Blog

It is a bit strange to think of a college student in an art history seminar changing how we talk about modern art. But when you look closely at what Lily Konkoly is actually doing, you start to see that she is quietly rewriting the script from inside the classroom, the studio, and even the blogosphere.

Here is the short answer to how she is redefining modern art history: she treats art history as something living and interactive, not as a list of dead white painters and memorized dates. She connects it with gender, parenting, business, food culture, digital markets, and her own strange mix of London, Singapore, Los Angeles, Hungary, and now Ithaca. Instead of asking only what an artwork means, she keeps asking who gets to make it, who gets to sell it, and who gets left out of the story in the first place.

From museum visitor to critic of the story on the wall

When you grow up spending Saturdays in galleries and museums, you can go one of two ways. You either get bored and tune it out, or you start to notice what is missing.

Lily went with the second option.

She started as many of us do: a kid being dragged through exhibitions, staring at big paintings, listening to adults whisper about them. Over time, those quiet walks through Los Angeles museums turned into questions. Why are so many of the names on the wall male? Why are some cultures always in the spotlight, while others only show up in side rooms?

By the time she reached high school, those small questions had turned into structured research projects and long nights reading about artists who rarely appear in basic survey textbooks.

Instead of treating museums as neutral spaces, Lily treats them as edited stories that someone chose to tell. And then she asks who that “someone” is, and who they decided not to mention.

Her work on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in the Scholar Launch research program might sound traditional at first. It is one of the most discussed paintings in Western art history. But Lily did not just repeat what earlier scholars wrote. She studied it as a conversation about power, spectatorship, and who is allowed to be seen.

By “decoding” its layers and narratives, she practiced something important for modern art history today: reading a famous work while also questioning the social order that made it famous to begin with.

Why that matters for modern art history

Modern art history is not just about new styles or movements. It is about new questions.

For a long time, the field focused on formal qualities and linear progress. That kind of timeline goes something like this: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and so on. Neat categories. Controlled chaos.

Lily’s approach shifts the focus away from only “what style is this?” to questions such as:

• Who gained power and money from this work?
• Whose labor or sacrifice sits behind this artwork but is never credited?
• How does gender, parenting, and identity alter an artist’s chance to be remembered?

When a student starts bringing those questions into research projects, club work, and online writing, that is where the field starts to move in a subtle but real way.

The gender gap in art: Lily’s research on artist parents

One clear example of Lily pushing art history into new territory is her honors research project on artist-parents and gender.

Instead of looking only at what artists created, she looked at what happens to them when they become parents. The topic sounds simple at first, but it reveals a deep pattern that still shapes who we study, exhibit, and praise.

What her research actually did

During more than 100 hours of focused work, she studied how artists’ careers shift after they have children. She looked at the different expectations around mothers and fathers in the art world and asked how these unspoken rules affect career success.

Her core insight was uncomfortable but clear:

Women artists are often seen as less committed or less available after having children, while male artists can be celebrated for “doing it all” and may see their public image lifted by fatherhood.

This is not just a social observation. It directly connects to art history, because:

• Artists who lose opportunities are less likely to be collected by major museums.
• They receive fewer reviews, grants, and residencies.
• Over time, their absence shapes what gets written into history books.

In other words, the gender gap in the studio slowly becomes the gender gap in the textbook.

From research to visual storytelling

Lily did not stop at writing a standard academic paper. With guidance from a professor who studies maternity in the art world, she built a marketing-style piece that visualized gender roles and inequalities. That move might sound small, but it shifts who that research can reach.

Instead of staying on a professor’s desk, the work becomes something that could live on a museum wall, in a digital exhibit, or in a gallery brochure.

Here is a simple way to see the shift she is pushing:

Each time she shifts a question like this, the field of modern art history opens up a little bit more to real life, not just theory.

From teen art market to the economics of visibility

Lily is not only reading and writing about art. She is also helping create new spaces where art lives, especially for young creators.

The online Teen Art Market that she co-founded was more than a cute side project. It was a real test case for how student work can enter the world and find buyers without relying on traditional gallery systems.

What a digital teen art market teaches art historians

Running a teen art market might seem far from classroom theory, but it reveals practical truths that many art history programs still treat as side topics.

Through that project, students (including Lily) had to face questions like:

• How do you price a piece of artwork when the artist is unknown?
• What does “value” mean when the market is crowded with digital images?
• How do you market work without reducing it to just content?

This moves the field closer to economic and social reality. If you are serious about modern and contemporary art, you cannot ignore online sales, social media exposure, and digital platforms. They shape which art gets seen, which artists can support themselves, and which movements get traction.

