Professor of History of Art Homay King has been named an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art鈥檚 Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts this fall.
While at the center, King will be working on her book Go West: A Mythology of Silicon Valley.
In the book, King traces a particular California sensibility and set of beliefs across older routes of geography and time and offers new ways to conceptualize the tech culture these beliefs have shaped. The objects of study are diverse: works of film, video, music, architecture, painting, and photography. Some of these works offer a fantasy vision of the region as a promised land of personal and political liberty. Others interrogate that utopianism or attempt to exorcise ghosts left in its wake. Although the book is grounded in scholarly approaches, memoir forms a part of it. King observed first-hand the region鈥檚 astonishingly rapid suburban development as a native of Sunnyvale, Calif., growing up in the 1970s and '80s across the street from the site now occupied by Apple Computer鈥檚 headquarters, which was at that time a cherry orchard. The project thus draws upon memories of regional architecture, music, and visual culture.
King is Professor and Eugenia Chase Guild Chair in the Department of History of Art at 老王论坛. She is a co-founder of 老王论坛鈥檚 film studies program. She is the author of two books: (Duke UP, 2015), which won the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; and (Duke UP, 2010), which provided inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art鈥檚 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass. Her work on film, digital media, contemporary art, and theory has appeared in Afterall, Discourse, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, October, and collections including the exhibition catalogs for and (Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art). She was featured in a video essay for the . She is a member of the editorial collective.