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Rice University Department of Art History

@arthistoryrice

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A place where images, architecture, and works of art are examined with open minds and attentive eyes.

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What stories does my body remember and satellite? What have I learned as I return?

Prompted by these questions, join us on October 20th, for a conversation with award-winning performer, teacher, and artist, Jasmine Hearn. The talk will center on a personal history of performance experiences that has informed how Jasmine uses gestural sequences, garment design, and embodied story-telling as methods to archive memories of Black m/othering people and places.

This is a public course guest speaker for HART 363 Sensorial Queerness, Queering the Sensorial taught by Assistant Professor Olivia Young. For more details, see the link in our bio.

Free & open to the public | No RSVP required

Image credit: Tony Turner Photography taken in Farnsworth Pavilion, Rice U by @arthistoryrice

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5 days ago

Take an art history course they said, it'll be fun they said (and it is!) 😁

We had the pleasure of visiting Professor Ana Franco's Objects-Based Course where students dove into lively discussions with museum professionals and experts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

They even tried their hands at painting different lines in relation to the topic of the day's class.

@icaa_mfah @mfahouston

#arthistory #ricearthistory #latinart #riceuniversity #museumoffineartshouston by @arthistoryrice

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8 months ago

What can shimmering surfaces and blushing skin reveal about early modern race-making?

Panel 3: Shimmering, Blushing, and Early Modern Racemaking brings together papers by Alani Hicks-Bartlett and Paul Michael Johnson, moderated by Andrew Kraebel.

Together, the panel considers how race was made visible through color, shine, performance, beauty, and the body. From Petrarchan pearls and Shakespearean performance to the contested meaning of blushing on Black skin, these papers ask how early modern writers and artists used visual and literary signs to produce ideas about Blackness and whiteness.

Rather than treating race as fixed or self-evident, the panel examines how racial meaning shimmered, shifted, and sometimes broke down through the very surfaces that were supposed to make it legible.

Across Two Seas
Rice University | October 8–10, 2026
Registration available on the symposium website.
In person only.

Image: Chafariz d'El-Rey (The King's Fountain in the Alfama District, Lisbon). Oil on wood, circa 1570–80. The Berardo Collection, Lisbon. by @arthistoryrice

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16 days ago

Join us on Wednesday, October 14th as we welcome the first speaker in the 2026-2027 Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture Series, Dr. Alicia Caticha of Northwestern University.

Her talk, “Towards an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenology of Whiteness: Madame du Barry, Zamor, and the Racial Politics of Marble” will dive into the racial politics of neoclassical aesthetics and how they shaped European notions of alterity.

Free and open to the public. A reception will follow with light bites and drinks, RSVP through the link in our bio.

**This event was originally set for January 2026, but was rescheduled due to inclement weather. This is the new date and location.** by @arthistoryrice

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16 days ago

One of Houston’s best cultural destinations is right next door to Rice.

Graduate ambassador and @ricehumanities art history Ph.D. student Osinachi Okafor takes us through the Houston Museum District, where art, science, history and cultures from around the world come together.

When you study at Rice, the city becomes part of the graduate experience.

This is "Owl About Houston." 🦉 taken in Museum District by @arthistoryrice

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17 days ago

Last week, Professor Ann Johnson, PVAMU, gave a powerful lecture showcasing works she's created over the years as an educator and interdisciplinary artist.

In series, she intertwines injustice and ancestry through images of family members, anecdotes of Black womanhood, and connecting with the audience's shared experience of living in Houston; exemplifying the vast changes in local housing and urban planning. Through this, she illuminates the complex and multidimensional aspects of the Black experience, confirming and further solidifying the truth: there is no art history without Black history. by @arthistoryrice

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23 days ago

What can the shine of an insect tell us about colonialism, race, and visual culture?

Today we are featuring Olivia Dill, who will present “Black Sheen: Maria Sibylla Merian in Colonial Context” at Across Two Seas.

Dill’s paper examines Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, a 1705 volume of hand-colored engravings based on Merian’s observations of plants, insects, and ecologies in the Dutch colony of Suriname. Long celebrated as a major work of early modern art and scientific observation, the volume also raises important questions about how colonial environments shaped what Merian saw, recorded, and represented.

