Statuette of a Seated Black African Boy, 450-425 B.C., Etruscan. Bronze. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. Image: Bruce White Photography
Art Break: Seeing Blackness in Greek and Etruscan Art
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Focusing on a 2,500-year-old Etruscan bronze statuette, antiquities curator Claire Lyons and Sarah Derbew, assistant professor of classics at Stanford University, consider depictions of Black Africans in Classical art and literature. They confront simplistic modern assumptions about race and servitude and investigate how meanings shift when images of Blackness migrate between cultures and across time.
Sarah Derbew received her PhD in Classics from Yale University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is currently an assistant professor of Classics at Stanford University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Center for African Studies. Her research focuses on literary and artistic representations of Black people in ancient Greece. She is currently finishing up her book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (to be published in 2022) in which she employs critical race theory to map out an expansive archaeology of Blackness in ancient Greek literature and art.
Since joining the Getty Museum in 2008, Claire Lyons has curated exhibitions including The Aztec Pantheon and Art of Empire (2010) and Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome (2013). She is currently preparing a catalogue of the museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic art, and is co-editor of Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (2000) and The Archaeology of Colonialism (2002). Claire completed a PhD in classical archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and has excavated at Murlo, Corinth, Metaponto, and Morgantina.