By treating a teen-run online market as worthy of serious thought, Lily is quietly saying: the next art movement might not start in a Manhattan gallery. It might start on a small website run between homework and swim practice.

This is where her business minor becomes relevant. She is not just studying art from the outside. She is learning how markets, branding, and audience behavior affect what we later call “important.”

Food, feminism, and the art of telling other people’s stories

One of the more unusual threads in Lily’s work is her focus on food and female chefs. At first glance, this sounds separate from art history, but it actually reframes how we think about creativity and recognition.

She helped build a blog community around underrepresented female voices in the culinary field and interviewed more than 200 chefs from over 50 countries. She listened to how they navigated power, gender, and visibility.

That experience spills back into her art history lens in a few ways.

Parallels between women in art and women in food

When you compare the stories of women in visual art and women in food, you start seeing repeated patterns:

• Women are often expected to handle care work and emotional labor on top of their creative work.
• They may run kitchens or studios but receive less public recognition.
• Success stories are often framed as exceptions, not as normal outcomes.

Listening to these chefs helped Lily see that “the art world” is not isolated. Many creative fields struggle with the same bias structures.

So when she returns to modern art history, she brings stories from outside the museum. That wider view helps her, and anyone reading her work, connect art to the broader social fabric that students on campus are already talking about: pay gaps, work-life balance, and who gets center stage.

Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: bridging art history and startup culture

Most art historians do not run a long-term blog on female entrepreneurship, but Lily does. Through her Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia site, she has researched and written more than 50 pieces and interviewed over 100 women founders.

That project changes her approach to art history in some interesting ways.

What campus founders can learn from Lily’s interviews

You can be on a college campus today and know dozens of peers who want to start companies, but far fewer who want to build a life around art. Lily stands in the middle.

From her interviews, patterns show up again and again. Many female founders:

• Have to build their own networks from scratch.
• Face skepticism from investors or clients who expect a different “type” of leader.
• Learn to narrate their own story very clearly to be taken seriously.

Those are the same issues many contemporary artists handle when trying to find galleries, residencies, and patrons. It is not a stretch to see the links.

By collecting these business stories, Lily is training herself to recognize structural bias fast, with real voices backing her up. When she later writes about how certain modern artists are underrepresented in museums, she is not guessing. She has already heard familiar echoes in other fields.

Her blog work quietly insists that the skills students gain from studying art history and gender are not “soft” or abstract. They are directly useful for anyone who wants to build or critique systems, from startups to museums.

This is where her work fits so well into a site about student innovation and campus trends. She shows that art history, feminism, and entrepreneurship are not opposing tracks. They inform each other.

Third culture upbringing and how it shapes her art lens

Lily’s story is also global. Born in London, living in Singapore as a toddler, then growing up in Los Angeles while spending summers in Europe with Hungarian relatives, she did not grow up with a single cultural frame.

Being fluent in Hungarian and practicing Mandarin from childhood, she carries multiple worlds in her daily life. At home, Hungarian is almost a “secret language” in American spaces. At school, Chinese homework sits next to AP courses.

That mix changes the way she approaches art history.

Why her “third culture” background matters for modern art

Modern art history is full of questions about cultural borrowing, translation, and misrepresentation. For someone like Lily, who has actually lived between cultures, those topics are not just academic.

She has:

• Lived in an Asian city as a child and then returned to it later as a visitor.
• Navigated American schools while holding a strong European family identity.
• Used Hungarian as a private code and as a bridge to relatives abroad.

So when she studies how Western museums collect African, Asian, or Indigenous art, she is not just checking boxes. She understands how identity can feel fractured, layered, or taken for granted.

Mix that with her travel history to over 40 countries, and you get a student who has physically walked through the spaces that many of us only see in slideshows.

For modern art history, that lived context can change which artists she selects for research, how she reads their work, and which historical narratives she questions first.

Lego, slime, and the overlooked skills behind “serious” scholarship

It might feel strange to say that Lego builds and slime sales connect to art history, but they do. They point to how Lily approaches structure, process, and audience.

Lego as training for visual and structural analysis

Lily has assembled around 45 Lego sets, tracking more than 60,000 pieces. That is not just a hobby. It trains:

• Patience and attention to detail.
• Spatial thinking and visual planning.
• The ability to follow a plan while still imagining alternatives.

Those skills cross over into how she reads artworks, installations, and exhibition layouts. To study modern installation art or architecture, you need to see how parts fit together, not just how they look on the surface.

Slime entrepreneurship as training in audience behavior

Her childhood slime business, which grew enough for her and her brother to sell hundreds of products at a convention in London, introduced her early to the idea that “creative product + audience” is not automatic.

