Lenore Metrick-Chen

Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History
lmetrickchen@drake.edu

Lenore Metrick-Chen received a joint Ph.D. at the University of Chicago from the Committee on Social Thought and from the Department of Art History. Her research concentrates on visual culture’s relation to race, immigration, and ethnicity, examining visual art aesthetically and as a language of social change: the art and politics of visual art. 

Professor Metrick-Chen’s writing uncovers the intertwining of political policy and cultural expression, as in her book Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and the American Visual Culture 1870-1900 (2012 SUNY Press) which explores the reception and effects of United States Chinese exclusion policies on 19th century American visual culture. Her upcoming book, an edited volume from SUNY press, Locations of Cultural Memory:  Monuments, Architecture, and Other Ephemera, is an inquiry into monuments and their mechanisms for the continuity of cultural memory, especially monuments housing memories that resist the ideology of power.  Her essays and articles are found in numerous journals including International Sculpture Magazine, Art in Print, International Dialogue, A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs, Hyperallergic, among others.

Metrick-Chen’s curatorial practice began as a kind of teaching laboratory: a source of reflection, sharing and testing ideas, and furthering knowledge. She has worked with students from all disciplines, exploring current cultural issues through understanding visual culture, teaching art and cultural histories and curated exhibitions in these areas.Her recognition that students benefit greatly by engaging ‘hands-on’ prompted her creation of courses in which students co-curate exhibitions, including Imaging Others in the Colonial Period; Ape Rope Pray Eight! (Appropriate!), and Are We Global Yet? The Art and Politics of Public Space (including the virtual), among many others.

Her current curatorial projects continue her focus on the intertwining of racial issues and visual culture. Several exhibitions center on racial relations in Iowa: Our Town: Reclaiming the Narrative, which has travelled across Iowa; and A Thin But Powerful Difference: Race | Embodiment. (2023) In 2024, she created an exhibition on Black WACs for the Museum Fort Des Moines, Iowa, and in 2025 as the guest curator at the Museum of Chinese in America in Chicago, she curated Race Making: Race Making: American Trade Cards 1870-1900.

Metrick-Chen has created a non-profit website, Black Iowa and the Nation: Deconstructing Historical Silences, which functions as a hub for community engagement and a platform for scholarly research, offering immersive engagement with Black American history in Iowa, offering a continually growing archive of crowd-sourced historical objects related to Black life in Iowa and contextualizing them through donor and scholarly video narration.

Metrick-Chen has presented papers at conferences and international programs: Harvard’s Visualizing Asia in the Modern World Conference (2011); the Confucian Summer Institute, sponsored by the Center for East-West Relations at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2011); the National Endowment for the Humanities three-week program: Re-envisioning American Art History: Asian American Art, Research, and Teaching (2012); the Danish Memory Network Copenhagen Colloquium; The Colloquium on “Postcolonial Memory, History and Power” (2014), at La Maison Des Sciences De L’homme Paris Nord; chaired a panel Monument / Anti-Monument conference, Saint Louis, MO, (2014); and lectured at Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago IL (2017). In 2025, she was invited by Arts, an international online journal, to edit a special issue on art and politics, forthcoming.