Odalisque Atlas: White History as Told through Art
Harvard University, Oct. 17, 2019 - Dec. 12, 2019
Press
In her first memoir Old in Art School, Nell Irvin Painter writes of her Black Sea Composite series: “Haiti scrunched up by Crimea. Thailand abutted Russia and Ukraine...With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.” In this series, Painter unpacks the origins of the word “slave,” whose etymology resulted from the frequent enslavement of Slavs during the early Middle Ages. Slavic peoples hail from many parts of Eastern Europe, including the Caucasus. Owing to the work of 19th-century racial scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “Caucasian” came to signify a person of European descent, though Painter learned, during a visit to Georgia, that it is simply a demonym in that part of the world. In her Black Sea Composite series, Painter maps this complicated history of whiteness unto the geographies of Atlantic slavery and reimagines the political boundaries of slavery.
