healing and renewal. This paper will respond directly to works of art that have been largely uncovered in scholarship, analyzing the artist’s visual references, bright colors, and diverse media to expand the current body of knowledge of Báez and highlight the activist nature of her practice.

In Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, Frida Kahlo explores the double-edged sword of pain and politics. While living in Detroit in 1932 with her husband Diego Rivera, Kahlo experienced a longing for her Mexican roots while growing feelings of disdain towards the United States. Although the U.S. was suffering the lasting effects of job loss from the Great Depression, the economy turned toward mass industrialization, specifically in Detroit, the auto industry. Kahlo depicts this in her self-portrait by dividing the landscape into two almost equal parts: the left Mexico and the right the United States. Kahlo longs for an independent Mexico, untouched by the U.S. and industrialism, and this push and pull between the two countries is strongly emphasized through the division of this piece. While her portrayal of the U.S. is cold and alienated, with silvery buildings stacked against each other and little room for natural elements, she conversely captures the deteriorating state of Mexico with its natural, earthy vegetation, untouched by industrialism. Kahlo paints herself planted awkwardly in the middle, acting as the median between these two countries. During the creation of this piece, Diego Rivera was completing murals throughout the U.S. commissioned by some of America’s wealthiest families. As Rivera was building relationships with Henry Ford and other political figures through his work in the U.S., Kahlo was dealing with her first miscarriage and her separation from Mexico. The feelings of pain and discomfort are strongly symbolized in this piece, along with her political views of Mexico and the U.S. This paper explores the negative emotional effects Kahlo experienced while living in Detroit, along with her political beliefs about Mexico and the U.S. by comparing the work of Kahlo and Rivera during this time, analyzing the iconology of the piece, and examining Kahlo’s political convictions.

Amidst the social and political stagnation of the Porfiriato in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, the Mexican artist Gerardo Murillo, also known as Dr. Atl, articulated a relationship between land, politics, and artmaking that would reverberate throughout the Mexican muralist movement that emerged in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. In imaging a revolution in the decade prior to the actual revolution, Atl helped to foment a vision for spiritual and national rebirth. Art was an essential component of this vision, and Atl’s interest in creating new modes of expression appropriate to this vision led to his creation of what he called atlcolors. Atlcolors, a now-lost mixture of resins, pigments, and waxes, was meant to work on any surface—as Jose Clemente Orozco memorably wrote, “The idea was, as [Atl] told us, to have colors that would work the same for painting on paper or fabric as they would on a rock from Popocatépetl.” Though often marginalized within the historiography of Mexican modernism, Atl and his early experimentation with medium set the stage for the murals and ideas that would come later; in a way, Atl’s pigments described the unified spiritual and political front that artists would unite behind following the Revolution. This presentation aims to position Atl’s experiments within an artistic community that was eager not only for new modes of expression but also new forms of political and social existence. Atl’s political ideas—spiritual rather than practical, and ultimately fascist—were able to coexist alongside other radically different ideas about revolution because of a common interest in articulating a new model of Mexican national culture through artistic experimentation.

The discourse surrounding the art of Ana Mendieta is fixated with the themes of Santería, an Afro-Cuban syncretic religion, in her work. I contend that Catholic imagery in her art has not been adequately acknowledged or engaged with. Mendieta heard of Santería as a child while growing up in Cuba, but she was never witness to or participant in any of its rituals. Conversely, Catholicism followed her from Havana, Cuba to Dubuque, Iowa, and was even the vehicle of her exodus to the United States through Operation Peter Pan, a program of the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami. During her time in Mexico as an undergraduate archaeology student, and over the many summers she spent in Oaxaca, Mendieta encountered Catholicism in practice and in art. Catholic symbolism can be traced as a through line in her work, which explored themes of purifying blood, self-sacrifice, rebirth, and regeneration. Although Mendieta wrote many times about Santería and its influence on her art, I pose that Santería has been overemphasized in critical analysis of her work because the art historical hegemony sees it as exotic and “other”. To pull on this thread, woven throughout her body of work, is to create a clearer understanding of the varied meanings of her art. This process of re-examination and recontextualization would also provide a deeper, more rich understanding of the meanings Catholic imagery can create in the contemporary art world. How then do we begin to untie a tangled web of exoticization and mythologization? In many ways, Mendieta has been reduced to one of her silhouettes: a schematic form, the fuzzy outline of an artist and her practice but ultimately lacking depth or dimension. Our task now is to fill in the edges.

