In October 2017, Prof. Elizabeth Childs, who is on sabbatical this year, delivered two talks in Europe. The first concerned the aesthetic and cultural meanings of the tropical woods used by Paul Gauguin in the sculptures produced in his first trip to Tahiti (1891-93). She delivered her paper "L'alchimie des tropiques: matérialité de la sculpture tahitienne de Gauguin," in the international colloquium "Gauguin, le droit de tout oser" at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, in conjunction with the exhibition "Gauguin l'alchimiste" on view at the Grand Palais. She also reviewed the exhibition (at its Chicago venue, in the summer of 2017) for The Burlington Magazine (vol. CLIX, September 2017), pp. 761-762. You can read the review here.
Following the symposium in Paris, she attended a workshop at The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, held in conjunction with the planning of a forthcoming exhibition on the art produced by Paul Gauguin and Charles Laval who visited Panama and Martinique in 1887. Prof. Childs spoke on the context of French colonialism in the Caribbean, and on Martinique in the French imagination. Here is a link describing the meeting, and the project as it will unfold.
