Kleinman Center, Fisher Fine Arts Library, Room 414

Join us for a lecture with Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.

This illustrated lecture by Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw considers work by African American artists that mobilize windows as a vessel through which to imagine new modes of seeing and coming into visibility. It will examine paintings, assemblage sculptures, and stained glass that transform domestic, educational, and spiritual architecture into spaces of contemplation and community.  

Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century” (2006), “Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art” (2015), and “I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women,” (2023) at the National Portrait Gallery.