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Dr. Denva | Art Historian

@dr_denva

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🎓 PhD Art Historian | Researcher & Educator
🎨 Exploring identity, power & image
🖼️ From altarpieces to Beyoncé
Across Two Seas: acrosstwoseas.com

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Hi, I’m Dr. Denva — an art historian working at the intersection of identity, power, and visual culture.
I post short-form content (2x/month) exploring everything from medieval altarpieces to Black pop iconography.
Follow to rethink what art history can be.

But trust and believe there will be more Yonce.
@amariecemone Professor Daphne

👁 #arthistory #inclusivearthistory #blackarthistory #visualculture #beyonce #medievalart #arttiktok by @dr_denva

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a year ago

What would the ACT II: Renaissance be without a little renaissance art! 😉

And if you’re wondering what the hell is the canon, it’s like the all time favorites and most revered works of art. And, it mostly centers Europe.

#beyonce #renaissance #medieval #renaissanceart #art

@ricecaaas taken in Rice University by @dr_denva

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a year ago

“According to a legend set during Muslim rule of Sicily, a foreign man visiting Palermo — called moro (“Moor”) in all versions of the tale — fell in love with a local girl who spent her days looking after her plants. The two became lovers, but when the girl discovered that the man already had a wife and children overseas, she killed him in his sleep and cut off his head, which she used as a vase for a basil plant. Impressed with her thriving plant, the girl’s neighbors started producing vases in the shape of a testa di moro.” —Laura Ingallinella

Source and inspiration: Un-Mooring Race in Sicilian Folklore: The Tradition of “Testa di Moro” from Medium.
https://lauraingallinella.org/

#medievalart #culturalhistory #sicily #arthistory #blackhistory #medieval #renaissance #whitelotus by @dr_denva

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a year ago

A wonderful write-up in Rice News about Across Two Seas, which brought together scholars, curators, and filmmakers to explore Black histories and representation across the premodern Mediterranean, Africa, the Islamic world, and the Indian Ocean.

So grateful to everyone who contributed to two days of rich conversations and intellectual exchange. And thank you to Rice News for helping bring these conversations to a wider audience!

https://news.rice.edu/news/2026/across-two-seas-widens-map-premodern-black-history

#AcrossTwoSeas #PremodernRace #BlackHistory #ArtHistory #GlobalMiddleAges taken in Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University by @dr_denva

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21 hours ago

What does a Black figure make possible in an image?

In Giotto’s Mocking of Christ, a Black African soldier stands at the center of a scene organized around violence, authority, suffering, and salvation. Rather than asking only what this figure represents, I ask what work his body is made to do—and what becomes visible around him because of it.

How might Blackness organize relations between bodies? How might it help make violence, mercy, Christian authority, and even whiteness legible? And what changes when we approach medieval images not simply as evidence of a historical world, but as instruments that helped structure it?

This November, I’ll be joining seven other medievalists working across disciplines for Thinking with Medieval Images at Princeton’s Index of Medieval Art. I’ll be sharing “Giotto and the Structure of Difference in Images” as part of what promises to be a really generative conversation about what it means to think with medieval images rather than simply use them as evidence.

Register here: https://thinkingwithmedievalimages.ima.princeton.edu/register-0
📍 Princeton University
📅 November 21, 2026

#MedievalArt #ArtHistory #Giotto #MedievalStudies #RaceAndArtHistory by @dr_denva

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2 days ago

How do nature, surface, and form shape the visual meaning of Blackness?

Panel 6: Blackness, Nature, and Visual Surface brings together papers by Dontay M. Givens II and Olivia Dill, moderated by Caroline Fache.

Together, the panel examines how Blackness was made visible through artistic form, naturalism, shine, and surface. Moving from the Black magus in Epiphany scenes to Maria Sibylla Merian’s images of Surinamese insects, these papers ask how visual culture linked Blackness to nature, beauty, observation, and possession.

The panel considers how color, sheen, and form carried racial meaning across medieval and early modern visual worlds.

