By exploring ways in which women artists managed to present nude figures, male and female, despite institutional barriers, this lecture takes gender analysis beyond the study of biography. The core examples are works by Lavinia Fontana (1604-13) and Angelica Kauffman (1780).

The most famous work of Andean art in the world is an enigmatic tunic in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Thought to be the only surviving royal vestment of the Inca Empire, it has spawned controversial theories that its intricate patterns are a long-lost writing system. For over a decade, Andrew James Hamilton has conducted careful physical studies of this rare, royal, and radiant object. In this talk, he will offer an entirely new understanding of the familiar object by piecing together its remarkable life history: from its arduous facture some 500 years ago, to its reappearance in the mid-twentieth century, and its cultural significance in the present day. Sharing insights from his new book of the same name, published by Princeton University Press in 2024, Hamilton reveals for the first time that the extraordinary textile is an unfinished masterpiece that was likely being woven by two women on the eve of the Spanish invasion. An eyewitness to the horrors of colonialism and a testament to the highest echelon of Indigenous art of the Americas, the tunic has earned an important place in the canon of art history.

Further details to be announced.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Franciscan friars launched a massive evangelical campaign that attempted to convert the Yucatán Peninsula’s Maya population to orthodox Catholicism. Monumental painted images formed the literal, figurative, and ideological backdrop of this ambitious mission, as they enlivened the walls of the architectural complexes that hosted the conversion effort. Maya muralists were tasked with these artistic commissions, resulting in a sizeable corpus of Indigenous-produced artworks that, until recently, has not received scholarly attention. This talk will illuminate the material and iconographical choices Maya artists made when painting these immense walls, choices that reveal the agentic role Indigenous neophytes actively played in the creation of localized Latin American Catholicism. 

Victoria Rovine, Professor of African Art History; Director of Carolina Public Humanities, UNC- Chapel Hill

Christopher L. Richards, Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Brooklyn College, NY

Moderated by Álvaro Luís Lima, Assistant Professor of African Art History, School of Art + Art History, UF

Further details to be announced.