‘Entangled Pasts’: Dr Cora Gilroy-Ware co-curates major Royal Academy exhibition

Dr Cora Gilroy-Ware is co-curator of a major Royal Academy exhibition exploring art’s role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism.

Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now: Art, Colonialism and Change brings together 100 major artworks spanning 250 years of history, including works by J.M.W. Turner, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Joshua Reynolds, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, John Singleton Copley and Hew Locke. The exhibition is part of and informed by a wider RA research initiative that considers the RA’s colonial past and themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.

The exhibition opened this past weekend and will remain on view until 28 April 2024. Learn more about the exhibition here.

Dr Gilroy-Ware is Fellow and Tutor in the History of Art at St Peter’s College and Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. In her publications, exhibitions and teaching, Dr Gilroy-Ware seeks to challenge the assumed universality of Western hegemonic perspectives. She is particularly interested in the fabrication of ideal beauty from the seventeenth century to the present day, and the role of classicising sculpture and pictorial art in the reification of ‘racial’ difference. She has curated projects at Tate Britain, the Huntington European Art Gallery and MK Gallery, and has held fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntington Library, California Institute of Technology, University of Naples L'Orientale and University College London. 

Dr Gilroy-Ware is the author of The Classical Body in Romantic Britain (Yale University Press, 2020). Her current book project, funded with support from the Henry Moore Foundation, will consider adaptations of Greco-Roman art, particularly marble sculpture, among artists of African and indigenous American descent including Phillis Wheatley, Ellen Craft, Mary Edmonia Lewis, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper and Kara Walker.

Learn more about Dr Gilroy-Ware here.