Professor History of Art
Contact
Education
Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
B.A., Harvard University. Fine Arts/Visual & Environmental Studies (studio arts)
About
On sabbatical leave 2024-25.
My research interests are 19th- and 20th-century art, design, and visual culture in Europe, and 20th-century art in the U.S. My publications have explored topics ranging from how African material culture was appropriated by artists and thinkers based in Europe and the U.S., to how female collaborators have been erased from the histories of European modernism.
I’m also a curator and museum educator. In 2017, I was co-curator of Matisse in the Studio (MFA Boston and Royal Academy, London) with Helen Burnham and Ann Dumas. I served on the curatorial committee for Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa Oceania and the Americas at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, 2020. A brief intro to that exhibition is here.
At Wheaton, I teach courses ranging from 100-levels (Introduction to Modern Art in Europe, Design History and Theory, Introduction to Photography) to 300-level seminars (Race and Place in Art History, Cultural Appropriation in a Postcolonial Context). My courses are cross-listed with Design, African, African American Diaspora Studies, and Film and New Media Studies. Whenever possible, coursework features object study and/or archival materials, to give students opportunities to conduct in-depth arts and humanities research with primary materials. Student research and writing often lead to digital publications.
I was recently Director of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities (Fall 2022-Spring 2024). More info about our programming exploring the theme Whose Normal? can be found here.
Publications
Books
Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Matisse in the Studio. Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2017.
Co-editor and author of two chapters.
Work in Progress
Co-author with Claudine Grammont. Henri Matisse, Paris: Les éditions Citadelles et Mazenod, forthcoming, 2025.
Book Chapters and Articles
“Bathers Unmoored,” in Simon Kelly, ed. Matisse and the Sea. Saint Louis Art Museum, in association with Hirmer and the University of Chicago Press, 2024.
“Lydia Delectorskaya and the Making of Matisse,” and “Woman in Blue,” in Matisse in the 1930s, ed. Cécile Debray, Claudine Grammont and Matthew Affron, exh. cat. Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Paris, Musée d’Orsay; Nice, Musée Matisse; Réunion des musées nationaux, 2022.
“Migrating Objects: From Maker to Museum,” in Greene, Vivien, ed. Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Guggenheim Foundation, Italy, 2020.
—An edited version of this essay was published as “Africa and Oceania in Venice,” in Vail, Karole, Vivien Greene, eds. Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa. Venice: Marsilio Editori/Guggenheim Foundation, 2019.
“Africa and Eros in Matisse’s Sculpture,” in Gianfreda, Sandra, Claudine Grammont, eds. Matisse: Metamorphoses. Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich/Scheidegger & Spiess, 2019.
“American Responses to Matisse’s Nudes,” in Stavitsky, Gail, ed. Matisse and American Art. Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 2017.
“Peindre les relations entre les objets,” in Pulvenis de Séligny, Marie-Thérèse, ed. Henri Matisse: Une palette d’objets. Musée Matisse, Nice, Editions Artlys, 2016.
“Escultura en los orígenes de la differencia: Matisse y Picasso en 1907” in Arte Moderno: Ideas y conceptos. Madrid: Fundación Cultural, Mapfre Vida, 2008.
“Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem: The Queer Performance of Nugent’s Salome (1930),” Art Journal 57:3 (Fall 1998): 22-28.
Reviews, Entries, Podcasts
“The ‘Black Art’ Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents by Joshua Cohen,” Book Review, The Burlington Magazine 163 (July 2021): 644-646.
Essay Entries (15) in Grammont, Claudine, ed. Tout Matisse. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2018.
Episode No. 286 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast with Tyler Green, April 2017
“Matisse’s Le Cauchemar de l’Eléphant Blanc,” Providence RISD Museum, Manual: A Journal About Art and its Making 3 (2014): 58-59.
“Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,” (exhibition review) in Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 8:1 (Spring 2009).
“The Joy of Life, The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 by Margaret Werth,” Book Review, Modernism/modernity 11:3 (September 2004): 596-598.
“Emile-Antoine Bourdelle,” entry for Encyclopedia of Sculpture, ed. Antonia Boström. New York and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.
Digital Projects/Media and Outreach
Founder, Editor and Faculty Advisor, ARTHive Revue, 2011–
Introduction to the Migrating Objects exhibition, and Migrating Objects In focus #1 segment the Peggy Guggenheim Collection site, 2020
Interview for Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy, London France 24 TV, 2017
Editor, Critical Concepts in Art History, For Students By Students, 2015
RISD Museum: “Matisse, Still Life with Lemons (Whose Forms Correspond To a Drawing of a Black Vase upon the Wall)” 2014. Channel 18.
