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David Pullins and Vanessa Valdés: "Juan de Pareja, a Conversation around an Exhibition in Progress"
SPEAKERS: David Pullins (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Vanessa Valdés (CUNY)
Since arriving at The Met in 1971, Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja has been heralded as a landmark in European art, but today it calls us to present a revisionary account of the Spanish Golden Age through the story of its Afro-Hispanic sitter who was enslaved by the Velázquez family for two decades before becoming a painter in 1660s Madrid. Co-curators David Pullins (The Met) and Vanessa K. Valdés (CUNY) will discuss their engagement with Pareja’s story in a forthcoming exhibition at The Met. Theirs will be the first exhibition to address enslaved artisanal labor in the Iberian Peninsula, Pareja as a painter in his own right and the artist’s many after-lives, notably as told by the Harlem Renaissance intellectual Arturo Schomburg and through the visual culture of the twentieth- and twenty-first century African diaspora. Emphasizing the degree to which this is an ongoing discussion, the presentation will take the form of a dialogue between the co-curators that encourages participation from those attending.
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