The Menil Archive Seminar Series - The Global Majority in Visual Archives
- Event type
- Seminar
- Series
- Menil Archive Seminar Series
- Address
- Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
- Event dates
- Contact
- warburg@sas.ac.uk 020 7862 8910
Sarah Okpokam (National Portrait Gallery) in conversation with Maria Golovteeva (Collection Research Assistant, Photographic Collection, Warburg Institute)
At this roundtable event, Sarah Okpokam and Maria Golovteeva will discuss the Archive Survey Project at the National Portrait Gallery. The project seeks to uncover the lives of global majority sitters in Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by systematically examining the Gallery’s vast image records of portraits. Held in the Gallery’s Heinz Archive and Library, these records, comprising approximately 4,000 boxes that document paintings held in NPG and other public and private collections, can be difficult for researchers to navigate, particularly if looking for images of sitters whose names have been lost to history.
Over the next 18 months, the project will work to enhance the discoverability of these figures within the archive, and conduct in depth research into selected portraits as case studies, bringing greater visibility to their stories. The project has been made possible thanks to the Pilgrim Trust and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Sarah and Maria will discuss the aims, findings and challenges of the project to date. They will reflect on the approaches and objectives that the project shares with the survey of the Menil Archive of the ‘Image of the Black in Western Art’ held at the Warburg.
Sarah Okpokam, Project Curator, Archive Survey Project at the National Portrait Gallery.
Sarah has several years of experience working in museums, heritage institutions and visitor experiences. She has researched and developed content for a range of audience-focused projects as part of interpretation, curatorial and exhibition design teams. Her academic research examines representations of people of colour within visual archives; contexts of production, use and circulation, as well as critically accesses approaches to their interpretation and documentation in museums and archives.
ATTENDANCE FREE IN PERSON OR ONLINE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING
