Mississippi University for Women will host the Diane Legan Howard Art History Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Wendy Marie Castenell, associate professor of African American Art at The University of Alabama, Tuesday, March 8 at 6:30 p.m.
Castenell will discuss “The ineffaceable Curse of Cain:” The Visual Culture of Gender, Race, and Caste in Antebellum New Orleans in the Mary Evelyn Stringer Auditorium of the Art and Design Building with a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Her presentation looks at portraits of free women of color in antebellum New Orleans to show how they used portraiture to legitimize their legacies and to counteract the increasingly negative stereotypes of promiscuity ascribed to them as a result of the tradition of common interracial marriages in Louisiana. Castenell’s research also focuses on gender studies, film history and theory.
She earned her doctorate in art history from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., and her master of arts degree in art history from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. Castenell earned her bachelor of arts degree in art history from Tulane University in New Orleans.
The W’s lecture series was established in 2012 to honor Diane Legan Howard’s passion for the arts.
Howard, studied art history at The W and graduated summa cum laude from the university in 1959. Her husband, Malcolm Beard Howard, and their four children chose to honor her love for the arts through a scholarship and this lecture series.
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