Biography

Cora Gilroy-Ware is interested in neglected or forgotten engagements with Greco-Roman and Renaissance forms, particularly those by marginalised artists and authors. She is currently an Associate Professor in the History of Art department at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at St. Peter’s College. Her first book, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, was published in 2020 with the Paul Mellon Centre in association with Yale University Press. She has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, California Institute of Technology, University College London and the Yale Center for British Art, and received grants from the Henry Moore Institute, the Marc Fitch Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Along with her teaching and publications she has worked on several exhibitions, most recently as part of a team of three external curators for Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change 1768 - now at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Project Summary

Spanning the years 1854 to 1892, the journal of poet, activist and Renaissance art lover Charlotte Forten Grimké was first published as a complete volume in the late 1960s. The subtitle given by the editors to this edition—“A Free Negro in the Slave Era”—is telling. Living and working in a time shaped by the oppression of her fellow African Americans, Grimké has been seen as the embodiment of a contradiction. Born into a family who had been free for generations, she and her kin used their relative privilege to campaign for those of common ancestry less fortunate than themselves. Despite the fact that her own life was informed by racial segregation, prejudice and financial precarity, the advantages she enjoyed in a violently divided America have caused her to remain a marginal figure. Her contradictory status is further exacerbated by her cultural interests, particularly her passion for Italian art. Exposed to reproductions of Renaissance painting in her early 20s, Grimké never travelled to Italy; yet throughout her life, she dreamed of Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, expressing an overwhelming identification with Italian people and an intense desire experience the imagined splendour of those distant lands. In the 1890s she met Anna Julia Cooper, a younger activist who had been born enslaved. Despite their differing backgrounds, the two women bonded over Italian Renaissance culture, going as far as to found an “Art Club” dedicated to this shared passion. Part of a larger book-length study provisionally entitled Sculpting the Self: Women, Race and Classical Art, this project contends that for both Grimké and Cooper, the regionality of Italy offered a welcome way of thinking beyond notions of race that were being grafted onto histories and theories of artistic practice by the likes of Hippolyte Taine, an author read by both women as part of their quest for knowledge and beauty.