In honor of International Women’s Day, art historian Patricia Kim explores queenship and power in the era of Alexander the Great and his successors. She considers how artists incorporated local traditions and cross-cultural influences when portraying royal women. Their visual strategies conveyed qualities, attributes, and behaviors defining a “queen.” These ideals may still impact women today, reflecting limited contexts of female power rather than broad cultural trends.
Portraying Power: Representations of Hellenistic Queens
Talk
Bust of a Ptolemaic Queen (Arsinoe II or Berenike II), 300–200 BCE, Greek. Rhodolite garnet. Getty Museum
This is a past event.
About
Speaker
Patricia Eunji Kim
Art Historian
Patricia Eunji Kim is an assistant professor at New York University. Her work mobilizes art historical methods to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. She is author of The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (in production, Cambridge University Press)—the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of royal women from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, spanning the fourth to second centuries BCE. Dr. Kim has produced several exhibitions, articles, and interdisciplinary books on ancient and contemporary monument cultures, ecological temporalities, and contemporary receptions of antiquity. Her research has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Know Before You Go
Duration
Appx. 1 hour
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