MA Student Grace Helmick Wins Poster Award at Virginia Association of Museums Annual Conference

MA student Grace Helmick was recently awarded first place in the 2026 Student Poster Competition at the Virginia Association of Museums Annual Conference, held in Williamsburg between March 14-17. The competition was open to undergraduate and graduate students as well as early career museum professionals, showcasing presentations on a range of museum-based research projects.

Helmick presented her ongoing research into a collection of photographs of nineteenth-century Indigenous leaders taken by photographer Charles Milton Bell, a collection that is now housed in the William & Mary Special Collections Research Center at SWEM library. Her presentation focused specifically on Bell’s portrait of Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, produced during Red Cloud’s visit to Washington DC in June of 1880. Drawing from a range of sources, methodologies and theories—including archival research in William & Mary’s Special Collections and exploration of newspapers, correspondence, and delegation records, close visual analysis of the 1880 photograph, theories of performance and representation, and frameworks drawn from critical Indigenous studies and Lakota cultural paradigms—Helmick’s presentation framed Charles Milton Bell’s photography studio as a diplomatic stage and his photographs as sites of strategic negotiation in which Indigenous leaders like Red Cloud could exercise agency over their visual representation. In Helmick’s words, “rather than reading the photograph as a static colonial artifact, this analysis reads it as a constructed encounter—one in which meaning was negotiated through posture, regalia, props, and the camera’s gaze.” Her poster presentation ultimately suggested that the 1880 portrait of Red Cloud constituted, in her words, “a staged diplomatic encounter in which Red Cloud strategically appropriated photographic conventions to assert political presence and visual sovereignty.”