Please join us on 9 July at 19h30 at the American Library in Paris for an evening with Dr. Denise Murrell, co-curator of Le modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse, Musée d’Orsay and curator, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse at Columbia University, New York, and Franco-Haitian photographer, Henry Roy, author of Regards Noirs, the first stylized photography book of prominent Afro-French personalities published in France. They will discuss their artistic journeys, the substance of their groundbreaking bodies of work, as well as have a conversation about the use of the Black model in historical and contemporary art forms.

This discussion will be moderated by Jake Lamar, the prize-winning African-American author of Bourgeois Blues and many other works, who has called Paris home for 26 years.

Dr. Denise Murrell is African American, and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York, and Curator of the Wallach’s exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (October 2018-February 2019), based on the dissertation for her 2014 Columbia PhD in art history. She is also the author of the exhibition’s catalogue, published by Yale University Press. She earned two other art history degrees from Columbia: a master’s in 2004 and an M.Phil in 2010. She is co-curator of an expanded version of the exhibition, titled Le modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse, at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (March 26-July 21, 2019), and is an essayist in the modèle Noir exhibition catalogue. Murrell is currently a visiting scholar at the Columbia Paris Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where she is teaching a summer course based on the two Black Model exhibitions. She previously held a Mellon predoctoral fellowship at the Princeton University Art Museum, has taught the course Masterpieces of Western Art at Columbia, and has been a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Henry Roy was born in Port-au-Prince. He left Haiti for France with his family in the 1960s. After studying photography in Paris, he began a career as a photographer. In 1996, he published Regards Noirs, a portrait book - inspired by photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn - dedicated to the influential Black personalities of France. His artistic work has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Taipei or Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. His portraits and features have been published in magazines such as Vogue Paris, Art Review, M Le Magazine du Monde, W Magazine, Harper's Bazaar UK, Air France Magazine, to name a few. His books- Out of the Blue, Spirit, and Mirage- were published respectively in Sydney, New York and London. His latest book Superstition (Etudes Books, Paris) was selected by the New York Times as one of the top 10 photo books of 2017. He is represented by L’AGENCE A PARIS and Sunday Gallery. He lives and works in Paris.

This evening is at the initiation of Little Africa Paris and hosted by The American Library in Paris. Evenings with Authors and other weeknight programs at the Library are free and open to the public (except as noted) thanks to support from GRoW @ Annenberg, our members, and those who attend programs. There is a suggested donation of ten euros for non-members.