Past Event: Wednesday, Dec.06.2023
Webinar series organized by Olivia Chiang and hosted by Smarthistory.
About Not your grandfather’s art history: A BIPOC Reader
Art history as a discipline was established during the peak of European colonization, and as a consequence is fraught with all kinds of erasures, silences, and omissions. Thankfully, the traditional celebration of the very distorted, racist, and sexist history of Eurocentric art and art-making has finally come under scrutiny. In other words, this collection ain’t their grandfather’s art history; rather, it’s mine and yours in that it is a digital reader of essays written largely by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) scholars full of the global histories and art production of BIPOC nations and communities from the ancient world to the present. Not your grandfather’s art history: A BIPOC Reader is a free, fully digitized, openly-licensed art history resource that provides more than twenty analytical essays that seek to re-route the traditional narratives of art history with Europe and whiteness at its center. Beginning with the ancient Mediterranean and the Silk Roads, the Reader consciously challenges a narrative that centers Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance to demonstrate that comprehensive understandings of art history cannot be advanced except within the broader contexts of world history.
