History of Art Lecture Series: Kailani Polzak (UCSC)

Prof. Kailani Polzak will present a talk titled, “Louis Choris’s Portrait(s) of Kamehameha I and the Dynamics of Art, Race, and Global Trade.” This talk focuses on Louis Choris’s depictions of Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) made while traveling on the Russian vessel Rurik between 1815 and 1816. Choris’s book about his travels on the Rurik is generally conventional, but his chapter on Hawaiʻi stands out for its unusual focus on a particular individual: Kamehameha I. The Hawaiian King sat for a portrait that occupies a specific place in the volume but also follows a rich itinerary of its own. By contextualizing this depiction of Kamehameha and the other images in the Hawaiʻi chapter, we can gain a deeper understanding of the significance of Hawaiʻi in nineteenth-century global trade networks, the investment of European monarchies and empires in the persona of Kamehameha I, and the interplay between class and gender in constructions of race. Lastly, this portrait and its many iterations challenge our assumptions about European prints in the global dissemination of information.