Cultural Representation & the Guadalupe Dress in "Heavenly Bodies"

In the fall of 2019, UC Berkeley professor Maureen Miller taught a course inviting students to examine the blockbuster 2018 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Heavenly Bodies. This program features Sofia Howard, a participant in the course, presenting findings from her research which critically explores the curatorial interpretation of a dress by Christian Lacroix, and the exhibit's overall failure to represent non-European Catholic cultures. Through dialogue, Howard and Miller offer new perspectives on the exhibit and present opportunities for participants to find parallels between the dress in question, and global objects from the Hearst Museum's collection.
About the speakers:
Sofia Jimenez-Howard is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is pursuing a degree in Political Economy and Computer Science. She is particularly interested in political theory and the impact of technological innovations on social justice movements, and she would like to spend her remaining years at Berkeley researching these topics as well as how the effects of colonization have persisted into the modern age.
Maureen C. Miller, University of California, Berkeley, is a historian of medieval Europe with a particular interest in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from Harvard University, where she studied with the distinguished social and economic historian, David Herlihy. The author of three prize-winning monographs, she has utilized various forms of material culture-surviving rural churches, ecclesiastical and secular palaces, as well as liturgical vestments-to illuminate changes in the western Church and the culture of the secular clergy across the Middle Ages. Most notably, she is the author of The Bishop's Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (2000) and Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe c. 800-1200 (2014) as well as the editor of a special centennial issue of The Catholic Historical Review (101:1, 2017) dedicated to Catholic material culture. She is currently working on ecclesiastical registers and the 'documentary revolution' in medieval Italy with special attention to material aspects of new documentary forms and administrative systems.