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

Image: Maria Sibylla Merian, Caterpillars vol 1, depicting the metamorphosis of the garden tiger moth, its plant host, and parasitic wasps. by @dr_denva

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9 days ago

What changes when African histories are placed at the center of the medieval world?

Panel 5: African Histories and the Problem of the Medieval brings together papers by Mariah A-K Bender, Jeffrey Fleisher, and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, moderated by Sophie Crawford-Brown.

Together, the panel asks how African histories reshape the categories, timelines, and geographies through which the “medieval” is often understood. Moving across the Mandinka epic tradition, the Swahili coast, and African archaeological sites connected to global exchange, these papers consider sovereignty, urban life, material culture, and concepts of the global.

Rather than treating Africa as peripheral to medieval studies, the panel places African worlds at the center of conversations about power, knowledge, movement, and historical imagination.

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

Photo: Great Zimbabwe by @dr_denva

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10 days ago

How did medieval writers think about race, slavery, and moral responsibility?

Panel 4: Race, Slavery, and Moral Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World brings together papers by Craig Perry, Hannah Barker, and Kristina Richardson, moderated by Julia Tomasson.

Together, the panel examines how Blackness, enslavement, comparison, and abolitionist thought took shape across medieval Islamicate texts and communities. Moving from Egypt and Mamluk writing to Abbasid Iraq, these papers ask how racial ideas were produced through language, politics, sacred history, ethical debate, and social life.

Rather than treating medieval race-making as a single fixed system, the panel considers how ideas about Blackness and slavery changed across contexts — and how medieval writers also imagined critique, justice, and opposition to domination.

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

Image: A scene from a 13th century manuscript, showing slaves in the Arab world. BNF MS Arabe 5847 fol.105r by @dr_denva

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11 days 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 @dr_denva

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14 days ago

How do curatorial choices shape the stories objects tell?

The Curator Roundtable: Curating Blackness and the Medieval Global brings together Bryan C. Keene and Janet Purdy, moderated by Denva Gallant.

This conversation will focus on how museums, exhibitions, labels, and installations shape the meanings of Black figures and Blackness in medieval and early modern material. The roundtable asks how curatorial practice can make histories of race, Black diasporic life, and global connection visible to audiences.

Together, the participants will reflect on the interpretive choices, tensions, and unresolved questions that arise when curating Blackness and the medieval global.

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

@brykeene @janetmpurdy by @dr_denva

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15 days ago

How did slavery, sexuality, and gender shape the making of race across medieval worlds?

Panel 2: Race, Slavery, and Gendered Bodies brings together papers by Angela Zhang, Mathilde Montpetit, and Lily Filson, moderated by Judith Brunton.

Together, the panel examines how racial meaning was produced through bodies marked by enslavement, sexuality, reproduction, domestic labor, and gendered power.

Moving from late-medieval Florence to the Islamicate storytelling traditions of the Hundred and One Nights and representations of the Queen of Sheba across Islamic and Christian sources, these papers ask how archives, literature, and visual traditions made race legible through gendered and sexualized bodies.

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

Photo: Detail of Hans Vintler, Die Pluemen der Tugent (Tirol 1411), Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod.13567 fol.6r. by @dr_denva

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16 days ago

How do images and texts make race visible — and what happens when they do not agree?

Panel 1: Seeing Race Otherwise: Image, Text, and the Making of Difference opens the first full day of Across Two Seas with papers by Alexandra Montero Peters, Jacqueline Lombard, and Lamia Balafrej, moderated by Farshid Emami.

Together, the panel considers how racial and ethnic difference was shaped across medieval manuscripts, objects, and visual traditions from Castile, Klosterneuburg, northwest Africa, the Mediterranean, and Southwest Asia.

Rather than treating race as fixed or self-evident, these papers ask how difference was produced through the relationship between image, text, geography, religion, and interpretation.

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

Photo: Nicholas of Verdun, Klosterneuburg Altarpiece (1181), Stift Klosterneuburg, Wikimedia Commons. by @dr_denva

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17 days ago