A new installation centered around a 17^th century painting by Dutch Master Frans Post asks timely conversations about point of view and power. Now on view in the Upstairs East gallery.

Category: Dutch Masters, Thought-provoking

Frans Post, View of Olinda, Brazil, with Ruins of the Jesuit Church, 1666,

Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection

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About the show: The works in this gallery were created at a moment when European powers were taking control of regions across much of the globe. Art played a crucial role in that process.

Paintings, prints, and decorative objects helped translate the empire into images of order, beauty, and religious morality. In these images, suffering and hardship are rarely explicit. Landscapes appear fertile and serene, masking even when they depict plantation economies built on the backs of enslaved labor. Religious imagery frames colonial expansion as righteous morality.

Seen together, these works reveal how art shaped ways of seeing that made conquest and hierarchy seem natural. They ask us to consider how power operates not only through force, but through aesthetics—through what is shown, what is idealized, and what is left out of view.

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Colonial societies sought to organize the world by naming, sorting, and ranking it. People were classified by ancestry; landscapes were surveyed and claimed; natural specimens and luxury goods were collected and displayed. Acts of classification were never neutral. They shaped social hierarchies, determined access to power, and justified exclusion. 

Placed alongside these historical works, Glenn Ligon’s blurred text reminds us that vision can be subjective. Who is seen and named continues to shape our world. These objects invite viewers not only to look closely, but to question the structures of knowledge and power that instruct how we see.

Image credits:

Unknown Mexican Artist, De Español y Mestiza: Castiza, c. 1790, Henry Melville Fuller Fund

Fritz Sigfried Georg Melbye, Entrance to the Harbor of Havana, circa 1860, Henry Melville Fuller Fund.

Unknown Mexican Artist, Circumcision of Christ, c. 1700, Ed and Mary Scheier Fund.

Glenn Ligon, Invisible Man (Two Views), 1991, Henry Melville Fuller Fund.