Tarsila do Amaral’s oeuvre in the modernist landscape was defined by its fusion of international and local Brazilian influences. For this, she has been dubbed an Anthropophagist – a cannibal of European modernism –consuming the Western styles she desires for her work, and abandoning the rest in favor of Latin American/indigenous muses. From now forward, I will refer to her as Tarsila, as she is iconically called in Brazil. While Tarsila’s Brazilian roots and inspirations contribute to a broader understanding of international modernism, her oil painting A Negra (1923) raises questions of artistic exploitation. Since published analyses of this object are split between sentiments of empowerment and visibility or exoticism and objectification, several dimensions of formal and critical analyses will be necessary to determine whether A Negra should be considered a liberated triumph within the modernist canon or another exhausted example of European profiteering off of the Black body. Immediately, I come forth to admit that I do not yet have a solution to this question, but I intend to grapple with it through explorations of two different binaries: Artist vs. Model and Artist vs. Canon. All too often are the subjects of “exotic” portraits neglected, and I intend to offer several theories for Tarsila’s relationship with the sitter. In addition, it is worth noting the efforts of Tarsila to be included in a white, male canon of modern art, along with curatorial efforts in the contemporary age made in her honor.

In Georges de La Tour’s baroque work The Fortune Teller, the story seems to be a classic: a naïve wealthy young man ventures into risky mixed company, and is the unsuspecting victim of robbery and other vices. The straightforward story is challenged, however, by one tiny detail: the young man’s filthy fingernails, not fitting of a man of his supposed standing. I wish to unpack the moral and symbolistic implications of this intentional detail placed by de La Tour. My argument is that the naïve young victim is really a cheat himself, and not simply a middle-class artisan. Proof of the young man’s deception is found in his suspicious body language, as according to French etiquette books of the era, dress, and the presence of the unkempt fingernails, which are also found on other cheats of de La Tour’s oeuvre completed around the same time in the mid-1630s. I will also address the effects of the connections the artist had to the northern Utrecht School, his realist inclinations as a Caravaggisti, and the impact of northern idealist labor prints on the artist’s subject matter and moral purpose of the painting.

Hindu cosmology is replete with stories and images that seek to dissolve the boundaries between opposites, combining everything from the male and female to the human and the bestial. Though this trend finds a philosophical and cosmological basis in numerous Hindu schools of thought, of all the branches, Advaita Vedanta is the most popular. Advaita, literally meaning nondual, argues that every individual object or person is an emanation of the same ultimate divine principle known as Brahman. Though the material realm may appear individuated and separate, all things can in truth be linked back to Brahman. My project seeks to explore the aesthetics of nondualism in Indian art and architecture, attempting to identify how artists and religious leaders attempted to represent the ultimate unity of the world through fundamentally individuated forms and materials. This will be achieved through a comparative analysis of three principal deities as they are represented in carvings and temples; Ardhanarishwara, the half-male, half-female synthesis of Shiva and Parvati; Narasimha, the half-man, half-lion avatar of Vishnu; and Harihara, the synthesis of Shiva and Vishnu, the two primary godheads of Hinduism. The project will examine how each of the deities are represented visually and the precise formal choices artists and religious leaders made in order to represent the concept of advaita. Art historical research and formal analyses will be accompanied by primary literature such as poetry and Hindu philosophy so as to further clarify the aesthetic choices necessary to represent a cosmology as elusive as nondualism. In particular, I hope to explain how spatial relationships between related artworks in temples dedicated to these deities and the false visual dichotomies used to represent them gesture towards the ultimate unity of all things through Brahman.

The Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, set a standard for the subject matter of European paintings. Historical events, religious scenes, and or well-known stories from Greco-Roman mythology were traditionally deemed the most important followed by portraits of significant people. Genre scenes, landscapes, animal, and still life paintings had less prestige. Despite this background, paintings from the Netherlands and Flanders or Belgium, known as Lowland countries, excelled in these “lesser” subjects. In Japan, as the Portuguese traders and Spanish Jesuits were expelled because Catholic influence was increasingly believed to be subversive to the authority of the Shogun, William Adams and other members of the Dutch owned East India Company were permitted to stay as the only foreigners in Japan between 1603 and 1868. Inevitably, there was an exchange of ideas and culture, one of which were Dutch landscapes. This resulted in a category of Japanese art known as Akita Ranga; landscapes painted by Japanese artists in the style of Dutch landscapes and using European practices such linear perspective.

This talk illustrates the minimally explored connection between one of Japan’s most famous artists, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), and the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting through a close analysis of Hokusai’s bird and flower prints (kacho-e). The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting was first published in China in 1679 and grew to be one of the most popular painting manuals in China and Japan in the 18th century. The influence this mass-produced and block printed Chinese painting manual had on one of Japan’s premier artists is important to understanding cross-cultural exchange between China and Japan in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a time when Japan’s doors were closed to outside influence. Despite the shogunate’s attempts to close off Japan to both citizens and non-citizens, Katsushika Hokusai was among many in Japan who wanted to explore the world beyond the closed borders, and he did so through various texts he had access to that described and illustrated the world.

In 2023, Harvard Art Museum opened a temporary exhibition titled Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade. It focuses on the Opium wars of 1839-1860, two significant conflicts between China and Britain fought over imbalanced commercial and political treaties, and explores its lasting impacts on Chinese society, American reception of Chinese immigrants, the contemporary American opioid crisis, and America’s growing appetite for Chinese art. This paper aims to situate this exhibition in a longer history of American collecting of Chinese art dating from the 19th century and identifies several essential principles that guided these material encounters in the past that remain visible today. Proposed by French philosopher Michael Foucault in The Order of Things (1966), an episteme is an unconscious set of relationships that produce knowledge about a culture. American author Eilean Hooper-Greenhill adapts this concept to examine the often-invisible epistemological principles that create museum exhibitions. Thinking through these implications, this paper identifies three fixations of 19th century collections that were crucial to forming American acquisition habits of Chinese objects and produced American epistemes about China that isolated and prioritized limited and static knowledge. I categorize these three fixations as: 1) colonial trade and network expansion, 2) self-appointed civilizing missions, and 3) integration of Chinese art into existing Euroamerican art historical frameworks. These three approaches together gave rise to epistemic knowledge still present in contemporary curatorial practices which reproduce and perpetuate flawed and biased colonial imaginations of China and Chinese culture.

Violence was an ever-present threat for Chinese people in 1880s California. Garish, racist caricatures of Chinese people and culture were visible everywhere. When the federal government banned Chinese immigration in 1882 with the Exclusion Act, the specter of deportation joined disenfranchisement, demonization, and danger as the zeitgeist for Chinese American people. This is the unspoken background for the early art of Theodore Wores, a young painter who had trained in Munich but wanted to paint the “picturesque” streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown in a realistic style. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, his paintings were published in national newspapers and sold to collectors all over the US and Europe. While he solidified his position as a world-renowned artist, his subjects remained nameless– experiencing discrimination, displacement, and violence. This paper analyzes several of Wores’ paintings, placing them in their historical, political, and social context. I argue that Wores’ insidious and implicit racism, which Orientalizes, Others, and isolates, was the socially palatable corollary to the explicit and violent imagery often associated with the period. Rather than subvert the racist ideas of his day, his work dismisses the pain and oppression faced by his subjects, at a time when his buyers held positions of power and privilege and benefited financially, politically, and personally from colonial projects. For his buyers, Wores paints a comfortable world of exotic fantasy in a façade of reality, ultimately reinforcing hegemonic ideas of modernism and white supremacy.

