2025 Annual Lecture: Melanie Keen
Art + Christianity’s 2025 annual lecture will be given by the Director of the Wellcome Collection, Melanie Keen.
The Ancient Art of Mothering: from iconography to lived experience
The painting of The Virgin of Guadalupe (1745) provides a rich starting point for the joyful exploration of iconographic images of motherhood and conceptions of gender and race which can help us understand the craft of mothering and birthing today. Moving between ideas of faith, pain, and healing from the medieval period towards more contemporary expressions of the mother and child in visual culture, a central question to ponder will be: how much does this exploration really help us to improve maternal health outcomes now?
About Melanie Keen, Director of the Wellcome Collection
Melanie Keen is Director of the Wellcome Collection in London, part of Wellcome, the global charitable foundation. Its vision is a world where everyone’s experience of health matters and a goal is to give voice to radical imagination on what health is and what it could be. Keen is committed to reshaping our cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health and health equity. A graduate of the RCA (Royal College of Art), Keen has worked as a curator and as a senior manager in arts policy and funding at the Arts Council England. Prior to joining Wellcome Collection in 2019, she was Director and Chief Curator at pioneering arts organisation Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).
She is an advisor at the Government Art Collection; on the Board of Visitors of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; and a trustee of Raven Row gallery, London. She has served as a judge on prestigious arts awards and most recently, she was on the jury of the Turner Prize 2023, and a judge for the Dezeen Awards 2024.
She speaks regularly at public events and in 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London (UAL) for her contribution to curation and arts management.
Pictures: Melanie Keen © Christa Holka and The Virgin of Guadalupe. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. wellcomecollection.org/works/e6fu9h82
Art + Christianity’s 2025 annual lecture will be given by the Director of the Wellcome Collection, Melanie Keen.
The Ancient Art of Mothering: from iconography to lived experience
The painting of The Virgin of Guadalupe (1745) provides a rich starting point for the joyful exploration of iconographic images of motherhood and conceptions of gender and race which can help us understand the craft of mothering and birthing today. Moving between ideas of faith, pain, and healing from the medieval period towards more contemporary expressions of the mother and child in visual culture, a central question to ponder will be: how much does this exploration really help us to improve maternal health outcomes now?
About Melanie Keen, Director of the Wellcome Collection
Melanie Keen is Director of the Wellcome Collection in London, part of Wellcome, the global charitable foundation. Its vision is a world where everyone’s experience of health matters and a goal is to give voice to radical imagination on what health is and what it could be. Keen is committed to reshaping our cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health and health equity. A graduate of the RCA (Royal College of Art), Keen has worked as a curator and as a senior manager in arts policy and funding at the Arts Council England. Prior to joining Wellcome Collection in 2019, she was Director and Chief Curator at pioneering arts organisation Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).
She is an advisor at the Government Art Collection; on the Board of Visitors of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; and a trustee of Raven Row gallery, London. She has served as a judge on prestigious arts awards and most recently, she was on the jury of the Turner Prize 2023, and a judge for the Dezeen Awards 2024.
She speaks regularly at public events and in 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London (UAL) for her contribution to curation and arts management.
Pictures: Melanie Keen © Christa Holka and The Virgin of Guadalupe. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. wellcomecollection.org/works/e6fu9h82
Art + Christianity’s 2025 annual lecture will be given by the Director of the Wellcome Collection, Melanie Keen.
The Ancient Art of Mothering: from iconography to lived experience
The painting of The Virgin of Guadalupe (1745) provides a rich starting point for the joyful exploration of iconographic images of motherhood and conceptions of gender and race which can help us understand the craft of mothering and birthing today. Moving between ideas of faith, pain, and healing from the medieval period towards more contemporary expressions of the mother and child in visual culture, a central question to ponder will be: how much does this exploration really help us to improve maternal health outcomes now?
About Melanie Keen, Director of the Wellcome Collection
Melanie Keen is Director of the Wellcome Collection in London, part of Wellcome, the global charitable foundation. Its vision is a world where everyone’s experience of health matters and a goal is to give voice to radical imagination on what health is and what it could be. Keen is committed to reshaping our cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health and health equity. A graduate of the RCA (Royal College of Art), Keen has worked as a curator and as a senior manager in arts policy and funding at the Arts Council England. Prior to joining Wellcome Collection in 2019, she was Director and Chief Curator at pioneering arts organisation Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).
She is an advisor at the Government Art Collection; on the Board of Visitors of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; and a trustee of Raven Row gallery, London. She has served as a judge on prestigious arts awards and most recently, she was on the jury of the Turner Prize 2023, and a judge for the Dezeen Awards 2024.
She speaks regularly at public events and in 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London (UAL) for her contribution to curation and arts management.
Pictures: Melanie Keen © Christa Holka and The Virgin of Guadalupe. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. wellcomecollection.org/works/e6fu9h82
