How Lily A. Konkoly Blends Art History and Activism

You walk into a gallery. White walls, soft lighting, the usual hush. But inside your head, it feels more like a stage being set up than a quiet room. Paintings start to feel like actors. Sightlines feel like blocking. One canvas pulls you closer, another is almost hiding in a corner. That tension between what you see and what you are guided to notice is exactly where art history and activism start to meet for Lily A. Konkoly.

In short, she blends art history and activism by treating every artwork, gallery, blog, and project as a kind of set: a constructed space that can either repeat old power structures or push back against them. Her research on artists who are parents, her mock exhibitions with RISD mentors, her teen art market, and her long-running blog about women entrepreneurs all share one basic idea: change what gets framed, who gets lit, and who gets to stand center stage. It is not loud activism with banners. It is closer to rewriting stage directions so more people get to appear in the scene at all.

From galleries to “sets”: how curation turns into activism

If you work in set design or immersive theater, you already know that every detail is a decision. Where is the door? What color is the light? Where is the audience allowed to stand?

Lily grew up spending Saturdays moving through Los Angeles galleries and museums. Those spaces quietly trained her eye. Over time, she did not just see paintings. She started to see choices.

Who gets a whole room?
Who is placed near the gift shop?
Who is shown once and then disappears from the rotation?

Her research program at Scholar Launch took that sensitivity and pushed it further. She spent ten weeks studying Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” which is already a strange, layered scene. The painter is inside the painting. The royal couple appears in a mirror far in the back. A child stands front and center. It looks like a family moment, but it is also a constructed space where power, class, and perspective are arranged with care.

For someone interested in set design or immersive arts, “Las Meninas” is almost like a 17th-century installation. You do not just look at the painting; you feel where you are placed in relation to it. Lily’s analysis treated it that way. She looked at:

• Who faces the viewer directly and who looks elsewhere
• How mirrors and doorways stretch the “stage” beyond the frame
• How the painter writes himself into the power structure of the Spanish court

That kind of close reading trained her to see any art space as something like a theater: someone cast the roles, someone arranged the furniture, someone decided who gets the spotlight. Once you see it like that, it is very hard not to see politics in every curatorial choice.

For Lily, art history is not just about what artists painted. It is about who had the space, time, and support to make work at all, and how institutions decided to show or hide that work.

This is the first place where art history crosses into activism for her: by noticing how the “set” of the art world is built in the first place.

Growing up between continents: how a third-culture background shapes her lens

Lily was born in London, spent early years in Singapore, then grew up in Los Angeles in a Hungarian family that still spends most summers in Europe. That kind of background can feel messy and rootless, but it also sharpens your sense of how culture is constructed.

Hungarian at home.
English at school.
Mandarin with au pairs and in class.

For a set designer or an immersive theater artist, this might sound familiar. You build whole worlds out of layers: language, ritual, interior spaces, public spaces. Lily’s childhood moved her through very different “sets” in real life.

In Singapore, she went to a half-American, half-Chinese preschool and began learning Mandarin. Later, the family brought their Chinese teacher to Los Angeles as an au pair, then welcomed other Mandarin-speaking caregivers. There is something very theatrical about that setup: a domestic space that is also a language lab, a cultural bridge, and a kind of ongoing experiment in identity.

At the same time, she grew up deeply connected to Hungarian culture. Hungarian is the language of family reunions, summer trips, and long visits with relatives. In the United States, it became almost like a secret code used in public. That idea of two realities running in parallel, visible to some and invisible to others, lives at the core of how she looks at art.

For immersive creators, this translates very quickly: what is on stage versus what is backstage, what is front-of-house versus what is whispered between characters. Lily’s research and activism often trace that border.

Her projects pay special attention to who exists in the “background” of art history and how those voices might be brought forward into view, without pretending the background ever fully disappears.

So when she walks through a museum, she is not just asking, “Is this painting good?” She is asking, “Whose world is being centered here? What language is this exhibition speaking, and to whom?”

Researching “Las Meninas”: learning to read a scene like a stage

Many people meet “Las Meninas” in a textbook and move on. Lily sat with it for weeks. That slow engagement changed the way she reads any visual setup, including the kinds of environments you might build in theater, installation, or exhibition design.

