Adrienne L. Childs, PhD
Presentations and Lectures
Race-ing Whimsy: Black and Asian figures in the Majolica Imaginary, Adrienne Childs, Sequoia Miller and Iris Moon,
Bard Graduate Center, October 2021
Bernard Osher Lecture,
David C. Driskell: Interiors, Objects and the Spirit of Form,
Portland Museum of Art, July 2021
In the Vortex of Art and Identity: Black Female as Object and subject
2021 Emerging Scholars Symposium, University of Georgia, March 2021
Bob Thompson, Goya, and the Caprice of Art History,
Research Symposium: Art by African Americans, The Lunder Institute, Colby College Museum of Art, March, 2020
Listen to Adrienne L. Childs on the Modern Art Notes Podcast discussing Riffs and Relations
Curator's Perspective tour, Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, March, 2020
Keynote Address
Material Matters: Race and Materiality in the Decorative Arts
The Clark Art Institute, November 1, 2019
The Eda G. Diskant Memorial Lecture
Ornamental Blackness & the Decorative Arts
Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 5, 2019
Keynote Address
Ornamental Blackness: Seeing the Black Body in European Luxury Arts,
9th Annual Rutgers Art History Graduate Student Symposium, April 19, 2019
Silver, Slavery and the Laboring Black Body,
The Anti-Black Interior? Enslavement and Refinement in Domestic Spaces
College Art Association, New York
February 15, 2019
Keynote Discussion
Shared Ground: Cross Disciplinary Approaches to Craft Studies
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
September 20, 2018
The Moorish Bath: Women of Color in Nineteenth-entry Orientalist Art
The Devens Lectures
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
December 7, 2017
Race, Exoticism and the Decorative Conceit: Black Figures in European Fine and Decorative Arts, 1700-1900
Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida
March 8, 2017
Riff: African American Artists and the European Canon, Session Chair
College Art Association, New York, February 2017
The Court Moor: Blackness, Servitude, and the Artifice of Court Culture
Black Portraitures II: Imaging the Black Body and Re-Staging Histories
Villa La Pietra, Florence
May 31, 2015
Dialogue and Discourse
In Dialogue with Debora Willis at the Jewish Museum, New York
Thursday, February 12, 2014
The Glazed Blackamoor: Minton's Majolica Jardinère and the African Body,
La Sculpture entre 1850-1880, Fondation Singer-Polignac, Paris, May, 2014
The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V, The Rise of the Black Artist (link to audio podcast)
Sunday, November 16
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Panel Disussion on the publication of the latest volume in the Image of the Black series.
Selected Presentations and Lectures
“The Glazed Blackamoor: Minton’s Majolica Jardinières and the African Body (1867)” La Sculpture entre 1850 and 1880, INHA and Ecole du Louvre, Paris, France, May, 2014
“Beauty and the Blackamoor,” Black Portraitures in the West, NYU, Harvard University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Musée du Quay Branly, Paris, France, January 2013
“A Blackamoor’s Progress: The Black Male Body in European Decorative Arts,” Fall Colloquium Series, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, November 2012
“Activism and Protest in African American Art: 1960-1985,” Image of the Black In Western Art, The Twentieth Century, Open Workshop, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, April 2012
“Colonial Illustration, Black Labor and the Art of Luxury Consumption,” Southeast Society for Eighteenth Century Studies “Science and the Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century, March, 2011
“Luxury Arts and the Black Laboring Body in Early Modern Courts,” Racial Consciousness in the Early Modern World, University of Maryland, College Park, April, 2011
“Modernism, Memoire and African Arts: David C. Driskell and the Art of Printmaking,” The Amistad Center at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut, February, 2011
“Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative Arts 1700-1900,” Fall Colloquium Series, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, October, 2010
“Dubious Attraction: Tropes of Blackness in Jean-Leon Gérôme’s Moorish Bath,” College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, February, 2010
“The Black Exotic: Representing Blacks in Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art,” The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, January, 2009
“Sugar boxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2007
“Imagining the Exotic in European Art and Artifacts,” Teachers as Scholars Program, Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, March 2007
“Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie Pogue,” University of Maryland, College Park September, 2006
“Venice and Consumerism, Luxury and Good Living, Mosque and Marketplace,” Looking East, Looking West: Europe and Arabia, 1450 – 1750, Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies’ Summer Institute for Arts Educators, University of Maryland, July, 2005
“Artist’s Proof: 50 years of Printmaking by David C. Driskell,” James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art, Howard University, April 2005
“Traditions in African American Art: The Jean and Robert Steele Collection,” College of William and Mary, April 2004.
“Race, Turquerie and the Exotic Orient: Mademoiselle de Clermont at the Bath,” College Art Association, Annual Conference, February, 2002
“Tanner, Orientalism and the Development of African American Art,” Laying Claim: Reconsidering Artists of African Descent in the Americas, Colgate University, October 2001.
“À Vendre: The Black Woman and Exotic Slavery in the work of Jean-Leon Gérôme,” Barnard Feminist Art History Conference, October 2000
