Washington Magazine: Elizabeth Childs

Elizabeth Childs, associate professor and chair of art history and archaeology, is featured in the October 2011 issue of Washington Magazine. Childs' forthcoming book, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti, 1880-1901 (University of California Press, fall 2012), presents as a collection for the first time more than 135 illustrations of turn-of-the-century French Polynesia by Paul Gauguin, John La Farge and lesser-known colonial photographers.

In the interview, Childs discusses the position of the artist approaching his island subject: "The story of these artists highlights how, in travel, we are generally not ... purely blank slates, capable of experiencing the new in an unbiased and fresh way," she says. "This study shows how any quest is usually framed by long-standing expectations of places, of other societies and, indeed, of ourselves."

Read more of the interview in the online edition of the magazine.

More on Childs' Gauguin and La Farge projects
College Art Association Publication Grant 

Lecture on La Farge at Yale University

"A Mobile Symposium": Art History Students on the Road to Visit Gauguin and La Farge

John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891

Yale University Art Gallery's exhibition of John La Farge's Second Paradise