Despite being coined “Father of Cartoons”, there is minimal scholarship on the effect Feng Zikai’s cartoons had on Shanghai since the 1930s. This paper examines Feng Zikai’s use of minimal cartoons to critique colonial influence on Shanghai’s cultural identity, with the greater message of promoting unity among its citizens. Analyzing the formal elements used in several of his cartoons, this paper demonstrates his perspective on foreign oppression and the necessity for Chinese citizens to cooperate with one another to bolster cultural self-preservation. His use of everyday foreign objects and daily obstacles instilled by colonial powers is often featured in his cartoons. His ambition to discuss everyday colonial oppression became a large motivator as the subjects of his cartoons. There are many examples of where Feng Zikai used cartoons to encourage the public to work together and strengthen their communities, ultimately pursuing the goal of thwarting the underpinnings of the city’s colonial social infrastructure. His cartoons aim to uncover the systemic colonial oppression and he hoped that they would spread awareness of the unjust colonial control motivating Chinese citizens to work together to fight against the colonial status quo. Ultimately his cartoons set him in a position against the modernized city by representing the unity necessary among people to fight against the colonial undercurrents and to fundamentally take control of Shanghai from the foreign tyrants.

In this paper, I argue that prior to the conscious efforts of Nilima Sheikh and her contemporaries, the concept of the “Indian woman artist” did not exist in the cultural lexicon of the art world. Without Sheikh’s work and advocacy, explicitly feminist Indian art would not be where it is today. I begin by introducing Sheikh and analyzing her most famous series, When Champa Grew Up, which chronicles the life and death of a woman murdered by her husband and his family. I discuss the series’ symbolism and impact, as well as the way that Sheikh’s use of traditional South Asian materials and techniques enhances the meaning of her work, both as a rejection of European colonialism and as an assertion of female agency. I explore how these factors make Sheikh’s work so powerful and radical. In addition to furthering the messages of the Indian women’s movement, Sheikh’s work also played a crucial role in the creation of the gendered concept of the “Indian woman artist.” In the second half of my paper, I discuss Sheikh’s relationship with three other female artists: Nalini Malani, Madhavi Parekh, and Arpita Singh. In the 1980s, the four women organized one of the first Indian exhibitions to explicitly center female artists. This exhibition introduced the concept of a distinct “Indian woman artist” to the global art world. I conclude by discussing Indian woman artists post-1980s, focusing on the ways that their art has engaged with gender-based issues in India. These women built upon the foundation laid by Sheikh and her contemporaries to establish explicitly feminist Indian art.

A somewhat niche figure in Western knowledge of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Zhixin was posthumously an essential propaganda symbol in Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to appease the Chinese populace during the Boluan Fanzheng period in the 1980s. The post-Mao reconstruction of Chinese society spawned the Scar Art movement, in which artists reckoned with the brutal reality of the repressive period through their work. As a famous martyr, Zhang Zhixin was a frequent muse in Cultural Revolution-themed artworks. However, beyond serving as a propaganda tool and symbol of resistance, she was also a figure on which post-Mao Chinese gender politics was projected. Mao’s state feminist policy and the creation of de-gendered and desexualized “Iron Women” have been well documented in contemporary studies of Chinese feminist history. However, few connections have been made between the emergence of neo-traditionalist positions on gender roles under Deng and the depiction of women in Scar Art by male artists. By recounting the history of women’s gender roles and practices from early 20^th century China to the modern day, I will illustrate the tumultuous transformation of women’s gender in China and an ensuing discourse reflected in two Scar Art pieces: which aspects of femininity- modesty or eroticism- constituted an ideal, traditional Chinese woman?

For more than 175 years the Smithsonian Institution has been dedicated to the preservation of America’s cultural heritage and cultural and scientific collaboration worldwide. This mission took on a new urgency after the 2010 Haiti earthquake when Corine Wegener teamed up with Smithsonian staff and other partners to deploy a cultural heritage disaster response team that evolved into the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI). Since then, Wegener and her team have deployed around the world helping with training, equipping, and rescue efforts for response to both natural and human-caused disasters. In this special keynote lecture, Wegener will describe her journey from art museum curator to defender of cultural heritage in places like Iraq, Syria, Nepal, and Ukraine and give an update on the Smithsonian’s partnership with the U.S. Army to train the next generation of Monuments Men and Women.