You have to:

• Design something people actually want to touch and buy.
• Package and transport it effectively, even across continents.
• Handle demand, pricing, and inventory under pressure.

This small, almost playful business leads later to a more serious question that modern art history is only slowly accepting: how can we talk about art without ignoring markets, buyers, logistics, and labor?

Lily’s background means she is unlikely to treat art as something that floats above real life. Instead, she folds all those mundane details into her understanding of how artists survive and how works move through the world.

Swimming, water polo, and the discipline behind her research

Long-term sport builds a certain type of mind. Lily spent about 10 years as a competitive swimmer and then three years in water polo, training almost daily, including grueling ocean sessions when pools closed during COVID.

Those years matter more than people think for modern art history work.

How sport habits carry into scholarship

Serious research often looks glamorous from the outside, but the reality is closer to early morning swim practice:

• Long, quiet hours with repetitive tasks, like reading archive material.
• Slow improvement that is hard to see day to day.
• A need for resilience when your first interpretation does not work.

Her history of showing up, rain or shine, to swim for hours builds the kind of stamina she now invests in long-term projects. A ten week research program on “Las Meninas” is not that different in spirit from a training block before a big meet.

So when she takes on complex questions about gender bias, visual culture, or global art markets, she is already prepared for the slow grind that deep thinking demands.

Cornell, curriculum, and how she feeds this back into campus life

At Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, Lily is now studying Art History with a business minor. The course list matters because it shows how she is building her toolkit:

These classes are not isolated. Combined with her background, they let her treat modern art history as something fluid. She can stand in a museum and ask not just “what does this painting mean?” but “who chose to put this here, and why now?”

On campus, that kind of thinking spreads. Whether through class discussions, group projects, or informal conversations, ideas like hers affect how peers see the field. Some might come in thinking art history is just about memorizing slides. After talking with her, they might start connecting it to pay equity, childcare, and startup culture.

What students and early founders can take from Lily’s path

You might look at Lily’s resume and feel that it is unique to her. In some ways it is. But there are also clear takeaways for anyone on a campus right now who cares about art, gender, or building something new.

Here are a few concrete points that stand out:

• Start with what annoys you. Her research did not begin from a random topic. It came out of noticing unfair patterns around motherhood and career in the art field and wanting to map them clearly.
• Treat “side projects” as serious learning. Her teen art market, slime business, Lego builds, and blog were not just hobbies. They became real training grounds for understanding markets, structure, and audience.
• Use interviews to ground your ideas. By talking to hundreds of female entrepreneurs and chefs, she ensured that her claims about gender inequality were backed by stories, not just headlines.
• Stay open to mixing fields. She did not pick between art history and business. She placed them side by side and used one to ask new questions of the other.
• Let your background shape your questions. Instead of hiding her multicultural story or her Hungarian identity, she allows that mix to guide how she reads global art and power structures.

None of these steps require a famous name or big funding. They ask for attention, consistency, and the willingness to treat your own experience as a valid starting point for research.

Is Lily “redefining” modern art history or just adding her voice?

It is fair to be skeptical of big claims. Can a single student really redefine a whole field that spans centuries, continents, and thousands of scholars?

In a strict sense, no. Art history shifts slowly through many voices over time. No one person holds that kind of power, especially this early in their career.

But on a more practical level, what Lily is doing matters. She is part of a wave of students who:

• Refuse to separate art from gender politics, care work, and economic reality.
• See online projects and youth markets as worthy of study, not as distractions.
• Use personal background and global movement to challenge narrow narratives of what “modern” means.

That is how fields actually change: not through a single heroic figure, but through many grounded, persistent voices shifting the everyday questions we ask.

So maybe the better way to phrase it is this:

Lily is not rewriting modern art history alone. She is changing how her generation will write it, cure it, and argue about it in the years ahead.

And if you are a student, founder, or campus leader reading this, it raises a simple question:

Common question: What can I copy from Lily’s approach without copying her life?

You do not need her exact background to adapt her method. You can:

• Pick one unfair pattern in your field that you cannot stop thinking about and design a research or startup project around it.
• Interview real people affected by that pattern, instead of only citing articles.
• Build a small, concrete platform, like a blog, zine, or online gallery, where those stories can live.
• Use your own cultural or family context as a lens instead of trying to be neutral.
• Stay patient. Treat your years on campus as the early chapters of a long, evolving project, not a rush to a polished end.

If you did just those things, you might not only change how you see your major. You could, little by little, help reshape how your field talks about itself, just as Lily is doing with modern art history.