FALL 2024 OFFICE HOURS: WEDNESDAYS 1:30-2:30PM BY APPOINTMENT
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery 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 American context. 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, The Art of Remembering, Essays on African American Art and History, (Duke: 2024), 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, at the National Portrait Gallery.
Research Interests
Professor Shaw studies race, gender, sexuality, and class in the art of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Since coming to Penn, she has worked with students to organize exhibitions on contemporary and historical American art, Polynesian art, Brazilian art, and Cuban art.
Selected Publications
Professor Shaw’s first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, was published by Duke University Press in the winter of 2004. In 2006-07, Shaw organized a museum exhibition and catalog, titled Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. In 2015, she helped mount "Represent: African American Art" in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in 2024 she published The Art of Remembering: Essays in African American Art and History with Duke University Press.
Other recent publications include, *“Divine Love, Mother and Child: Sargent Johnson’s Orphanhood.” In Sargent Claude Johnson, The Huntington Library and Museum, San Marino, California, 2024; “Imaginary Ancestors and Blacked-Up Imposters.” In Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in Early North American Art, The American Folk Art Museum, New York, 2023; “‘The illegitimate children of this artistic union …’: Expanded Contexts for Basquiat’s Collaborations.” In Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2023; “Whose History of Art.” In Jayson Musson: His History of Art, Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia, 2023; The Various Colors and Types of Negroes”: Winslow Homer Learns to Paint Race.” In Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale University Press, 2022; “The Decolonization of John Sloan.” In “When and Where Does Colonial America End?” Colloquium, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 2 (Fall 2021); “No Man is an Island.” Art in America / ArtNews, (November 2021); “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art volume 6, no. 2, (Fall 2020); “African American Artists and Mexican Muralism.” In Vida Americana: Mexican Muralism in the United States, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Press, 2020. “10 Years of 30 Americans.” In 30 Americans, 5th Edition, The Rubell Collection and the Barnes Foundation, 2019. (Reprinted on ArtNews.com; and in the 5th edition of 30 Americans.); “Memoria Mia.” In Cecilia Paredes, Museo Universidad de Navarra, 2019; “The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018), (Reprinted in Carrie Mae Weems: October Files, MIT Press, 2021); “Interesting Characters by the Lines of Their Faces”: Moses Williams’s Profile Portrait Silhouettes of Native Americans,” in Asma Naeem, Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now (Princeton University Press, June 2018). (Reprinted on Laphams.com.); “Andrew Wyeth’s Black Paintings,” in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, published by Yale University Press; “Family and Fortune in Early African American Life and Representation,” in the exhibition catalog, Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed, from the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York; and “Creating a New Negro Art in America,” in Transition 108, published by the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research and University of Indiana Press.
