Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 5 hours ago
Jessie Park, Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Catherine Roach, Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA
This event marks the return to public view of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s "Study for the Portrait of Mai ('Omai')," on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. The first person from Polynesia to reach Britain, the sitter in Reynolds’s painting sought a military alliance and instead became a celebrity among Europeans, due in part to a public persona he crafted and enacted. The man now known as Mai bore many names over his lifetime. He came to fame in Britain as “Omai” or “Omiah”, a British misunderstanding of a Tahitian honorific that he reportedly bestowed on himself. What should we call him, and his representations, today? Can this case study offer deeper insights into the ethics of naming pictures? And how might we thoughtfully narrate the stories of historical figures of color whose lives are known nearly exclusively through European visual and textual sources?
Jessie Park, Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Catherine Roach, Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA
This event marks the return to public view of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s "Study for the Portrait of Mai ('Omai')," on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. The first person from Polynesia to reach Britain, the sitter in Reynolds’s painting sought a military alliance and instead became a celebrity among Europeans, due in part to a public persona he crafted and enacted. The man now known as Mai bore many names over his lifetime. He came to fame in Britain as “Omai” or “Omiah”, a British misunderstanding of a Tahitian honorific that he reportedly bestowed on himself. What should we call him, and his representations, today? Can this case study offer deeper insights into the ethics of naming pictures? And how might we thoughtfully narrate the stories of historical figures of color whose lives are known nearly exclusively through European visual and textual sources?