The paper focuses on one insect: a shining black and green iridescent moth. Dill argues that Merian and other artists emphasized the glossy blackness of the moth’s body in ways that did not simply reflect observation. Instead, this fascination with black sheen may reveal broader seventeenth-century Dutch aesthetic interests in shining black bodies.

By tracing this visual language, Dill’s paper connects colonial natural history, the slave trade, and the visual rhetoric of possession. It asks how even images of insects can carry histories of empire, race, and desire.

Across Two Seas will take place at Rice University from October 8–10, 2026. by @arthistoryrice

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a month ago

Join Art History in Berlin, Germany this summer!

Accompanied by two locals; an Art History Prof. and PhD student, select undergraduate students will embark on a 3-week trip to Berlin and nearby areas for an educational and cultural experience that will truly be unforgettable!

All trip expenses will be covered by the department including: airfare, ground transportation, lodging, and all on-site admissions. Upon successful completion, students may receive 3 research credits.

Interested in learning more? Join us next Wednesday at the info session and get your questions answered! Lunch will be provided (while supplies last).

#riceuniversity #arthistory #summer2027 taken in Berlin, Germany by @arthistoryrice

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a month ago

A look back at our summer course in Paris, HART 327: Making Modernity in the Streets of Paris: Art, Architecture, Film.

Led by Professors Graham Bader and Lida Oukaderova, students visited various cultural landmarks such as Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, local artists' studios in Montmarte, and the historical Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Students in this course were introduced to a broad and complex history with a precise focus on Parisian spaces, buildings, institutions, and the events through which it took shape. by @arthistoryrice

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a month ago

Join us next Thursday for "Soul II Sole", a talk with Professor Ann Johnson of @pvamu. Primarily an interdisciplinary artist, Professor Johnson has a passion for exploring issues particularly in the Black community which has led her to create engaging works.

"Soul II Sole" will discuss her creative and technical process, her “artivism”, and the works she does in series. Her work “investigates hard truths, and focuses on the Black experience” as she examines ancestry, injustice, and double consciousness. Her work explores Black womanhood, women in the shadows, and community.

Johnson was listed as an “Artist to Watch” in the International Review of African American Art and in 2023, as "one of the most transformative artists of the year" by Black Art In America. She was also included in the Texas Biennial in 2013, and 2021.

We hope to see you there.

Open to the public | No RSVP required by @arthistoryrice

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a month ago

How do museums, maps, and historical images shape what we think we know about African history?

Today we are featuring Janet Marion Purdy, Barbara Franke Associate Curator, Textiles, Art Institute of Chicago and Visiting Lecturer, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, who will participate in the *Across Two Seas* roundtable on curatorial practice, display, and interpretation.

This roundtable will consider how objects and images function in exhibition spaces, and how curatorial choices can shape the stories audiences encounter. Participants will reflect on specific objects, installations, or interpretive challenges from their own curatorial experience, focusing on the decisions involved in display, labeling, and framing.

Purdy’s work on the Kilwa Sultanate offers one way into these questions. Based on the island city of Kilwa Kisiwani, the sultanate was one of the great medieval powers of the western Indian Ocean, central to trade networks connecting Africa, Arabia, India, China, and beyond. Yet one of the best-known European images of Kilwa, published in Braun and Hogenberg’s 1572 atlas, recasts the city through a European visual framework rather than representing Swahili urban architecture on its own terms.

Her contribution to the roundtable will help us think about how Eurocentric records and displays can distort, minimize, or erase the histories of Black Africans and their global contributions—and what it might mean to reframe those histories more expansively.

We are delighted to welcome Janet Marion Purdy to Across Two Seas, taking place at Rice University from October 8–10, 2026.

Registration: acrosstwoseas.com
@arthistoryrice
@janetmpurdy by @arthistoryrice

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2 months ago

Happy first week of classes! We had a lovely time meeting everyone at the Academic Fair.

We are so excited to get to know you all even better this semester! by @arthistoryrice

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2 months ago