Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. This digital publication contains essays related to the exhibition Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now, which was on view January 16 through June 1, 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. Irreplaceable You featured works of art that resist the rendering of human lives into objects of consumption, data sets, and/or algorithms. The exhibition touched on subjects from the recent and not-so-recent past, looking at how art helps build our capacity for empathy when our worldviews are often shaped by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the Internet.

These essays were written as part of a scholarly colloquium held on Saturday, April 26, 2025, presented in conjunction with the exhibition. Colloquium panelists included Sascha Crasnow, Assistant Professor of Art History at Drake University, Laura De Becker, Chief Curator and Helmut and Candis Stern Curator of African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art, and Joshua Rashaad McFadden, visual artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Irreplaceable You was curated by Sean J. Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment Fund.