Activity

I’m not simply interested in reminding the world of Pareja’s existence, or in complicating our reception of Velázquez, although those might be excellent ancillary benefits. Nor am I suggesting that Pareja’s painting is necessarily a neglected masterwork that secretly rivals the image of the Old Mas…

There is a common misconception that Foucauldian critique is a reductive reading of a work of art to show how it is merely a product of its time. It’s just the opposite: the idea is to show how time itself, historical epochs, or epistemes, are produced and organized by (and through) the language of…

For Foucault, Las Meninas is much more than a simple representation of the infantas and court attendants of Velázquez’s royal patron, the king of Spain, Philip IV. It expresses the rise of European Man as a sovereign subject at the height of imperial and colonial power. Its famous trompe l’oeil pre…

Houston Baker Jr. came up with a pithy chiastic phrase to describe how black artworks and writings negotiated this tension: “the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.”

We, who were once symbolically remanded to the racial Salon des Refusés and exhibited as animals at the colonial fairs, have stormed the palace of the Occident and crowned ourselves victorious in that gilded place.