TRANSGRESSIONS

In this exhibition, contemporary artist Lalla Essaydi meets 19th-century French orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme head on. Gérôme’s The Slave Market, on loan from the Clark Art Institute, will hang next to Essaydi’s paintings in a visual dialogue that is conducted across time and cultural space. The encounter is about diverse transgressions—old, cavalier ones and new, purposeful ones. Essaydi challenges the wider orientalist worldview that Gérôme and his contemporaries painted so seductively, posing alternatives, demanding answers, getting respect. She is fluent in the painterly language of Gérôme, but chooses to speak back to him, and others like him, from a space all her own. Organized by Holly Edwards, Lecturer in Art at Williams College, and Stefanie Spray Jandl, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator for Academic Programs.

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TRANSGRESSIONS
Lalla Essaydi confronts Jean-Leon Gerome
Organisation: Holly Edwards, Stefanie Spray Jandl