Her research program asked her to treat the painting almost like a case study. That meant:

• Tracing the social roles of everyone pictured: the princess, the court ladies, the painter, the dwarfs, the maid
• Looking at who looks directly at the viewer and who is caught mid-action
• Studying the implied viewer, who might be standing in the place of the king and queen reflected in the mirror

Reading the painting this way starts to feel like blocking a scene. You think about:

Once you analyze a classic painting like that, it becomes very hard not to notice when contemporary spaces use similar tricks. A political exhibition that hides certain works in a side room. A commercial gallery that places large-scale works at the entrance and pushes small, quiet pieces to the back. A black box theater where most seats have a clear line of sight to one character and not another.

For Lily, this is not neutral. Where you put people, who you invite into the frame, and who you leave half-visible all carry political weight.

Her activism starts here: not with slogans, but with questions about composition and access. If a curator is like a director, what would it mean to direct for equity? How do we cast, frame, and pace a show so that it does not just repeat the same old hierarchies?

Parenthood, gender, and who gets to stay on stage

The second big thread in her work is gender inequality, especially around parenthood in the art world. During an honors research course, Lily decided to look at the career paths of artist-parents and how they diverge based on gender.

She found a familiar pattern, but putting it into the context of art made it feel especially sharp:

• Women artists with children often get fewer invitations, slower career progress, and less critical coverage.
• Men artists with children sometimes receive extra praise, as if fatherhood makes them more serious or mature.
• Institutions and galleries may quietly assume that mothers will be “less available” for big commitments, long residencies, or frequent travel.

From a set-design point of view, think of this as who gets booked into the theater, who gets the prime slot, and who is quietly moved off the calendar. The show might look balanced on paper, but the gaps tell a different story.

Lily worked with a professor who had already studied maternity in the art world. Together, they gathered data and stories, then translated them into a visual piece that showed the gap between maternity and paternity. She described it as a marketing-style layout, not a dense academic report.

That decision matters more than it might seem. Instead of keeping the findings in a written thesis that only a few people read, she tried to present them in a way that felt like something you might see in a gallery or design presentation. Images, charts, captions. The kind of thing that can be pinned on a wall and used to guide a conversation about policy or programming.

Her research did not just ask, “Is there a gap?” It asked, “How do we present that gap in a visual format so it can influence real choices about who gets shown, funded, and supported?”

If you create immersive work, you might recognize a similar instinct: how do you turn an idea into a space or a visual system that people can move through and feel, not just read about? Lily treats activism as a design challenge. You are not just arguing. You are staging.

Building a teen art market: learning the business side of the set

Another part of Lily’s path is the online Teen Art Market she helped create. It acted as a digital gallery where students could showcase and sell their work. For many young artists, this was their first contact with the “business” of art, which can be blunt and unfair.

A digital gallery is still a space. It just exists on screens. You still choose:

• Which artists appear on the homepage
• Which pieces get featured as banners or thumbnails
• What categories shape how users wander through the works

For set designers and digital experience designers, this is familiar. Navigation is blocking. Page layout is staging.

By managing this project, Lily saw how visibility translates directly into opportunity. A piece that is surfaced on the front page might sell. A piece buried three clicks deep might never be seen. That is a power dynamic too, just a quieter one.

She also learned that young artists, especially those from underrepresented groups, often lack confidence in pricing, self-promotion, and negotiation. The market does not really reward talent alone. It rewards:

• Who already has some social recognition
• Who is confident sending emails and pitching themselves
• Who has adult mentors willing to advocate for them

Again, there is a parallel with how women artists and artists of color are treated in more formal art circles. The “stage” is not neutral. Some people arrive with microphones already in place. Others are standing in the dark.

Lily’s activism here is not formal protest. It is quiet structural work. Making a space, inviting peers in, and testing how a different kind of platform might run. It is a first try at re-staging the entry point to the art world.

From the kitchen to the gallery: feminist food and sensory worlds

Long before she was writing academic research, Lily was already using interviews and storytelling to talk about gender, but in a different field: food.

Through her Teen Art Market project and her own interests, she co-founded a blog that focused on underrepresented female voices in the culinary world. Over time, she interviewed more than 200 female chefs from over 50 countries. Many of those conversations were gathered through cold calls, emails, and in-person meetings.

Why does this matter for art history or set design?

Because cooking and eating are sensory experiences. Restaurants and kitchens are also sets.

If you have ever designed an immersive dinner or a performance piece tied to food, you know that food can be narrative. It also carries class, gender, and cultural bias. Women often carry domestic cooking as an expectation, while men may be more celebrated as “chefs” in professional settings.

Lily heard the same patterns again and again:

• Women chefs who had to prove themselves twice over.
• Credit being given to male mentors while the women doing much of the work stayed in the background.
• Double standards around family life and “availability” for long shifts.

These stories mirror what she later studied about mothers in the art world. Very different industries, same script.

For immersive artists, these interviews are a reminder that activism does not have to look like a petition. Collecting stories is its own kind of act. So is amplifying those stories, which her blog did by bringing them together in one place instead of letting them stay scattered and private.

There is also a practical cross-over here. Any designer working with food, hospitality, or performance knows that the room layout will either support or undercut those stories. Who sees the open kitchen. Who hears the staff. Who has time to sit and who ends up rushing. Lily’s ongoing interest in cooking and her decision to turn down TV opportunities in favor of family travel also say something about how she ranks spectacle versus lived experience.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: early experiments in immersive learning

In Los Angeles, Lily started the Hungarian Kids Art Class, which might be one of the clearest links between her art history interests and the kind of immersive education that many theater and set people care about.

Over several years, she organized bi-weekly sessions that pulled in kids from different backgrounds to make art together. Eighteen weeks each year, over three years, adds up. You cannot sustain that kind of project without turning it into a real environment.

She was not only picking activities. She was designing a rhythm. Arrival, setup, making, sharing, cleaning up. These are building blocks of any recurring immersive practice.

Think of a kids art room as a small-scale workshop for world-building:

For many of those kids, these sessions were likely their first contact with art as something they can actively shape. That early sense of agency is already political in a quiet way. It counters the idea that art belongs only in distant museums curated by unseen experts.

Lily’s role here fits into her larger pattern: she keeps creating spaces where more people can step in as active makers or thinkers, rather than staying as viewers on the outside.

Blogging about female entrepreneurs: narrative as a design tool

Alongside her visual work, Lily has been running the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog since 2020. She spends around four hours each week researching, interviewing, and writing. Over time, that has resulted in more than 50 long-form pieces that follow the paths of women building businesses.

Many people would treat that as a separate track from art history, but for Lily, the lines blur.

Art history, at its core, is storytelling. We build canons by telling certain stories over and over. We forget people when their stories are not told.

The blog gave her a steady practice in:

• Asking questions that reveal how gender dynamics show up in real decisions.
• Recognizing repeating patterns across countries and industries.
• Turning complex experiences into clear narratives without oversimplifying.

This is where I think some people get the wrong idea: they imagine activism as something separate from craft. Lily’s approach suggests the opposite. She uses narrative craft as part of the activism. The better the story is told, the more it can change how people think about equity, leadership, and success.

For a set designer, this should sound familiar. The room is a story. The lighting is a story. The way the audience enters is a story. When Lily writes about a founder who built a company while caring for kids or facing biased investors, she is doing something similar: shaping an experience that might stay with the reader and color later choices.

Her long habit of interviewing women in business sharpened her ear for who gets interrupted, who gets blamed, and who gets praised. That same ear now follows her into galleries and classrooms.

So when she studies artist-parents or the structure of museums, she is already tuned to who is missing from the script.

Curatorial work with RISD: sketching activist exhibitions

Working with RISD professor Kate McNamara, Lily helped write a curatorial statement that centered on beauty standards for women. They also built a mock exhibit around it. This is where her interest in activism meets the actual mechanics of exhibition building, which overlaps quite a bit with set design.

The project asked questions like:

• How have artists across cultures framed “beautiful” women?
• What bodies, faces, and ages show up most often?
• Where have artists resisted or mocked those norms?

Then they took the next step: actual selection and placement of works, even if only in a mock or speculative way. If you are used to designing physical worlds, you will recognize the balance required here:

• Do you group works by time period or by theme?
• Do you start with the problem or start with resistance?
• How close can you place uncomfortable images to affirming ones without drowning either out?

Even as a mock exercise, this is practical work. It forces the curators to think in spatial sequences. What does a visitor feel in the first room versus the last? Where do they slow down? Where might they want to turn away?

