Research

Manet, Olympia (detail), 1863

My research exists at the intersection of art history/visual culture and Womanism/black feminism. I arrived at this crossroads while researching black female identity in art history as an undergraduate researcher and finding that the most images exist in ethnographic collections, rather than art collections. In "Abandoning the Negress and Recovering Laure in Manet's Olympia," I examined the role of identity and gendered blackness in Manet's infamous painting. I concluded that scholarly writings about the painting routinely glaze over the complicated identity of the Afro-descended woman and focus on the central white model, Victorine, rendering Laure virtually invisible. Very little scholarship has been published that reveals Laure’s identity. These invisible women are ubiquitous in Western art and I have a sustained interest in black female identities and recovering narratives for Afro-descended women in art history, as creators and as subjects. Moreover, I examine the implications that my findings have on popular visual culture.