Watson Conversations, 2011—
Lectures
Invited Lectures
“Erasing Labor: Lydia Delectorskaya and the Making of Matisse,” Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, December 2021.
“Myths, Muses, and Surrealism” online lecture series (3) for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Italy, May 2021
“Rethinking Primitivism with Migrating Objects,” online Lecture for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Italy, December 2020
“Dealing with Difference: Curating Cultural Appropriation,” Paris College of Arts, Paris, February 2018
“The Artist’s Studio as a Laboratory for Ideas,” Parsons Paris, The New School, Paris, November 2017
“Matisse’s Faces: A Portrait is a Quarrel,” Royal Academy, London, October 2017. Listen.
“Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive,” Dartmouth College Department of Art History, October 2014, and Saint Anselm College, February 2014.
“Henri/Henriette: Matisse’s Variations on a Model,” RISD Museum, Providence, 2011. [Given on occasion of the exhibition “Changing Poses: The Artists’s Model”]
“‘I Paint the Differences Between Things’”: Matisse, Photography, and African Sculpture,” Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011. [Selected for the Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture for emerging art historians].
“Henri Matisse, Serial Portraitist,” Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, 2008. [Given on occasion of the exhibition “Paris Portraits”]
“The Past as Future: Sculpting at the Origins of Difference, Matisse and Picasso, 1906-1908,” Instituto Cultura, Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, 2007
Conferences and Panels/Speaker
“Matisse, the Model & the Studio,” with Claudine Grammont and Matthew Affron, The Irma and Herbert Barness Endowed Lecture, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2022. Watch.
“Provocations in Art: Cultural Appropriations,” with Yinka Shonibare and Wessie Ling, Royal Academy, London, September 2017
“Matisse and his Palette of Objects,” Looking at Matisse Today: A Symposium, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, October 2016.
“Digital Art History: Opportunities to Engage,” Panel: A Digital Publications Future, CAA, New York, 2015
“Matisse and the Anti-Commodity Mystique of African Sculpture,” Panel: Antimodernism(s) in French Art and Culture, 1890-1914, CAA, Chicago, 2014
“Cracking the Da Vinci Code at the Louvre,” Panel: A Novel Approach: The Fusion of Art History and Historical Fiction, CAA, Boston, 2006
“Matisse, the Maghreb, and the Model,” Panel: Oriental Erotics, CAA, Philadelphia, 2002
“The Primitivism of Matisse’s Sculpted Nudes,” Metropolitan Museum Research Fellows Colloquium, New York, 2001
“Documents and Les Noirs: The Representation of Race in a Surrealist Journal.” New Scholars/New Ideas Symposium, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2000
“The Victorian Mad Woman Confined: Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond’s Photographs of the Insane,” History of Photography Group Symposium, Manhattanville College, New York, 1997
“Richard Bruce Nugent’s Salome (1930): The Spectacle of Homosexuality in the Harlem Renaissance,” CAA, Boston, 1996
Panels and Conferences/Organization
Pass the Mic! Create. Curate. Care (lead organizer and moderator) featuring 13 artists, activists, and curators. 2-day online conference, October 2021
Brick by Brick: Building Anti-Racist Arts Organizations (organizer and moderator), with Anita Bateman, Suzanne Blier, Larry Ossei-Mensah, and Jasmine Wahi, Wheaton College History of Art online conference, April 2021
“The Arts in Providence: Creating Community,” (lead organizer and moderator) with Lynne Harlowe, Daniel Schleifer, and Lynne McCormack, 2013
“Land Reformations,” Moderator with exhibiting artists for Sitelines, Wheaton’s Beard and Weil Galleries, 2011
Courses and Students
Courses
Seminars
Art and Race: Africa in Modern France (1830-1930)
The Art of Writing About Art (First Year Seminar)
What is Art For? (First Year Seminar, taught with two colleagues from Visual Arts and Theatre)
Curating Immigration Histories (curatorial practicum with Rhode Island Historical Society, interrupted by Covid)
Matisse and the Methods of Art History (Research Methods)
Senior capstone seminars (open to non-majors with permission):
The Limits of Visibility and the Politics of Representation (curatorial practicum)
Cultural Appropriation in a Postcolonial Context
Race and Place in Art History
Art History Today: A Critical Assessment
Lecture Courses
ARTH 198/DES 198, Introduction to Design History and Theory
ARTH 142, Introduction to Photography
ARTH 122 Introduction to Modern Art in Europe
ARTH 240, Arts of the Avant Gardes in France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, 1900-1945
ARTH 200, Introduction to Contemporary Art and Design
