Gwendolyn

See Dr. Shaw on the new PBS series

"Art Through Time"

now streaming online - and on TV in February!

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania where she also serves as Director of the Program in Visual Studies. Dr. Shaw received her PhD from Stanford and was an assistant professor at Harvard for five years before coming to the Penn in 2005.  Her research and teaching focus on the art and material culture of the New World; from Moses Williams to Kara Walker; from Canada to the Caribbean to Cape Horn; and from Taos to Tahiti.  She is interested in the role that visual culture plays in the conflicting histories that have arisen since the initial confluence of cultures that occurred when Columbus landed on the Island of Hispaniola in 1492.

NEW: Visit my Blog! 

http://gwendolynduboisshaw.blogspot.com/

Areas of Research

Dr. Shaw's first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, was published by Duke University Press in the winter of 2004.  Her second project, a museum exhibition and catalog, titled Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006) was organized with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts before traveling to the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington and the Long Beach Art Museum in California.  Currently she is developing a book about visual culture and apocryphal history.

   2010 Lectures

• "The Ideal Pencil: Poetry, Portraiture, and Prejudice," lecture accompanying the exhibition, The Author's Portrait
  Jan. 22-July 5, 2010
  Main Gallery Princeton University Firestone Library, January 2010.
• University of Pennsylvania, Founder's Day Symposium, "Forbidden Knowledge: Science, Art and Censorship," January 15, 2010
• "To Know to Know to Love Her So: Sargent Johnson, Gertrude Stein and Motherless Moderns," University of Pennsylvania, History of Art Colloquium, February 5, 2010.
• "Postracial America" Lecture Series, Lehigh University, February 25, 2010
  
• "The New Negress: Kara Walker Does Josephine Baker." Autobiography/Performance/Identity
  A Symposium on African American and African Diasporan Women in the Visual ArtsUniversity of Maryland, March 5 & 6 2010
• Trauma Studies Conference, Robert Penn Warren Center, Vanderbilt University, March 18 & 19, 2010.
  
• Savannah College of Art and Design, April 28, 2010