Bryn Mawr’s Homay King: Decoding Film, Art, and the Digital Age

Professor Homay King is the Chair of History of Art on the Marie Neuberger Fund of the Study of the Arts and on The Catherine Fales Fellowship. She will be giving an endowed lecture titled “Better Living in Eichlerville: California Modernism’s Influence on Apple” on Monday, Feb. 24.

As a teen, ���������� art historian and film theorist Homay King was so obsessed with pop artist Andy Warhol that the stellar student briefly lapsed in her academics.

“The one class I got a B in my whole high school career was chemistry, because I was secretly reading Warhol’s Philosophy of Andy Warhol while pretending to do my chemistry homework,” she says, laughing now.

King turned to documentaries, photographs, and recorded music in her quest, relentlessly playing the album The Velvet Underground & Nico that Warhol co-produced and that featured his banana cover art. She was also smitten with his Factory, where he directed a motley crew of avant-garde artists in silk screening and film making.

“I liked the aesthetic,” she says. More importantly, she was intrigued “that there could be elements of satire and critique in something as simple as an image of a soup can or Coca-Cola bottle.”

Arguably, that fascination has served to spark King’s passion for investigating through a theoretical framework modern culture as captured in films, digital media, contemporary art, ads, and even architecture. “I’ve always been interested in the social dimension, the cultural dimension of works of art,” she says.

On Feb. 24, King will speak on “Better Living in Eichlerville: California Modernism’s Influence on Apple” as part of the Catherine Fales Fellowship awarded last year. (The Marie Neuberger Fund for the Study of the Arts also supports her work). Based on an excerpt from her third book, the work-in-progress Go West: A Mythology of California’s Silicon Valley, the endowed lecture will examine the influence on Apple’s clean design of real-estate developer Joseph Eichler, known for his mid-century, modernist tract homes that featured glass walls and open floor plans.

The project is personal. King, the eldest of five girls, lived with her computer scientist father, a Taiwan emigree, and Irish Catholic, social worker mother who hailed from Cleveland in a Sunnyvale, Calif., Eichler home. Across the street was a cherry (alas, not apple) orchard that now houses the tech giant’s headquarters.

In Go West, King returns to a familiar theme that has dominated her scholarship: the mythology that informs contemporary culture. Here, she traces the history of Silicon Valley, the place, from Spanish colonialism to an innovation hub glorified as a golden land of opportunity for all. The 2021 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art supported her research.

“Of course, some people do strike it rich and live wonderful, healthy, abundant lives,” she says. “It’s also a myth.”

Why the interest in these cultural constructs?

“Fantasy and myths have consequences,” she adds. “They shape policy. They shape how people behave in their everyday lives. They shape beliefs. They shape politics.”

In her first book, Duke University Press, 2010), King critiqued depictions of East Asia in Western cinema, focusing on mise-en-scene, or setting décor and props. In 1940s films noirs (Shanghai Gesture, Lady from Shanghai), for example, villains’ homes are littered with Asian curios, some with Chinese language characters, as a way, she argued, to indicate deviousness and the unintelligible. “The China you see depicted in much of Hollywood cinema, and on occasion in Chinese cinema too, is a virtual one, an imaginary one,” she says. “It’s not that it’s simply false, or stereotyped, or Orientalist as [literary critic] Edward Said would have said. It’s a space apart.”

The significant scholarship caught the eye of Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and inspired the 2015 Met Gala’s provocative costume show——that spotlighted the work of Western fashion designers influenced by this enigmatic, make-believe nation. Homay wrote the catalog essay “Cinema’s Virtual Chinas.”

“At first, I was in disbelief,” she says of Bolton’s initial email that she almost deleted as spam. “But it was a personal invitation. It was such a shock.”

(Duke University Press, 2015), her next book, took on cyberspace, tracing the history of computers as omnipotent, of this “digital fantasy,” as she called it, through the musings of philosophers on time and matter and connections between virtual and temporal dimensions. It won the 2017 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

“There is a complexity and clarity in her thinking that has been really influential,” says Patricia White, the Centennial Professor of Film and Media Studies and director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, who works with King on the feminist film journal Camera Obscura. “She’s always trying to find the broader ideas that could illuminate the places that we find ourselves.”

White notes that King’s “optic” allows her to connect the seemingly disparate across mediums—the contemporary artist, a 1970s film and a building’s design, say—in elegant ways that consider the cultural and philosophical. “It’s really pleasurable to read,” she says, “like a beautiful, long essay in The New Yorker.”   

At Bryn Mawr, King has cultivated those same qualities in her students. “I have become more attentive to formal analysis and more precise in my prose—at least, I try!” says Hilde Nelson, a third-year graduate student advisee from Lake Villa, Ill., researching contemporary time-based media that includes film and video. “But perhaps most important to me, Dr. King is capacious in her thinking. I feel challenged and encouraged to pursue new, exciting, and even unexpected artists, practices and modes of inquiry.”

Even though King describes herself as “an omnivore” of mediums, she often concentrates her inquiry on film. Last year, she was a keynote at the Film-Philosophy Conference in Portugal. In 2021, she was a main contributor to the 2021 The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Volume 2, 1963-1965.

King grew up watching classic Hollywood movies featuring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and, perhaps as a harbinger of what was to come, that most famous of Mawrters, Katharine Hepburn. In high school, she discovered she could study cinema like she did poetry or fine art. “It really blew my mind,” she says, “and opened up a whole new world for me.”

That aha-moment led to majoring in modern culture and media at Brown University, where her thesis was on the daughterly duty in Chinese American film and literature. After a year as an Oakland community organizer, she began her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in rhetoric and film studies under the tutelage of renowned art historian Kaja Silverman and scholar Judith Butler and honed her expertise in theories and philosophies that could be applied to interpretations of visual culture.

After defending her dissertation in 2002, King joined Bryn Mawr. In 2006, she cofounded the College’s interdisciplinary film studies program. As art history chair, she has helped expand the department’s offerings beyond European art to a global panoply.

One of her favorite classes to teach is the intro course “The History of Narrative Cinema,” which surveys global films from the 1940s to the early 21^st century.

King says she relishes opening her students’ eyes, as hers were all those years ago, to the potential of film studies. “Films can be even more complex than still images, because you’re talking about 24 frames per second and adding dimensions of movement and time,” she says, her voice rising with enthusiasm. “I love the light-bulb moment that happens when they realize they can closely analyze film in the same way they would a work of literature or a painting.”