Enfilade

Anonymous (Delft), Tile panel with a Chinese landscape, ca. 1700; François Desprez, Illustration from Recueil de la diversité des habits‘, 1562; Jan Jansz Mostaert, Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?), 1525–30 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

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From The Warburg Institute:

The Image of the Black Archive: Past, Present, and Future

Online and in-person, The Warburg Institute, University of London, 7–8 November 2025

Organized by Hannah Lee and Maria Golovteeva

In 1960, Franco-American art collectors and philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Ménil initiated the Image of the Black archive. Originally begun in Paris and then expanded with an office in Houston, the research project was a response to the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the US. This two-day international conference brings together scholars who have contributed to the project over its history and those producing new research on the historic representation of African people in European and American art and culture. Attendance (online or in-person) is free with advance booking, though places are limited.

Keynote Speaker
Dr Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, published by Yale University Press in 2025.

This conference is organised with the generous support of the Henry Moore Foundation, the Society for Renaissance Studies, and the Association for Art History.

f r i d a y ,  7  n o v e m b e r

9.00  Registration

9.30  Opening Remarks

9.45  Panel 1
• Joaneath Spicer (Walters Art Museum), Balthazar, One of the Three Kings > Portrait: Prince Aniaba of Assinie as Balthazar, 1700
• Adam Sammut (University of York), Painted Black: Rubens’s ‘Mulay Ahmad’ after Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen
• Edward Town (Yale Center for British Art), Framing the Black Presence in British Art: Research, Curation, and the Limits of the Archive

11.05  Tea and coffee break

11.30  Panel 2
• Najee Olya (William & Mary), The Contradictions of the Anthropological Gallery: Frank M. Snowden, Jr.’s Ethiopians and the Image of the Black in Western Art
• Jaqueline Lombard (University of New Hampshire), Coins on the Cutting Room Floor: Twelfth-Century Images of Saint Maurice in the Image of the Black Archives
• Paul Kaplan (Purchase College, SUNY), First Fruits

12.50  Lunch break

13.50  Panel 3
• Michael I. Ohajuru (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), The John Blanke Project: Artists and Historians Reimagine the Black Trumpeter to Henry VII and Henry VIII
• Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck), Facing the Inventory: WY Ottley and the Archive of Enslavement
• Nanfuka Joan Kizito (Makerere University), Decolonising the Archive: An Africanised Reflection on the History of the ‘Image of the Black in Western Art’ Project

15.10  Panel 4
• Isabel Raabe (Talking Objects) and Doreen Mende (Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden), Plural Histories of Networked Knowledge: Cross-Collections Research at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
• Sarah Okpokam (National Portrait Gallery), TBC

16.10  Tea and coffee break

16.30  David Bindman: In Memoriam

Drinks Reception

s a t u r d a y ,  8  n o v e m b e r

9.30  Registration

10.00  Keynote
• Adrienne L. Childs, The Ornamentality of Blackness

11.00 Tea and coffee break

11.30  Panel 5
• Jacopo Gnisci (UCL), European Perceptions of Ethiopia’s Material Past in the Renaissance
• Patricia Simons (University of Michigan Ann Arbor \ University of Melbourne), Heat and Wind: Renaissance Representations of Black Men in Material Culture
• Riccardo Tonin (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Musi da porton: The Image of the Black on the Doors of Venice

12:50  Lunch break

13:50  Panel 6
• Amber Burbidge (European University Institute), Blackness and Bathing: The ‘Black Venus’ in the Image of the Black Archive
• Denva Gallant (Rice University), Afterlives of the Black Body: Dismemberment and the Black body in Matteo di Pacino’s Miracle of the Leg
• Nancy Ba (Sorbonne Université), Ethnographic Sculpture as Visual Archive? The Politics of Flesh, Complexion, and Scientific Image-Making in the Colonial Context, 1859-1931

15.10  Panel 7
• Borja Franco Llopis (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Misconceptions and Silences: Black Representation and Slavery in Iberian Art
• Ekaterini Kepetzis (Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität, Landau), ‘Only a lodger, and hardly that’: The Representation of Blacks on Eighteenth-Century English Trade Cards
• C.C. McKee (Bryn Mawr), Forms of Blackness from Fireburn to Sale: Painting Labor, Race, and the Environment in the Post-Emancipation Danish West Indies

16.30  Closing Remarks