David Pullins

Lecture Abstract:

Reevaluation of Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja (1650) reveals the extent to which the field has failed to address questions of race and enslaved labor in seventeenth-century Spanish art and visual culture. Building on research for The Met’s exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter (2023), co-curated by Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés (CUNY), this talk addresses Pareja’s decades-long enslavement in Velázquez’s studio before his manumission and Pareja’s later life as a painter in his own right.  As the best documented example of a formerly enslaved painter in early modern Spain, Pareja’s case prompts the reevaluation of broader issues relevant to how we understand a range of artisanal trades and the concept of “liberal arts.”  The talk will also consider the intersection of Pareja’s historiography with the exhibition’s reception by critics and the public.

Workshop Abstract:

While the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter sought to recover as much empirical evidence as possible about this understudied seventeenth-century artist, this workshop will focus on the vast body of writing about him from the centuries after his death.  Operating with precious few facts, authors felt free to image his life to wildly different ends.  Often engaging stereotypes around enslavement, race and ethnic origin, Pareja’s surprisingly wide-spread presence in nineteenth-century popular culture served both pro- and anti- abolitionist movements.  In the twentieth century United States, these threads were taken up by a key voice on Pareja, the Harlem Renaissance writer Arturo Schomburg, and in the Newbery Award winning children’s book, I, Juan de Pareja, that made his name familiar to a generation of school children in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.

Biography:

David Pullins is the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is responsible for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, Italy and Spain.  He studied art history at Columbia University, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2016.  Recent projects at The Met include co-curating Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023) and forty-five reinstalled permanent collection galleries that constitute Look Again: European Paintings, 1300-1800 (2024); his monograph The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Getty Research Institute: 2024) questions art historians’ inheritance of a distinction between fine and decorative arts that took hold in eighteenth-century Paris.