U of T Sociology professor Kristin Plys has been on research leave this past year, furthering her scholarship and writing her monograph about feminist resistance through visual art. As a J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Plys has been researching artists’ opposition to Pakistan’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Specifically, she is investigating how female artists navigated exclusion, and resisted the dictatorship through their artwork.
Plys wrote an article for International Women’s Day for Met Perspectives, the Met’s digital magazine, about two feminist artworks from the 1980s and how they depicted the female body in response to oppressive or reactionary regimes: Lala Rukh’s Masaawi Haqooq and Guerrilla Girls’ Do Women Have to Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? Plys’ article ties into her recent scholarly publications and highlights some of the work she has done with the Met’s collection, including the works of Lala Rukh. Plys has also participated in workshops and fellows sessions related to pedagogy through visual culture. The Met and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council have supported her research and international travel.
Plys attended Art Dubai, a major festival of Middle Eastern and South Asian contemporary art, in late February-early March and participated in their Curator Exchange Session, a closed-door conversation about today’s dynamic artistic landscape.
In March, she travelled to three major cities in Pakistan for research, attending Lahore’s Aurat March for International Women’s Day. She was received by education and arts institutions and conducted oral histories with artists in Lahore and Karachi. In Islamabad, Plys met with Pakistan’s Minister of Culture, Jamal Shah, as well as the Director General of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Ayub Jamali, at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts. At the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, she received a private tour of the collections from head curator, Mariam Ahmad.
Next, Plys is travelling to Amsterdam to visit the International Institute of Social History and continue her research on leftist political movements and how they inspired art students’ movements during the military dictatorship in Pakistan. She is looking forward to writing her book about artists’ politics at Lahore’s National College of Arts based on the new insights she gained while conducting research in Pakistan!
We are excited to welcome Professor Plys back for the coming academic year!