Julia Skelly

Julia Skelly teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919: Wasted Looks (Ashgate, 2014) and Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (Bloomsbury, 2017). Skelly is interested in Prudence Heward in part because of her Montreal roots but also because Heward’s figurative paintings often represent women as self-contained and confident. She has long been intrigued and troubled by Heward’s aesthetic choices related to gender and race in her paintings of black women, and she welcomed the opportunity to engage critically with these artworks, drawing on both feminist and post-colonial theories. She also appreciates the fact that curator Charles C. Hill once described Heward as the enfant terrible of Montreal’s art world in the early twentieth-century.