If you strip it down to the basics, the way Lily Konkoly blends art history and activism is actually quite simple: she studies how images shape power, gender, and beauty, then turns that knowledge into concrete projects that challenge bias in the art world and beyond. She reads paintings, museum labels, and career paths of artists almost like case studies of discrimination, and then uses research, writing, and small but real platforms to ask better questions about who gets seen, who gets paid, and who gets quietly pushed aside.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is more layered, and probably more useful if you care about anti-discrimination work.
How a childhood around museums turned into a critical lens
Lily did not start by calling herself an activist. She started as a kid in a family that spent a lot of Saturdays walking through galleries and museums in Los Angeles and Europe. That kind of routine, hour after hour looking at paintings and objects, builds a certain comfort with visual culture. You start to feel that art is not distant or mysterious. It is just there, and you are allowed to look at it closely and ask questions.
Growing up Hungarian, born in London, spending a year in Singapore, then landing in Los Angeles, she moved through several cultural contexts before she was even in high school. At home she spoke Hungarian. At preschool in Singapore she was learning Mandarin. In Los Angeles she was dealing with American school culture. None of those spaces worked the same way.
Her early life made one thing obvious very quickly: there is no single “normal” culture, and that matters a lot when you start judging whose stories appear on museum walls.
That multicultural background is not a side note. It trained her to notice which stories are centered, which languages are treated as default, and which communities are expected to adapt. When you carry that awareness into art history, it becomes hard to ignore how Western, male, and Eurocentric many collections and textbooks still are.
By the time she reached high school, Lily had already logged years of casual museum time. The difference is that she began to add structure on top of that curiosity. She took art history courses. She learned to read an image not only as “beautiful” or “interesting” but as a product of its time, tied to real power structures and real human lives.
Turning a canonical painting into a political question
Las Meninas and the politics of who is seen
One of the clearest examples of how Lily blends art history and activism is her research on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” Many students study that painting for composition or technique. Lily studied it as part of a 10 week research program, looking at its layers of power, representation, and gaze.
“Las Meninas” is often described as a puzzle: the painter in the picture, the young Infanta, the dwarfs, the figures in the background, the reflection of the king and queen in the mirror. Where are we, the viewers, supposed to stand? Who is actually the subject?
Lily took those classic questions and pushed them a bit further. Who has agency in the painting? Who is looking, and who is looked at? Who is framed as central, and who is present but marginal, almost decorative?
When you start to see a famous painting not just as an achievement of one “great master,” but as a dense record of class, gender, and power, it becomes much easier to link art history to current debates about visibility and representation.
That link is where activism enters. You can look at Velázquez’s court and then ask: who occupies that “background servant” space in our own cultural images now? Which groups are always in the frame but rarely at the center of the narrative?
Lily’s writing on “Las Meninas” did not preach modern values back onto a 17th century work. She tried to stay grounded in historical context. But the habit of reading carefully for power dynamics is something she carries into contemporary questions about discrimination in museums, galleries, and the wider cultural sector.
Studying art history with discrimination in mind
Cornell, coursework, and a focus on structures
At Cornell University, Lily studies Art History with a Business minor. On paper, that looks like a classic pairing: theory plus structure. For her, it is more than that. It is a way to hold the content of art and the systems that circulate it in the same frame.
Her art history coursework covers things like:
- Art and Visual Culture
- History of Renaissance Art
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Museum Studies
- Curatorial Practices
Those subjects raise questions about who collects, who curates, and who gets written into art history survey courses. Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices in particular invite students to think about gatekeeping. Who decides which artists deserve wall space? Who shapes the labels that guide visitors’ understanding?
At the same time, the Business minor keeps her close to topics like marketing, pricing, and market access. When you talk about discrimination in art without looking at money, you risk staying at the level of slogans. But the reality is that galleries, auction houses, and even nonprofit spaces operate inside economic logics.
Lily is not just asking “Do women and marginalized artists appear in exhibitions?” She is also asking, “Do they get the same prices, the same promotion, the same long term institutional support?”
