The work of iconic Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha has long been a source of fascination for its appealing aesthetic qualities, yet there has been little in the way of critical analysis of his work. Considering that Mucha is most famous for the commercial posters he produced around the turn of the century, all of which featured a woman as their subject, this results in a gap in the academic literature that overlooks the fact that it is arguably the women who are the real “product” being advertised. This paper focuses on one of Mucha’s iconic posters, the 1896 poster for JOB cigarette papers, the first of two Mucha produced. It argues that femininity is performed in Mucha’s poster the way that Judith Butler describes in her article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” as the female subject wears modernity like a skin and performs freedom without truly being a liberated woman.

After contextualizing Mucha’s JOB poster in the social and economic climate of fin de siècle Paris, this paper will speak to the complex role women played in nineteenth-century society, as companies were slowly beginning to advertise more specifically towards women, despite the persistent restrictions of patriarchal society.

Oftentimes indigenous objects in Western museums are displayed with little to no context, making them seem divorced from the presence of their community. This article engages with the Southern Cheyenne’s Child’s Moccasins on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Art of Native America. By taking a critical approach to the exhibition practices, this article hopes to present a case for the embodiment of community within their display. With specific attention given to a visual analysis of the Child’s Moccasins, as well as a discussion of the generationality behind their creation, the article intends to broadly highlight possible ways of engaging with these objects in the museum space.