“When I tell people my grandmother, Dora Keyser, was an anarchist, they sometimes ask whether she was ever jailed or involved in violence—common misconceptions about the anarchist movement. For many Jewish and Italian immigrants who embraced it, anarchism was a universalist, anti-capitalist, nonviolent movement committed to freedom from political, social, economic, and religious authority. Drawing on my book in progress, Dora the Anarchist, this talk explores the influences that led Dora to anarchism and the ways she lived its principles.” — Lisa Aronson
Lisa Aronson is Professor Emerita from the Art History Department at Skidmore College, where she taught African Art for 31 years. Her research and publications on African art and visual culture have centered on African textiles and trade, issues of gender in African art, contemporary African art issues, and African photography. Lisa’s contemporary African art exhibition, Environment and Object in Recent African Art, co-curated with the Tang Museum’s former Director, John Weber, was on view at the Tang from February-July 2011, and then traveled to Middlebury College’s Museum of Art and to the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2017, she and Martha Anderson co-authored their book titled African Photographer J. A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial (Indiana University Press, 2017). The six-year long research project that led to its publication was funded by a Getty Collaborative Research Grant. In 2021, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) awarded it the “Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award for a Joint-Authored Book.” Since retirement, she has turned her attention to the pivotal role that the anarchist movement played in her grandmother, Dora Keyser’s, life.