Enfilade

From YCBA:

Naming Rights: The Case of Mai/Omai from Polynesia

with Jessie Park, Catherine Roach, and Edward Town

Online and in-person, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Thursday, 13 November 2025, 12pm ET

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Study for the Portrait of Mai (‘Omai’), ca. 1774, oil on canvas, 64 × 56 cm (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery).

This event marks the return to public view of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Study for the Portrait of Mai (‘Omai’), on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. The first person from Polynesia to reach Britain, the sitter in Reynolds’s painting sought a military alliance and instead became a celebrity among Europeans, due in part to a public persona he crafted and enacted. The man now known as Mai bore many names over his lifetime. He came to fame in Britain as ‘Omai’ or ‘Omiah’, a British misunderstanding of a Tahitian honorific that he reportedly bestowed on himself. What should we call him, and his representations, today? Can this case study offer deeper insights into the ethics of naming pictures? And how might we thoughtfully narrate the stories of historical figures of color whose lives are known nearly exclusively through European visual and textual sources?

Join the livestream here»

Jessie Park is Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art, YUAG. Catherine Roach is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Edward Town is Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA.