Rewriting History with Fabiola Jean-Louis

Talk
A photograph of a Black woman wears an elaborate 18th-century gown in aqua blue with pink ribbons

Marie Antoinette is Dead, 2016, Fabiola Jean-Louis. Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist

Friday, Jan 23, 2026

6pm

Getty Center

Museum Lecture Hall

Free

Tickets are free, but required for event entrance. Your event ticket will also serve as your Center entrance reservation. Please note, there is a fee for parking.

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About

Fabiola Jean-Louis’s photographic series Rewriting History places Black women into a surreal historical imaginary, sculpting the trappings of European nobility and colonialism onto Black femme bodies. Using paper as a symbol of freedom, she intricately crafts papier mâché period gowns for her subjects, inverting the historical depiction of women of color as disenfranchised, enslaved and unadorned into empowered and elegant portraits. She will be joined in conversation by Professor Tiffany Barber to discuss traditions of portraiture and Black aesthetics, historic revisionism and Afrofuturism, in a dialogue about the reparative work of artists and curators alike.

The conversation will be available on the Getty Research Institute YouTube channel following the event.

Visit the Getty Research Institute's Exhibitions and Events page for more free programs.

    1. Fabiola Jean-Louis

      Artist

      Fabiola Jean-Louis (b. 1978, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a conceptual artist specializing in paper sculpture, photography and installation. Through self-portraits and elaborate paper costumes, Fabiola crafts powerful narratives that blend Afro Surrealism with the cultural richness of her Haitian heritage. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the DuSable Museum of African American History, Alan Avery Art Company, and the Andrew Freedman Home. In 2021, Fabiola became the first Haitian female artist commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, debuting in the Afrofuturist Period Room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly. Her upcoming exhibition, Waters of the Abyss, premiered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in February 2025, and The Chicago Cultural Center in June 2025.

    2. Tiffany E. Barber

      Assistant Professor, African American Art, UCLA

      Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. She is the author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women's Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (2025).

    Know Before You Go

    Duration

    Approximately 1 hour

    Planning your arrival

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    Event check-in

    Check-in begins 30 minutes before program start time at the Museum Lecture Hall. Doors open 15 minutes before program start time.

    Seating

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    Accessibility

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