Queering the Collection
About
As a verb, to “queer” is to challenge or subvert normative ideas of gender and sexuality. Join museum educator Sam Nehila and Robyn Price, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, to “queer” an object on view in our galleries. The discussion will focus on how artists and makers of the past and present explore their identities in ways that are meaningful to our own experiences today.
Registration required. Space is limited.
Free with admission. Museum members and artists members, along with college & university member institutions’ students, faculty, and staff always receive free admission. Check for your college here. Learn more about Museum membership options here.
Admission is paid day-of at a Visitor Services desk prior to the start time of the program.
REGISTER
Upcoming Queering the Collection sessions on Saturdays, April 19 and May 10, 3:00-4:15 pm and Thursday, June 12, 6:30-7:45 pm.
Sam Nehila wears many hats in the art world of Providence, RI. He is a tour guide for Gallery Night Providence, a museum educator for K-12 student visits at the RISD Museum, and working on his personal practice of printing stone lithographs in his Providence studio. He received a BA in Art History and a minor in Printmaking from Rhode Island College, and a MA in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a co-organizer of PVDPrintmakers (@pvdprintmakers), an online and in-person community group working to support and connect printmakers across Rhode Island.
Robyn Price studies ancient sensory experience and its ties to inequitable power dynamics in the past. To do this, she investigates the relationships curated between living and nonliving bodies as a way of understanding how cultural narratives are constructed and how these 'ways of being' influence the organization of large-scale economic, social, and political systems. Her dissertation examines the value of scent in New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1550-1050 BCE) as a case study for this phenomenon.
Other research interests include sensory archaeology; ancient Egyptian archaeology; 3D-imaging, RTI and Photogrammetry; GC/MS (residue analysis); oils, incense, cosmetics, and unguents; museum ethics; ethnoarchaeology; and inclusive pedagogy practices. She earned M.A. degrees in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology and Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Memphis and University of Virginia, respectively, before completing her Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022. She has excavated in a variety of locations, including Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Ethiopia, and Spain.