Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Shaw received her PhD from Stanford and was an assistant professor at Harvard for five years before coming to the Penn in 2005. She is the Visual Arts Editor for Transition  and an independent curator.

Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed

at the

The American Folk Art Museum in New York City

January 24-May 26, 2013

Dr. Shaw has contributed an essay to the catalog for this exhibition, which is the first solo show for William Matthew Prior.

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The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania will be host to a symposium organized by Dr. Shaw titled, Polo S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas.  In 1936 and 1943, the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García made two related drawings both of which depict the continent of South America from a southern perspective. With the cardinal direction of “Polo S” written across the top of the continent, the artist implored his modernist contemporaries in the Southern Cone to reconsider their perspective on the geographic location of the contemporary avant garde impulse. By invoking Torres Garcíaʼs radical move, this international and interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an exploration of the theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective problems encountered by scholars who are currently working on the visual and material culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. It is therefore an attempt to identify the shared challenges that researching and writing about objects produced in these locations prior to 1850 might present in a moment of de-centered intellectual discourse, not unlike the onehat Torres García critiqued in the middle of the last century.

Schedule:

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Friday, April 13, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

3:30pm - 5:00pm

Keynote:

Marcus Wood, University of Sussex "Exploding Archives: Slavery in the Americas and the Limits of Recoverability, Some Thoughts Outside the Box"

5:00pm - 7:00pm, Reception, Arthur Ross Gallery, 34th Street, Inside the Fisher
Fine Arts Library.

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Saturday, April 14, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

9:00am - 9:30am: COFFEE

9:30am - 11:00am: SESSION ONE

Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"Asia and the New World: Global Exchange and Artistic Influence in the Colonial Americas"

Mónica Domínguez Torres, University of Delaware
"Visualizing the Americas Upside Down and Inside Out: The Indigenous Subject as Agent"

11:00am - 11:15am: COFFEE

11:15am - 1:00pm: SESSION TWO

Regina Root, College of William & Mary
"Beautiful Fragments:  Women, Space and Presence in Postcolonial Argentina"

Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania
"Pancho Fierro and the Color of Elegance in Nineteenth-Century Lima, Peru."

1:00pm - 2:30pm: LUNCH

2:30pm - 4:30pm SESSION THREE

Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia
"The High Price of Virginian Luxuries"

Charmaine Nelson, McGill University
"Sugar Cane, Slaves and Ships: Nineteenth-century Landscape Art as Pro-Slavery Discourse"

Amanda Bagneris, Tulane University
"Ambiguous Bodies and the Reading of Race in the Paintings of Agostino Brunias"

4:30pm - 6:00pm: RECEPTION

*****

The symposium is funded by grants from the University of Pennsylvania’s Mellon
Initiative for Cross-Cultural Contacts and the Terra Foundation for American
Art and is supported by the History of Art Department, Africana Studies, Latin
American and Latino Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/events/2012-04-13/polo-s-reorienting-visual-culture-early-americas


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.  

Dr. Shaw recently completed a book manuscript titled, Strictly a Negro Art: Biography and Belief in the Work of Sargent Johnson.

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SAMBA SESSÃO: AFRO-BRAZILIAN ART AND FILM

ARTHUR ROSS GALLERY
University of Pennsylvania  |  220 South 34th Street  |  Philadelphia, PA inside the Fisher Fine Arts Library Building 

www.upenn.edu/ARG

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Transition is a forum for creative expression from and about the African Diaspora.  Dr. Shaw joined the team at Transition as its first visual arts editor in summer 2012 .  

Many of the artists featured in Transition109 "Persona" make their livings making themselves up—Renée Stout buying new potions for her “shop” as the root worker Madam Ching, or Rashaad Newsome drawing on “the equalizing force of sampling” to create his own language and title in the heraldic tradition. But even for these performance artists, persona shades into personality, and their theatrics don’t seem so different from the daily wardrobe decisions of metalheads in Botswana, or, at the other end of the spectrum, the highly tuned persona, personality, and apotheosis of personhood that is Oprah herself. As Ms. Winfrey might say, you are your hardest role yet. The craft of the self is unmasked in this issue, revealing the sleight of hand at play in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous words: “We wear the mask.” There’s a special ring to it in the African diaspora.

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This fall, Dr. Shaw and Penn Alumni Travel took a fantastic trip to Spain from October 18-28, 2012!  To promote the trip, Dr. Shaw participated in a webinar, outlining the itinerary and answering travelers questions. Her blog entry on the trip may be found at Frankly Penn.

In June 2013, Dr. Shaw will serve as the host for another Penn Alumni Travel tour to Paris and Normandy.

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See Dr. Shaw on the PBS series Art Through Time, look for episode 13 "Conflict and Resistance," now streaming online.