민족적, 문화적 다양성을 추구하는 브루클린뮤지엄이 최근 아프리카 미술 전문 큐레이터에 백인 여성을 채용해서 비판이 고조되고 있다. 크리스틴 윈드뮬러-루나(Kristen Windmuller-Luna)는 프린스턴대 아프리카 미술사로 박사학위를 받았고, 컬럼비아대와 메트뮤지엄에서 강의해왔다. 경력은 화려한데, 피부색이 문제라는 것. 이 또한 인종차별은 아닐지.

‘Simply Not a Good Look’: Activists Criticize the Brooklyn Museum’s Hiring of a White African Art Curator

The group is calling on the museum to form a Decolonization Commission.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/brooklyn-museum-white-african-art-curator-1260662

Kristen Windmuller and Joseph Luna

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/fashion/weddings/kristen-windmuller-joseph-luna-weddings.html

Lecturer in Discipline

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2016

Biography

Kristen Windmuller-Luna studies African art and architectural history, with a specialization in the early modern period and Christian Ethiopian. Her research centers on cross-cultural exchange, early globalization, transcultural art, and the depiction of non-Western cultures in museums and popular media. Emphasizing object-based learning, her teaching counters myths about African civilizations and artistic production by focusing on cultural specificity, artistic diversity, and global historical context.

Windmuller-Luna’s current book project, Seeing Faith: The Art and Architecture of Early Modern Christian Ethiopia, examines the relationship between royally-sponsored Roman Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox art and architecture during the Jesuit Ethiopian mission (1557-1632). In contrast to studies that propose that European visual culture displaced the Ethiopian, this book argues that the period’s art and architecture demonstrates both significant Ethiopian direction and the Jesuit strategy of cultural accommodation. Furthermore, it shows how structures previously classified as “Jesuit” share stylistic and iconographic hallmarks with Ethiopia’s later “Gondärine style.” Research for the project was supported by a Metropolitan Museum of Art fellowship, and received a Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Forthcoming publications include a study of talismanic imagery in a seventeenth century Ethiopian Christian manuscript; and an article on architectural design, labor, and patronage in early modern Ethiopia.

Windmuller-Luna received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Yale University. She most recently held the position of Mellon Collections Research Specialist (African Arts) at the Princeton University Art Museum, where she curated the 2018 installation Changing the Conversation: African Interventions. Previously, she has worked at several art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015-2016 Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Fellow), the Princeton University Art Museum, the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation (exhibition curator, Life in Miniature: Asante Goldweights and African Sculpture from the Collection of the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation). She appeared in the 2017 PBS series Africa’s Great Civilizations, and lectures on African arts regularly at the Met.