Shawon Kinew

Photograph of art historian Shawon Kinew

Shawon Kinew
Photograph by Stu Rosner

Shawon Kinew is interested in how early modern sculptors pushed the boundaries of what sculpture should be able to do. “Even though they’re carving in hard marble,” explains the assistant professor of the history of art and architecture, “they’re making it look like fur or flesh that’s so soft that it looks like you could poke it and it would spring back….It’s been created to make you stop in your tracks and go, ‘Wow, meraviglia, it’s marvelous.’” Kinew remembers a similar feeling from her days as a child ballet dancer: That was “the first aesthetic experience I had where I was just completely enraptured by what I was seeing.” As a child, she split her time between Winnipeg and her home community, an Anishinaabe reserve in northwestern Ontario. Her father, an “intellectual force,” participated in dialogues between academic scientists and Native American knowledge keepers on physics and cosmology. “That was the milieu that I grew up in,” Kinew says; it helped lay the foundation for her curiosity about ideas and the human experience. In college at the University of Toronto, she was immediately captivated by art history. “The best course I took was a six-person class on Caravaggio where we didn’t read any secondary literature—only biographies from the seventeenth century.” After a Ph.D. from Harvard and postdoc at Stanford, she returned to Cambridge in 2018, in art history and as Shutzer assistant professor at the Radcliffe Institute. In her course “Old Masters in a ‘New’ World,” Kinew challenges students to think about how canonical European artists fit into the new landscape of art history. “Michelangelo has a lot to teach us about gender and sexuality,” she says. “Titian and Van Dyck have a lot to say about race and colonization. We just weren’t asking the right questions before." 

Click here for the January-February 2020 issue table of contents

Read more articles by Marina N. Bolotnikova

You might also like

When Code Meets Canvas

In brushstrokes and bytes, a symposium at Harvard explores data, perception, and art.

Reconstructing the Berlin Wall

David Leo Rice explores the strange, unseen forces shaping our world.

Making Money Funny

Matt Levine’s spunky Bloomberg column

Most popular

Two Momentous Faculty Retirements

Arthur Kleinman and Harry Lewis depart the classroom.

House Committee Subpoenas Harvard Over Tuition Costs

The University must turn over all requested materials related to tuition and financial aid by mid-July. 

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Explore More From Current Issue

Garber, Trump, and the Fight for Harvard’s Future

Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.

Filmmaker John Armstrong’s Adventure Documentaries

Filmmaker John Armstrong’s “outdoor adventures” find the human spirit.

How Harvard Students Handle Political Disagreements

The Undergraduate asks if intellectualism is really on life support.