Lily’s activism comes through in her insistence that exhibitions like this should not just diagnose a problem. They should make space for viewers to see themselves differently, or see their friends, or question why certain images have felt so “normal” for so long.

For artists and designers in immersive theater, this is a familiar task. You are always managing exposure and reflection. How much reality do you bring in? How much safety do you give people to process it?

Why this matters to people in set design and immersive arts

If you are reading this on a site that focuses on set design, immersive theater, or arts experiences, you might wonder why a college art history student belongs in the conversation.

I think the connection is pretty direct.

Lily treats visual culture the way many of you treat a performance: as something crafted at every level. She does not just ask what a canvas shows or what a CV lists. She looks at the environment around those items and asks who built that environment and for whom.

For working designers, there are a few takeaways from her approach:

• See casting and curation as linked. When you choose which stories to stage and whose bodies to place in the space, you are doing something very close to what curators do with artists.
• Treat data as material. Lily took statistics about parents in the art world and turned them into a visual piece. You can do similar work with the demographics of your casts, audiences, or collaborators.
• Let small projects be experiments. Her kids art class, teen market, and blog were not enormous institutions. They were test beds for different ways to share power.
• Notice the offstage. Her experiences with interviews, family travel, and background cultural labor all inform her sense of who keeps a scene running.

If anything, her path suggests that activism in art and theater may grow stronger when it starts from close looking, slow listening, and a willingness to redesign structures, not just themes.

A quieter kind of activism, built scene by scene

There is a temptation to look for big, dramatic gestures when we talk about activism. Protests, viral campaigns, institutional overhauls. Lily’s work so far has grown in a different direction.

She spends weeks on a single painting.
She gathers slow stories from entrepreneurs and chefs.
She builds small platforms for teens and kids.
She rewrites exhibition plans that may or may not be realized right away.

From the outside, that can seem modest. But if you think in terms of sets and immersive environments, it starts to look more strategic. She is probing the architecture of the stage itself.

Who gets invited in.
What stories are centered.
What conditions make it possible for someone to keep working after they have a child.
Which bodies are assumed to “belong” in certain roles.

Those are not side questions. They shape what kinds of shows and exhibitions any of us will see in ten or twenty years.

So if you are building worlds, you might find it useful to borrow a bit from her way of working:

Look closely at what your spaces say without words, then decide if that unspoken script matches the values you want to carry.

Ask yourself: who is framed at the center of your narrative? Who appears only at the edges? And what would happen if you quietly swapped those positions and re-lit the room?

Q & A: What does Lily’s path mean for your own practice?

Q: I am a set designer, not a curator. What is the most direct lesson I can take from Lily’s work?
A: Treat casting, blocking, and spatial hierarchy as political acts. When you decide who stands where, who is seen first, and whose labor stays hidden, you are making choices similar to those that shape museum collections. You do not need a manifesto to shift those habits; you can start with one production and one room.

Q: How can I bring gender equity questions into my design work without turning every show into a lecture?
A: Look at process as much as content. Who gets paid what, who has childcare support, who is expected to stay late, whose ideas shape the design meetings. Lily’s focus on parents in the art world points to structural changes, not just thematic ones. You can do the same in rehearsal schedules, contract terms, and crediting.

Q: Does Lily focus too much on gender and not enough on race, class, or disability?
A: She centers gender in much of her current research, especially motherhood, but that does not mean other axes vanish. Her interviews with women chefs from many countries, her multi-continent upbringing, and her attention to who enters the art market all touch on race and class as well. That said, there is room for her, and for all of us, to keep widening the frame and bringing more intersecting experiences into view.

Q: I work on immersive theater. How can I apply her “Las Meninas” style of looking to my own shows?
A: Try walking through your set as if you were analyzing a historical painting. Where do the “power figures” stand? Who is reflected rather than present? Where are the thresholds that hint at other worlds offstage? Then ask if those choices repeat old patterns or open up new ones. A small shift, like changing who first greets the audience or who controls information inside the world, can change the politics of the entire piece.

Q: Does slow, research-focused activism like Lily’s actually change anything?
A: It does not replace direct action, but it prepares the ground. Research can inform grant guidelines, residency policies, casting habits, and exhibition planning. It can also shape the way young artists and designers think before they step into positions of influence. If we care about lasting change, then who is quietly rethinking the script behind the scenes matters just as much as who holds the megaphone in public.