This double focus is what makes her path feel different from a standard art history track. She is interested in the politics of images and the politics of careers at the same time.
From theory to research: gender, parenting, and artistic careers
Why look at artist-parents at all?
During an honors research project in high school, Lily chose a topic that sits at the intersection of gender studies, labor, and art: the success disparities between artist-parents based on gender.
On the surface, that might sound like a niche subject. But if you look closely, it reveals a lot about broader discriminatory patterns. The question is simple enough: what happens to an artist’s career when they become a parent, and how does that change depending on whether they are a mother or a father?
Lily spent more than 100 hours over the summer collecting data, reading case studies, and analyzing how motherhood and fatherhood are framed in the art world. She found a pattern that will not surprise many readers of an anti-discrimination site, but it is still uncomfortable to confront.
| Aspect | Mother Artists | Father Artists |
|---|---|---|
| Assumptions about time | Often assumed to be less available, less focused, more distracted. | Often seen as stable, dedicated, still committed to their practice. |
| Public narrative | Motherhood framed as a potential career “interruption” or “sacrifice.” | Fatherhood framed as admirable “balancing” of roles, even heroic. |
| Career impact | Loss of opportunities, fewer invitations, skepticism from curators. | Sometimes increased visibility, seen as more “relatable” or mature. |
| Perceived seriousness | Questioned: “Can she still be serious about her art?” | Rarely questioned on this basis. |
Her research suggests that motherhood often triggers doubts about professional commitment, while fatherhood can even enhance an artist’s image. That double standard is not unexpected, but seeing it play out in a specific field like contemporary art makes it sharper.
Guided by a professor who studies these issues, Lily did not only write a traditional paper. She also created a marketing style visual piece that shows how gendered expectations shape career arcs. Graphics, charts, and short narratives can make data readable beyond academic circles, and this is where her interest in communication and advocacy shows up.
For someone interested in anti-discrimination, this project matters because it focuses on structure, not individual choice. It does not say “some women choose family over career,” which is often used to excuse inequality. It asks: what happens when an art world that claims to be progressive still reacts differently to mothers and fathers who are both trying to maintain a professional practice?
Curating beauty standards as a political act
Working with RISD on beauty and the female body
Lily’s collaboration with a RISD professor on a curatorial statement around beauty standards for women shows another side of her approach. Here the focus is not on career trajectories but on how women’s bodies and faces are represented across art history.
For that project, she worked on a mock exhibition that brought together artworks from different periods and cultures, all engaging with the idea of female beauty. Some pieces supported narrow, idealized images. Others challenged them outright. The point was not to define a correct standard, but to show how shaped and restricted beauty ideals can be.
In many societies, beauty norms have been used to police women: what they wear, how they age, how they present in public. Art often mirrors these norms, sometimes questions them, and sometimes reinforces them quietly.
By curating images of women together, Lily was not just arranging objects. She was asking visitors to see beauty standards as constructed, political, and uneven in their effects on different groups of women.
This touches on discrimination in a subtle way. It is not always about explicit bans or laws. It can be about the repeated visual message that only certain bodies, certain skin tones, certain ages, and certain gender expressions deserve admiration.
Lily’s curatorial work points to a useful practice for readers: pay attention to which images of women you live with daily, in museums, ads, social media, and shows. Ask whose beauty is normalized and whose existence is treated as “alternative” or “edgy.”
From galleries to blogs: activism through storytelling
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia and gender in business
Lily does not confine her interest in inequality to the art world. Through the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog, she has spent years interviewing women in business. More than 100 entrepreneurs, from different countries and sectors, told her their stories.
Across those interviews, certain themes kept resurfacing:
- Women needing to prove competence multiple times to be trusted.
- Investors asking more about risk and family plans than about ideas.
- Media stories focusing on personality and appearance more than on strategy.
- Pay gaps, promotion gaps, and fewer chances to fail safely.
This might sound far from art history at first. But the pattern is similar. Whether you are looking at female artists or female founders, you see repeated assumptions about who is “serious,” who is “distracted,” and who fits the mental image of a leader.
