In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Erica Moiah James (University of Miami / Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow) provides a careful study of Portrait of a Young Woman using the material archive provided by the sitter’s dress, jewelry, and cotton head-tie to establish her as a Black, Caribbean, Creole woman. It seeks to render a “problem space” between historical Black representation and contemporary desires to know and name figures like her as proof of life, through a relational consideration of time, embodiment, and the representational capacity of Black flesh in the work of contemporary artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, alongside representations of Black people under threat of life in the digital age.

Erica Moiah James is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at the University of Miami. Her research centers on Indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African Diaspora. At the Clark, James plans to develop several chapters of her next book, which focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century global Caribbean art in conversation with contemporary practices and art historical methodologies. As an extension of the book project, she will also develop an exhibition of some of the earliest known paintings and prints of the Caribbean made by British military artists.