Thursday 30 April 2026, 5pm - 6.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Tickets are free, but please register via Eventbrite
Please join us for the first lecture in the 2026 TORCH / Princeton University Press Lectures:
1. Le Modèle noir: An Anti-Racist Exhibition?
The lecture series will be delivered by Professor Anne LaFont, and will be based on three case studies. It explores the extent to which objects, art, museums, and heritage-making processes in general are shaped by issues of racism—and, even more so, of anti-racism. The aim is to understand how the Black Lives Matter movement, which reached its international peak in the spring of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, intersected with, and impacted, in France, civil society’s calls regarding the political responsibility of heritage institutions. And even so, over a longer period (1983–2025), what were the French experiences regarding heritage and anti-racism? This history deserves specific attention, capable of explaining how, in this country in particular, the republican and universal ambition of museums and the effective engagement of the art and heritage worlds in the anti-racist struggle are articulated.
This first lecture will focus on the Musée d’Orsay exhibition: Le Modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (2019), which represents an ambitious turning point in French heritage politics. We will also need to assess under what conditions an anti-racist project is explicitly articulated.
Tickets are free, but please register to attend via Eventbrite.
Speaker:
Professor Anne LaFont, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris is the 2026 Guest Lecturer for the TORCH/ Princeton University Press Lecture Series.
Other events in this series:
Please click here to learn more about the second lecture 'Turning Public Insults into Cultural Heritage', on Tuesday May 5 2026.
Please click here to learn more about the final lecture 'Why Do We Need a Black Mona Lisa?' on Thursday May 7 2026.
Princeton University Press Lecture Series
