History of Art and Architecture

Benet Ge studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art. His research focuses on contact, speculative and sustained, between Britain and its imperial outposts in China and the Americas.

He holds a BA in art history and economics from Williams College, and completed a thesis on London printseller Edward Orme, inventor of the transparent print. His research on a cabinet Orme commissioned from Guangzhou, which was inset with reverse glass paintings depicting the Spanish conquest of the Inca, triangulates his broader interests in art as a vehicle for antiquarianism, enterprise, and ephemeral or visceral sensation. He is especially interested by cross-cultural interest in the facture of material properties, such as transparency, which are registered as intangible and not quite visual.

Most recently, he worked in the department of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art on projects involving lacquer, silver, and ceramics between viceregal New Spain, colonial America, and the Caribbean, and has previously worked in curatorial departments at the Clark Art Institute and Whitney Museum of American Art.