WSSU Hosts Lecture on Gandhi
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Dr. Rebecca M. Brown, teaching professor in the history of art at Johns
Hopkins University, will lecture on "Gandhi at the Spinning Wheel: Creating India through Image
and Practice" on Thursday, October 17, at 12:30 p.m. in Room 207-A of the Thompson Student
Service Center on the campus of Winston-Salem State University (WSSU).
The presentation, which is free and open to the public, is based on her work as a scholar of
colonial and post-1947 South Asian visual culture and politics. She will focus on how Gandhi,
the leader of India’s movement for independence from Britain, deployed the spinning wheel as
the symbol of the anticolonial movement. She will examine the imagery of the spinning wheel
to discuss how something so mundane could create not only thread but also a nation, and its
implications for other historical and contemporary political movements.
She is currently writing a book on the complex intersection of exhibition, diplomacy, human
display, and the temporalities of craft and contemporary art during the 1985–86 Festival of
India in the U.S.
Brown has taught at Johns Hopkins University since 2008. Prior to that, she taught at Swansea
University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Redlands and St. Mary’s College of
Maryland. She has a B.A in Art History from Pomona College, and M.A. and Ph. D in South Asian
and Islamic Art History from the University of Minnesota.
In addition to her research and teaching, she has served as a consultant and a curator for
modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum
and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. As a writer, her publications include “Goddess,
Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin
Collection” exhibition catalog, “Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India,” Art for a
Modern India, 1947–1980” and articles in several journals including “Visual Anthropology”,
“Archives of Asian Art,”” Art Journal,” Journal of Urban History” and “Journal of Asian Studies”.
Brown will be a visiting scholar at WSSU for two days as part of a National Endowment for the
Humanities funded project on integrating India into the liberal arts curriculum. In addition to
her public lecture, Mitchell will also conduct a workshop for WSSU faculty.