This presentation will examine the works of Kehinde Wiley and Lalla Essaydi in thecontext of the organization of nineteenth-century French art in contemporary museums.Both artists overtly quote nineteenth-century European art in ways that challenge notonly the painting they are citing but also the way that French art is installed inpermanent collections. We will explore how these twenty-first-century artists participatein today’s discussions of how to reenvision national and landmark collections.
Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture and coordinator of theFrench and Francophone Studies program at the University of Richmond. Her researchfocuses on nineteenth-century French literature, art criticism, and the plastic arts andtwentieth and twenty-first-century critical museum studies. She is the author ofNaturalism’s Imaginary Museum, French art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century(Toronto, 2024) and she has published in Word & Image, Nineteenth-Century FrenchStudies, Symposium, French Forum, and Dix-Neuf. She is currently working on anedited volume on quotations of the nineteenth century in contemporary art.
