Race-ing Art History:Contemporary Reflections on

the Art Historical Canon

Yinka Shonibare

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, 1748.

Yinka Shonibare, Mr. and Mrs.

Andrews without their Heads, 1998.

Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews,

1748.

Yinka Shonibare, The Swing

(after Fragonard), 2001.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing,

1766.

Kehinde Wiley

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon

Crossing the Alps, 1800.

Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the

Army Over the Alps, 2005.

Peter Paul Rubens, Equestrian

Portrait of King Philip II of Spain,

c. 1635.

Wiley, Equestrian Portrait of King Philip

II, 2009.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique

Ingres, Napoleon I on His

Imperial Throne, 1806.Wiley, Ice T, 2005.

Abelina Galustian

Jean Léon Gerôme,

Moorish Bath, 1883.

Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The

Bath, c. 1890.

Eugène Delacroix, Algerian Women

in their Apartments, 1834.

Gerôme, The Slave Market,1867.

Abelina Galustian, Womansword

series (quoting Gerôme’s Slave

Market), 2000.

Gerôme, The Slave Market, 1867.

Ettore Cerone, Examining Slaves, 1890.

Galustian, Womansword series

(quoting Cerone’s Examining Slaves),

2000.

Galustian, Womansword series

(quoting von Chlebowski’s

Purchasing a Slave), 2000–1.

Stanislaus von Chlebowski,

Purchasing a Slave, 1879.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-

Day, Erased

Lynching series

and Wonder

Gaze

installation,

2000–13

Gonzales-Day, Tombstone, 2006.

Gonzales-Day, East First Street, 2006.

Gonzales-Day, At daylight the miserable man

was carried to an oak, 2007.

Gonzales-Day, Aaron, 2007.Gonzales-Day, Momento

Mori,2007.

Installation view (At Daylight, left; Aaron, right).

Fred Wilson

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of

barbarism.” — Walter Benjamin

Wunderkammer, cabinets of curiosities.

Crystal Palace, World’s Fair, London, 1851.

Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889.

Humans on exhibition, nineteenth-

twentieth century.

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum,1992.

Wilson, Mining the Museum,1992.

Wilson, Metalwork 1723–1880 in Mining the Museum, 1992.

Wilson, Cabinet Making 1820–1910 in Mining the Museum, 1992.

Wilson, Modes of Transport 1770–1910 in Mining the Museum, 1992.

Wilson, Cabinet Making 1820–1910,

1992.

Shonibare, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews

Without Their Heads, 1998.

“The decolonial option is an option and, as such, it makes evident

that there is no right or natural way to define what museums shall

do. Museums should offer spaces for many kinds of interpretive

activity (dialoguing or contesting each other). The decolonial

option displaces the ‘spectacle’ and ‘performance’ of museum

exhibits and installations and brings to the foreground what

‘spectacle’ and ‘performance’ hides: coloniality, that is, the

darker side of modernity of which museums are a paramount

institution.”

— Walter Mignolo, “Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity:

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992).”