UNC Chapel Hill

“Like the Dawn of Creation: Byzantine Fragments in the Modern Imagination” 125 Chapman Hall This talk explores how Byzantium operates as a queer cipher in modern culture, appearing as an adjectival modifier, “the Byzantine,” rather than as a distinct historical referent. Analyzing Gore Vidal’s 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, Betancourt demonstrates how... Read More →

100 Hamilton Hall Yvette Mayorga (b. 1991) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist known for her Rococo-inspired reliefs that merge confectionery labor with found images to explore themes of belonging. Dominated by the color pink, Mayorga celebrates femme power while questioning the allure of consumer culture and the American Dream as a first-generation Latinx. Mayorga holds... Read More →

Sit! Dog Portraiture and the Animal Self in Eighteenth-Century France University Room, Hyde Hall To a twenty-first century viewer, nothing could be more natural than wanting a portrait (or many portraits) of your dog. But in eighteenth-century France, animal portraiture was a recent invention, and one that overturned artistic and species hierarchies. Despite, or maybe... Read More →

“Drift and Anchor: Researching Ships, Remembering the Sea” 125 Chapman Hall This talk explores the intersections of art history and memoir through the lens of maritime architecture and seafaring culture. Drawing on her current book project, which explores ships as architectural spaces, Professor Anderson considers how vessels shaped labor, cities, and natural landscapes across the... Read More →

100 Hamilton Hall River Claure is a Bolivian photographer and visual artist known for his meticulously crafted portraits and evocative landscapes. His work challenges dominant notions of cultural identity and examines the role of photographic images in shaping our perception of reality. His work has been exhibited in various platforms and institutions worldwide. In 2024,... Read More →

100 Hamilton Hall Karyn Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations, and public art. This year, Olivier will unveil a Philadelphia memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. Last year, she participated in the Whitney Biennial (NY, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (NY,... Read More →

“Reimagining Liberation: Visual Disobedience in Central American Art” Davie Hall room 112 In this lecture, Dr. Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she... Read More →

“The Ecology of Ephemeral Dyes: Textile Colorants Beyond Colonial Trade Networks in Early Modern South and Southeast Asia” 215 Phillips Hall This talk brings together poetry, dye recipes, textiles, and their representations in painting to explore the vivid but quickly fading pink and yellow dyestuffs that were used in early modern South Asia and maritime... Read More →

“Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico” 115 Howell Hall In this talk, Emmanuel Ortega analyzes the genealogy of the nomenclature involved in art history’s considerations of indigenized forms of art and the erasure of over five hundred years of influence to better articulate the processes... Read More →