09:00
Birkbeck
July 4
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Please note: this event will take place in the Keynes Library, First Floor, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PN (nearest tube Euston Square). A lift to the first floor may be found in Reception on the Ground Floor. For more information about access, please see the guide to Getting Around (Floor 1-4).
The subject of my talk is on how early modern portraiture can be used as a globalising tool in museum spaces by exploring the construction and formation of racialised whiteness, rarely used as a means of broadening debates about British imperialism and its colonial legacies. I am frequently told by curators and historians how race in the early modern period had little do with colour, and instead signified lineage, class, and gender. Therefore, any attempts to racialise the period are anachronistic. Indeed, as a Tate gallery guide, all attempts to engage some visitors with the subject of race and difference in the early modern period are met with at best puzzlement, and at worst, outright resistance. For after all, where was the all-important subservient Black figure as signifier of race and foreignness?
My focus will be on three early modern portraits on display at Tate Britain: Marcus Gheereart’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee (1594), Gheeraert’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1595), and The Cholmondeley Ladies, unknown artist (c.1600). These images have remained popular with visitors, yet are rarely discussed as visual indexes of race by art historians and curators. I will explore these works in relation to the artist’s determination to render white skin legible. The ornamental nature of skin in this period alerts us to the precarious nature of cosmeticised whiteness and the threat of Blackness. More broadly, I will share my experience as a researcher, and that relatively rare phenomena in the art and museum world: a Black English, working-class early modern art historian.
Dr Janet Couloute is an independent art historian, with a professional background in social work, academia, and psychodynamic counselling. Having a long-term interest in making gallery, museum and heritage sites safe, accessible and relevant spaces in which to engage audiences with Atlantic histories and their enduring legacies, Dr Couloute has sought to do this through her pioneering work as the founder of African Heritage Tours at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, her EDI consultancy work with galleries and museums, and her revisionist art history telling.