Ornament and Ideology: Reading Beneath the Surface of Gilded Age Art

Chinoiserie, a style invented in early modern Europe around the fantasies of the East, had a long afterlife, particularly in Gilded Age America, where it took on new forms in the paintings of artists such as Howard Gardiner Cushing.

Join associate curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Iris Moon, as she explores how this style, initially associated with colorful, exotic, and ornamental luxury goods imported from Asia such as porcelain, mirrors, and lacquer furniture first came to obsess European consumers and makers, and how it subsequently shaped fantasies and projections that birthed modern ideas of race, gender, and sexuality.

Iris Moon is an assistant curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she specializes in ceramics. Moon most recently curated the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, in 2025. This exhibition radically reimagined the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens.

With an undergraduate degree from Williams College and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Moon has earned fellowships at The Met, the Clark Art Institute, and the Getty Research Institute. She has also served as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, and, in 2016, published her dissertation, The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France.