Michal Lynn Shumate is a researcher and educator whose work is based in the visual culture of historicism and the domestic topography of Rome. Her interdisciplinary practice draws from the history and theory of interior architecture and the decorative arts, with projects ranging from the restoration of medieval houses, to decorative programs of the 1830s, to the cartographic nature of domestic inventories.
Michal Lynn worked, studied, and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before relocating to Italy, and is co-founder of the research collective HAIR CLUB with Suzanne Gold and Kelly Lloyd.
Publications include:
“Space of the List: Mapping Domestic Inventories,” in Remediated Maps, Transmedial Approaches to Cartographic Imagination, edited by Tanja Michalsky and Tommaso Morawski, Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana. Rome: Campisano Editore, 2024, p. 145-168. (forthcoming)
HAIR + WAITING, Occasional Gallery: Stockholm, Sweden, 2024. (forthcoming)
“Promising Monsters: Imagining Medieval Space at the Ottocento Villa Torlonia,” Studi e Ricerche di Storia dell’architettura, Numero 15 (2024), p. 90-107.
“Behind the Roman Monument: Case Medioevali as Case Study,” archimaera: RÜCKSEITEN, Issue #9 (2021), p. 167-184.
“HAIR CLUB: Towards a Hair Studies Discipline.” In Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History. Edited by Cynthia Persinger and Azar Rejaie. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
“Color as Concept: from International Klein Blue to Viktor & Rolf’s Bluescreen.” In Colors in Fashion. Edited by Jonathan Faiers and Mary Westerman Bulgarella. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
“Fashion in the Expanded Field: The House of Viktor & Rolf and Valentino a Roma.” DRESS: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, Volume 40, Issue 1 (May 2014).