Denise Murrell will discuss works of art from the Posing Modernity exhibitions in New York and Paris, with a focus on paintings, photographic portraits, and sculpture by Manet, Degas, Bazille, Nadar, and Cordier, among others. She will make observations about the exhibitions’ implications for the restoration of overlooked or obliterated narratives to art history, and specifically for the development of an iconographic lineage for the representation of the African Diasporan presence in nineteenth-century art. She will briefly consider the legacy of specific works of nineteenth-century art for early twentieth-century modernists from the School of Paris and the Harlem Renaissance. She will conclude with some “first thoughts” on the project’s implications for curatorial practice in this current moment of renewed focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in art history.

Open to Boston College faculty, staff, and students. Register at https://tinyurl.com/y2xgkxse.

Denise Murrell is an associate curator of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She received a PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014.  She was the curator of the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (October 2018–February 2019) at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, and the author of its catalogue, as the Wallach’s Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar (2014–19). She was a co-curator of the exhibition’s expansion at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Black Model from Géricault to Matisse and a guest lecturer for its final tour, as The Black Model from Géricault to Picasso, at the Memorial ACTe in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Murrell previously received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She taught art history at Columbia University in New York and Paris.