Cécile Fromont is an art historian specializing on the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Her scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded during this period across and around the Atlantic Ocean. Her research and writing center on African expressive, spiritual, and material cultures and their ramifications in Latin America and Europe, demonstrating how the often violent, but vital connections between the three continents gave contours to the early modern world and continue to shape our own times.
In current projects, she investigates the nature and material manifestations of political and spiritual power in the era of chattel slavery, the aesthetic entanglements that the Atlantic slave trade created and sustained between Europe and Africa, and the conditions of visibility and invisibility of colonialism and racialized slavery in France’s public monuments and collections from the seventeenth century to today.
She is the author of several award-winning books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022). The latter appeared alongside two digital-humanities publications (find them here and here). Co-authorship and editorship are central to her field-building scholarly practice. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored several essays and volumes, including the book Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition and, with Esther Chadwick, a special issue of the journal Art History on the theme of the Vast Atlantic.
Her work also unfolds at the intersection of art and scholarship. Recent projects in this realm include Debris of History, Matters of Memory a collaboration with Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji at the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennial.
Beyond academia, she collaborates internationally with museums and other public-facing institutions on publications, exhibitions, and programming aimed at broad audiences. She lends her expertise to news stories and media productions in venues such as Netflix, NPR, PBS, Arte, the New York Times, and Le Monde.
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ade their success from the 17th century to today, this talk sheds light on the long-forgotten African sources of their iconography and analyzes the long-invisible colonial dimension embedded in their alluring exotic tableaux. It puts into dynamic dialogue the context of their creation in the ebbs and flows of the early modern Atlantic World with the contemporary debates about their display as historically and socially charged objects of European artistic patrimony.