Templeton Colloquium in Art History: Race, Museums, Art History

The UC Davis Department of Art and Art History will examine these issues during the annual Templeton Colloquium in Art History. The colloquium, titled “Race, Museums and Art History,” is free and takes place online Feb. 19 at 4 p.m. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the colloquium, which is made possible through the support of Alan Templeton (B.A., psychology and art history, ’82).

Register for the colloquium here.

The event will feature Bridget Cooks, an associate professor in the UC Irvine African American studies and art history departments, and Susan Mullin Vogel, a scholar, writer and filmmaker who specializes in African art. Michael Yonan, who holds the recently created Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art at UC Davis, will moderate the event.

“We’re having a broad national discussion about race and racism in American culture,” Yonan said. “Museums are big players in that they create narratives about culture and history. So many museums are making statements and grappling with the past. This is a great time to have this discussion. Both [Cooks and Vogel] have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and they are the best people we could have hoped to take part in the colloquium.”

Due to the timely nature of the topic, the event is expected to draw wide interest from audiences across disciplines at UC Davis, other universities and colleges, museums and art organizations, and the general public, Yonan said. In addition, this year’s online format due to COVID-19 will broaden the colloquium’s global reach.

Each of the guest speakers will make a presentation, engage in a larger conversation led by Yonan, and respond to questions from the audience.

In her talk “Museums As Sites for Cultural Change,” Cooks will discuss Black representation in mainstream art museums and pressures museums face today to decolonize their spaces and rethink their functions. Cooks is author of the 2011 book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, which was awarded the inaugural James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History. She is co-editor with Jennifer Wagelie, academic liaison at the Jan Shem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, of the forthcoming Mannequins and Museums: Power and Resistance on Display. Cooks has also served as an exhibition curator, including “The Art of Richard Mayhew” at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

The colloquium is co-sponsored by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis

[Image: (Photo: Peter Brenner/ Los Angeles County Museum of Art)]