Call for Papers: The Menil Archive of ‘The Image of the Black in Western Art’: Past, Present and Future

Conference dates: 7 & 8 November 2025, Warburg Institute, University of London

Submission deadline: 16 June 2025

In 1960, Franco-American art collectors and philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Ménil initiated the Menil Archive of ‘The Image of the Black in Western Art’ (IBWA). Originally started in Paris and then expanded with an office in Houston, the IBWA research project resulted in two visual archives of photographs. Collected between 1960 and the 1990s, the photographs document paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, decorative arts, and other objects depicting people of African heritage in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, early modern and modern European and American art, as well as art created by Western artists in Africa and America. The reference collection of photographs and accompanying materials from Paris is now held by the Warburg Institute.

The Menil Archive of ‘The Image of the Black in Western Art’: Past, Present and Future conference will bring together scholars who have contributed to the project over its history and those producing new research on the historic representation of African people in European and American art and culture.  The conference aims to:

• contextualise the Archive within the existing scholarship,
• consider how the themes and topics mapped out by the Archive have changed and developed over time,
• discuss how the materials held by the Archive can be useful to researchers as well as potential challenges that working with this type of visual archive can present.

We would like to invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes which connect to the wide range of themes covered by the Menil Archive’s holdings. We particularly welcome applications from PhD students and early career scholars working in this field.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: 

• Black antiquity
• Manuscript, book and print culture
• Travelogues
• Medieval and early modern art and material culture
• Decorative arts
• Portraiture
• The Transatlantic world
• The visual and material history of slavery
• The history of the ‘Image of the Black in Western Art’ project and archive
• Archival and curatorial practices

A full index outlining the themes and research areas covered by the Archive can be found here: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/photographic-collection/index/menil-archive-image-black-western-art

Please send an abstract of up to 200 words and brief biography to hannah.lee@sas.ac.uk and maria.golovteeva@sas.ac.uk  by Monday 16th June 2025.