The first Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Distinguished Lecture of the academic year, Dr. Mia Bagneris will present, Deliberately Defaced: Anti-Blackness and Museum Institutions.

Exposing the shocking story of a duplicitous restorer, the knowing misrepresentation of an important object, the widespread circulation of a damaging and entirely fabricated narrative, and more than three decades of institutional cover-up, this talk analyzes the series of visual culture crimes to which Franz Fleischbein’s 1837 Portrait of a Free Woman of Color has been subject and considers similar examples like that of the Met’s recently acquired work, Bélizaire and the Frey Children(also 1837), in order to unveil the anti-Blackness ultimately at the foundation of conventional art historical inquiry and museum practice.