Emily C. Burns, director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West and associate professor of art history at the University of Oklahoma, will deliver a guest lecture at 5:30 p.m. April 23 in Richards Hall, Room 15. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Burns’ lecture is titled “Building Black Histories and Futures Through Diorama: Architectural Models on Exhibition, 1900-1940.”
From the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900 to the Jamestown, Virginia, Tercentennial Exposition of 1907 to the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940, diorama series made by African American artists explored and celebrated Black histories. Burns’ talk shows how interrelated these dioramas were and analyzes how architectural copies — both of generic building types such as the cabin and the plantation house, and of replicas of specific buildings such as the M Street School, a structure at Howard University, and the White House in Washington, D.C. — functioned to either signal racial oppression or transcendence from oppression in the construction of public historical memory of African American culture and identity.
Burns earned a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Union College, a Master of Arts in art history and theory from the George Washington University, and a doctorate in art history and archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis.
At the University of Oklahoma, she teaches courses on American art and the art of the American West.
Burns is a scholar of the transnational 19th century, with an interdisciplinary research practice that analyzes artists and works of art moving through space and between cultures, with a focus on relationships between the U.S. and Native American artists, as well as dialogues between French, U.S. and Native American artists.
She is the author of “Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) and co-editor of “Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts” with Alice M. Rudy Price (Routledge, 2021), as well as co-editor for an issue of “Transatlantica on the American West in France” with Agathe Cabau (2019).
