Exhibition Tour of Hung Liu: Happy and Gay at Georgetown University Art Galleries

Join artconnexDC for a tour of the exhibition Hung Liu: Happy and Gay at Georgetown University Art Galleries with Director & Chief Curator Jaynelle C. Hazard and Founding Director of the Hung Liu Estate, Dorothy Moss. Coffee and pastries provided after the talk. Also on view, &Loving: Photography from the Georgetown Collection.

Hung Liu: Happy and Gay presents a selection of oil paintings and prints from a 2011-12 series by Hung Liu, the renowned Chinese American artist (born Changchun, China 1948 - died Oakland, California 2021). The images adapt and subvert Maoist propaganda cartoons that were published during the 1950s in small booklets for children in China. In the series, Liu revisits cartoons of her youth that were published in children’s books and primers (known as xiaorenshu). Like the Dick and Jane readers circulating in the United States during the postwar era, the illustrations were used in China to socialize children by instilling values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism. Liu’s reformulation of this palm-size historic childhood imagery into large-scale, richly-painted contemporary canvases not only turns mass-produced illustrations into paintings but also raises questions at the intersection of ideology, propaganda, and education. Liu invites viewers to think critically about the words and images that shape our collective identities, challenging us to reimagine them, a form of rewriting history. As she often said, “History is a verb. It is constantly flowing forward.”

Former Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery and current Director of the Hung Liu Estate, Dr. Dorothy Moss shares her excitement and connection to the work of Hung Liu. “Working with Georgetown graduate students on Hung Liu’s Happy and Gay series has led to new research about Hung Liu’s practice, especially her sourcing of archival materials, from photographs to children’s books to ancient Chinese illustrations. It is a pleasure to present this understudied body of work with the students and to offer new interpretations and scholarship on this groundbreaking contemporary artist.”

Jaynelle Hazard

Jaynelle Hazard is the Director and Chief Curator of Georgetown University Art Galleries and an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art and Art History. Her career has been dedicated to amplifying diverse voices within the canon, presenting work by pioneering artists, and bringing audiences together for discovery. Before joining Georgetown, Hazard was the Executive Director and Chief Curator at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA), where she led a significant rebranding effort and expanded the institution’s reach, impact, and strategic initiatives. Hazard has been invested in arts education, collaborating with various universities and supporting emerging arts leaders through her career. Hazard holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Arts from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.

Dorothy Moss

Dorothy Moss is the Founding Director of the Hung Liu Estate. From 2011-2023, Moss held the position of curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. During her tenure at the Smithsonian, she was a leader of the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, serving as coordinating curator of the Initiative from 2018-2021. Her recent projects include the exhibition and book, co-authored with Kim Sajet, Taina Caragol, and Richard Powell, The Obama Portraits, published by Princeton University Press in 2020 and the exhibition and book Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands published by Yale University Press in 2021 for which she received the Smithsonian Secretary's Prize for Excellence. Moss earned a BA from Smith College, an MA in Art History from Williams College, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Delaware.

Image: Hung Liu, Street Readers (detail), 2013. Oil on canvas, wood shelf, Chinese picture story books, 66 x 83 inches. Private Collection, San Francisco.