Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” is really a new benchmark for
the Wallach Art Gallery.
We are borrowing over 140 works from more than 40 lenders, international lenders, and
bringing the very finest material here to Columbia University to share with our campus,
our neighbors, and the broader art-going public.
Denise Murell: It is an honor and a privilege to complete a dissertation at Columbia University in 2013
and have an exhibition based on that dissertation open in 2018 at the Wallach Art Gallery, the
newly expanded Wallach Art Gallery.
There’s a lot of excellent research coming out of Columbia University and Denise Murell’s
dissertation was this spectacular investigation of gender, race, and even class, looking at
the role of the black female model.
Darren Walker: This is a narrative.
A scholarly narrative, a well-researched narrative, that is done by a black woman about black
women throughout history and certainly, the importance of this goes well beyond simply
modern art I believe.
Denise really talked about the centrality of the black female figure in modern art.
I’ve never had anyone explain that to me so passionately, intelligently, and compellingly.
I decide that I want to excavate the narrative of Laura, the black model who posed the maid
in Olympia.
As I go about doing that, I see that Manet’s Olympia was the subject not just of his own
work, but of the work of successive generations.
As I looked more inward deeply into the archival and anecdotal and other information about
that subject, I became aware of just how extensive an influence, a legacy, and a pattern of images,
a set of images existed across the last 160 or so years.
"Posing Modernity" will have a rich slate of public programming that accompanies the
exhibition.
There will be, of course, educational outreach to K-12 students, to classes at Columbia,
and to broader groups that want to visit the show.
There will be academic symposia, there will be artist talks and other types of activities
to allow different points of entry to different publics.
I would like to see visitors come to the exhibition with curiosity to know. ‘What is this
grouping of Images?
What are the images?
And what did they mean in their own times?
And what do they mean for me as a citizen of the global world of today?
The fact that Columbia is presenting this and that it is in Harlem on 125th street
is historic in so many ways.
Matisse, who loved Harlem, is coming home.