Linocut Relief Print By Molly White

decolonial art history starter guide

really tired of seeing AH on the internet/tumblr talked about w the same extreme reverence for the classics that has dominated the field since its conception and has led to the proliferation of white supremacist ideals in this course of study i love very much so decided to channel that by collecting some of my favorite readings on decolonizing art history, with a particular focus on the ancient/classical world. note: this is by no means an extensive list, but rather a selection of pieces i found helpful when starting to explore decolonial art history - with this list i'm focusing more on broad issues than highly specific case studies

reflections on the painting and sculptures of the greeks. jj winckelmann: giving this one a preface as it is quite literally the least decolonial art historical text you can find but also the one that kicked off classical art history studies as we know it (winckelmann is largely seen as the father of art history). as such it is worth a read to understand what these arguments are based around - in more recent years this text has been used extensively to support the white supremacist idea that aryan art came from the great green past and that anything not pertaining to the greeks was ‘degenerate’

decolonization is not a metaphor. tuck and yang.

empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum, open theory. nicholas mirzeoff.

decolonizing art history. grant and price.

decolonization: we aren't going to save you. puawai cairns.

why we need to start seeing the classical world in color. sarah bond.

beyond classical art. caroline vout.

classics and the alt-right: historicizing visual rhetorics of white supremacy. heidi morse.

decolonizing greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology and the post-colonial critique. yannis hamilakis.

how academics, egyptologists, and even melania trump benefit from colonialist cosplay. blouin, hanna, and bond. (i'd like to flag this one in particular with a nod to tumblr's obsession with maintaining a certain aesthetic linked to what you study).

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

A pair of gold bracelets... snacelets. Roman, 1st century AD

from The Walters Art Museum

Cathy de Monchaux: Beyond Thinking (2018)

Illustration for Wuthering Heights by Felix Abel Klaer

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.

Joan Didion, from On Keeping A Notebook in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain?

What is your favorite obscure Greek mythological fact

Hm, probably the Orphic fragment that says that Persephone was born with a monstrous appearance (fragment 87 according to Athanassakis, fragment 58 in the translation of Otto Kern’s compilation of fragments at HellenicGods.org):

…"of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλη), whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly Phersephoné and Koré"…

It's so totally different from all other versions that only describe her as very beautiful (as goddesses tend to be). Sometimes I regret that I didn't give my Persephone horns.

the story of psyche

Denis Maurice, The Story of Psyche, 1908, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg: 1) Eros is Struck by Psyche’s Beauty; 2) Zephyr Transporting Psyche to the Isle of Delight; 3) Psyche Discovers that Her Mysterious Lover is Eros; 4) The Vengeance of Venus; 5) Jupiter Bestows Immortality on Psyche; 6)  Psyche’s Kin Bid Her Farewell on a Mountain Top; 7)  Cupid Carrying Psyche Up to Heaven. 

Sleeping Bacchant by Károly Lotz (19th Century)