Of Mannequins and Minikins

Press Release

“Of Mannequins and Minikins”

An art exhibit by professor and artist María DeGuzmán in collaboration with Jill H. Casid and Carisa Showden
Dr. DeGuzmán is professor of English & Comparative Literature and Director of Latina/o Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill

September 16 – 25, 2013
Exhibit Gallery, 2nd Floor
Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Of Mannequins & Minikins is a photography exhibition that offers a small sample of fifteen years of visual work by university professor, writer, and photographer María DeGuzmán. Some of the work has been done in collaboration with Jill H. Casid, some with Carisa R. Showden, and some created solo. The images employ mannequins or minikins (miniature figurines) to visualize complex relationships between the categories of public and private, inanimate and animate, post-human and human, the visibly larger than life and the overlooked, the displayed and the obscured, the legible and the illegible.

María DeGuzmán is Professor of English & Comparative Literature and founding Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of two books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012). She has written a third book with Carisa R. Showden titled Conjuring Worlds: A Queer Phenomenology of the Miniature.

Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. Her book projects include Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization and her forthcoming book Shadows of Enlightenment–both with the University of Minnesota Press. She is currently at work on several new book projects: The Volatile Image: Other Histories of Photography, Forms-of-Life: Bioethics and Aesthetics, and, with Aruna D’Souza, Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn for the Clark Series at Yale University Press.

Carisa R. Showden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work (2011) and co-editor (with Samantha Majic) of Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism (forthcoming 2014), both with University of Minnesota Press.