Dr. Temi Odumosu, an interdisciplinary scholar and curator with a teaching focus on critical and creative approaches to understanding information technology’s role within society, gives a free, online lecture as part of the Spring 2022 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series. In her talk, Odumosu explores what appears, what is lost, and what could be reimagined in the process of researching African and African-descendant people in the history of art. The focus is a portrait from the Danish colonial archive, representing a young woman called Justina Antoine. She was an Afro-Caribbean nanny to the Marstrand family, whose presence in the genre of Danish portraiture is rare. Her representation as a figure of interest in Danish art raises critical questions about the ways in which Black people are visualized as evidence of colonial encounters. Using the wider cultural archive to complicate our relationship to, and understanding of, her imaging, the talk reconsiders how we come to look at the past, and what we do in/with those moments of contact. 

Registration is required.

Dr. Temi Odumosu is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at University of Washington Information School. She is author of the book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017). Her research and curatorial interests include colonial visual cultures, archives and archival praxis, post memorial art and performance, digitization of cultural heritage, and ethics-of-care in representation. Overall, she is focused on the multitude of ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. She is currently a member of the research network The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories. 

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.