Episode 1:
curating history and race
“Over the last few years in writing and speaking and thinking about the Saint Louis Portrait of a Young Woman, I found myself in this unsettled place on the boundaries of this abyss between identification and recognition, opacity and unknowability. And what I found is that a study of a Portrait of a Young Woman explores the potentialities of nontraditional archives and methodologies when transatlantic art histories imbricate with Black representation.”
In this episode
Erica Moiah James introduces the 18th-century pastel Portrait of a Young Woman, shares her experience first encountering the work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and explains how she has tackled the process of unravelling this woman’s identity. She speaks with Judith Mann, the senior curator of European art to 1800 at SLAM, discussing the acquisition of the work, its provenance, its role within the collection, and the ways in which the museum thinks about curating history and race through the care and exhibition of this portrait. Erica and Judy explore what it means to name an individual who has historically been unnamed in the history of Western art and how museums and publics might attend to the presence of Black and Brown people in historical images.
TRANSCRIPT
Judith Mann is Senior Curator, European Art to 1800, at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Her work focuses on Italian artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has organized international loan exhibitions on 16th and 17th-century art. These include exhibitions on Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Federico Barocci, and paintings on stone between 1530 and 1800, the first major exhibition to examine this underappreciated aspect of early modern visual culture. She is currently preparing an exhibition on the baroque painter Guercino with her colleague Clare Kobasa. Scheduled for the fall of 2027, it will examine how the artist approached the representation of narrative subjects.
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