ARTH 250, Modernism and Mass Culture in France, 1848-1914
ARTH 257, Photography as Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century
ARTH 398, Postwar & Contemporary Art and Design Since 1945
Student Projects
Founder and Faculty Advisor, ARTHive Revue (student-run platform for art and culture essays)
Pass the Mic! Create. Curate. Care. An online resource for the October 2021 Wheaton conference, focusing on social justice and the visual arts. Collaboration with Emily Gray and Liv Doherty (Class of 2022)
Critical Concepts in Art History: For Students, By Students A project with seminar students in “Art History Today: A Critical Assessment,” Spring 2015 http://art-history-concepts.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/
Watson Conversations, 2011—Inaugurated a digital platform for students to develop interpretative podcasts for objects in Wheaton’s Permanent Collection. With students in Art of the Avant-Gardes, Spring 2011, and Photography as Knowledge, Spring 2013
Dania Piscetta, “‘All the Splendors of the Chinese Masters:’ Henri Matisse’s Interpretation of Chinese Painting and Decorative Arts,” Advisor, Honors Thesis (2011)
Research Interests
My first book was an attempt to reassess early 20th-century modernist “primitivism” in France though one its primary artists. Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive (Yale University Press, 2014) examines the artist’s conceptual reliance on figural sculpture made by unrecorded makers from West and Central Africa, in conjunction with erotic and ethnographic photography. I propose several close readings of Matisse’s appropriations from nude photography and African sculpture in the artists’s early work (roughly 1906-1914). I argued for the many roles played by these two resources in Matisse’s attempts to refigure the European tradition of the nude, and the dominant narratives of identity that tradition was meant to support. The project disputed the notion that Matisse—primarily known as a painter—was only a sculptor on the side, by demonstrating how his sculptures’ nuanced play with constructions of race and gender is, in fact, a key to understanding the Parisian avant-garde’s larger fascination with cultural and sexual origins. It also seeks to explain the meaningful relationships, productively mined by Matisse, between mass cultural nudes and African, sculpted ones.
The book deals with topics as diverse as the reception, understanding, and historiography of African sculpture in early twentieth-century France; the politics embedded in the visual culture of French colonialism; and the impact of non-elite forms of image-making (commercial photography and the history of mechanical reproduction) on the fine arts. Some of the ideas from this book served as the basis for the 2019-2020 Matisse: Metamorphosis exhibition at the Kunsthaus, Zürich, and Musée Matisse.
I conceived and co-curated the Matisse in the Studio (loan exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Royal Academy London 2017). With Helen Burnham, I edited and authored half of the accompanying catalog, the first book in English to explore the essential role that Matisse’s personal collection of objects played in his studio practice. Our research revealed the range of international resources informing Matisse’s work in all media. We examined makers and traditions such as North African textiles, Algerian metalwork, Samoan barkcloths, while critically considering the broader ethical implications of European appropriation in colonialist contexts.
I was co-curator for Migrating Objects, Arts of Africa, Oceanic and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 2020, as well as a contributor to the exhibition catalog. My essay examined Guggenheim’s African and Oceanic collecting choices in the 1960s in the context of modernist primitivism, proposing how her selections of Baga or Kota sculpture strategically echoed the preferences of Picasso and other artists from earlier that century.
A more recent essay “Lydia Delectorskaya and the Making of Matisse” (2022) for the Matisse in the 1930s exhibition book attempts to uncover the concrete material labors Delectorskaya contributed as Matisse’s studio assistant, and how their collaboration impacted works in which she appears as model.
Although my published work is primarily focused on art made in Europe and the U.S. (1880-1960), my approach is transnational and transhistorical. I try to understand the roles visual culture, design and technology play in shaping points of contact across cultural boundaries, real or imagined.
Department(s)
Film and New Media
Visual Art and History of Art
Program(s)
African, African American, Diaspora Studies
Design
Film and New Media Studies
History of Art
Women’s and Gender Studies
Office
Watson 144
Hours
Fall 2024 and Spring 2025: On sabbatical research leave.