Department of Art History

An exhibition about a groundbreaking University of Chicago professor, co-curated by Art History PhD candidate Stephanie Strother, has been featured in the Chicago Reader.

Lauded as a moving tribute to the remarkable life of Paul B. Moses, Stephanie worked with Moses' son, Michael Moses, to create an exhibition that traced Moses' life and academic contributions before his untimely death at the age of 36 in the hands of two would-be car thieves. 

Stephanie and Michael's partnership was born from a chance meeting during the pandemic, at a makeshift dog park on a patch of green next to a defunct U of C dorm. Michael's desire to organize his mother's vast collection of documents about his father, coupled with Stephanie's own research interests, shared with the late Professor Moses: turn-of-the-century and early 20th-century French art, made their meeting seem serendipitous. 

Once they’d assessed the material, they approached the University of Chicago the following spring to pitch their idea. The school enthusiastically agreed, and the exhibition opened at the beginning of the 2022 Autumn Quarter.

Michael and Stephanie uncovered additional items to supplement Alice Moses’s collection, including references to the professional dynamics Moses navigated as one of the only Black professors at the University of Chicago. While teaching a general humanities course, Moses advocated for removing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the assigned reading list for incoming freshmen, citing its racist stereotypes. At the time, many of his white colleagues, literary critic Wayne C. Booth among them, criticized Moses’s objections as anti-intellectual and insufficiently “objective.” Years later, however, Booth acknowledged not only that he grew to understand Moses’s stance, but that it inspired his 1988 book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. 

Haverford College, where Paul Moses was admitted as their first African-American student, plans to house an abbreviated version of “Paul B. Moses: Trailblazing Art Historian” in fall 2023. Earlier this month, the college also dedicated an undergraduate research conference to his memory. Both bring greater visibility to Moses, who, thanks to an anonymous benefactor, has had a scholarship at the school named in his honor since 1982.

The exhibition 'Paul B. Moses: Trailblazing Art Historian' ran at the Joseph Regenstein Library from September 12 to December 16, 2022. A previous article about Stephanie's contribution to it can be read here.

Stephanie Strother is a PhD student focusing on art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include the relationship between art and craft at the turn of the century, popular reception and consumption, and global circuits of visual and material culture.