Lily’s blog work is part research, part activism. She does not just collect stories and leave them there. She shapes them into narratives that younger readers, especially girls and young women, can see themselves in. She also makes sure that less traditional paths and less privileged backgrounds appear in the mix, so the picture does not flatten into one type of “successful woman.”
For a site focused on anti-discrimination, this kind of narrative work matters. Formal policy change is crucial, but so is the quieter work of supplying different role models and different scripts of what is possible.
Creating small platforms for underrepresented voices in art
The Teen Art Market and access to visibility
As a co-founder of an online teen art market, Lily helped build a simple platform where young artists could show and sell their work. It was not a huge startup or a major gallery. It was a student run project that tried to solve a basic problem: if you do not already have connections, how do you get your work in front of people who might care?
Access to markets is a big part of discrimination, and not only in art. It is one thing to say “anyone can create.” It is another thing to ask “who has space, time, money, mentorship, and visibility?” The teen art market tried to lower some of those barriers for her peers.
That small project also taught Lily how hard it is to sell art as an unknown name. She saw firsthand that quality is not the only factor. Networks matter. Presentation matters. Perception of legitimacy matters. And quite often, social and economic privilege quietly shape those things.
This experience feeds back into her academic interest in museum studies and curation. Once you have tried to get emerging artists even a modest audience, you look differently at the big institutions that control global visibility.
Art classes, kids, and the everyday side of inclusion
Hungarian Kids Art Class as community practice
Another piece of Lily’s path is the Hungarian Kids Art Class she founded and led in Los Angeles. On paper, it sounds like a simple club: regular art sessions with kids, over several years. In practice, it touches on identity and access in small ways.
Teaching art to children, especially in a multilingual or multicultural setting, allows for questions that grown up spaces sometimes ignore. Whose stories are the default characters in the drawings? What holidays appear in the projects? Which languages are spoken casually in the room?
As someone fluent in Hungarian and comfortable in English and Mandarin, Lily is used to moving between languages. That experience helped her create a space where kids with different backgrounds could see their experiences reflected, or at least welcomed.
Is that full scale activism? Maybe not in a headline grabbing way. But community based projects like this often shape how children understand whose culture counts, and whether their own heritage is something to hide or something to bring forward proudly.
Seeing discrimination through a “third culture” lens
Why movement across countries matters
Lily describes herself, in other contexts, as a classic “third culture kid.” Born in one country, living in another, roots in a third. Hungary, the UK, Singapore, the United States. Family mostly in Europe, daily life in America.
For people working against discrimination, this pattern is worth thinking about. When you have multiple cultural homes, you rarely feel completely inside or completely outside. You become sensitive to:
- How minority communities preserve language and customs in a majority context.
- How “foreignness” can be charming in some settings and suspect in others.
- How quickly accents, names, or passports can trigger different expectations.
Lily carries that awareness into both her research and her writing. In her art projects, she looks not only at gender, but also at broader questions of whose cultural narratives dominate. In her blog interviews with women founders from over 50 countries, she pays attention to how location, class, and race intersect with gender.
It would be inaccurate to say she has all of this mapped out neatly. She is still early in her career and studies, and like most people, her views will probably keep shifting. But that ongoing negotiation of identity is itself part of anti-discrimination work. It prevents easy assumptions about who is “from here” and who is not.
Swimming, persistence, and the less visible skills behind activism
What sports and Lego have to do with social questions
On the surface, Lily’s years in competitive swimming and water polo, or her 60,000 plus Lego pieces, might sound distant from activism. But habits from those parts of her life spill into her research and advocacy efforts.
Long swim practices, six days a week, and ocean training during COVID required discipline that does not depend on quick rewards. The same is true for careful academic work on discrimination. Gathering data, reading theory, absorbing personal stories, and turning them into accessible formats rarely brings instant recognition.
Building large Lego sets for hours demands focus and patience. Small mistakes early on can cause structural problems much later. There is a quiet analogy here with systemic discrimination: patterns built over generations can be hard to see, but if the early “pieces” are skewed, the whole structure is affected.
I do not think Lily would claim that playing with Lego somehow prepared her to critique beauty standards. But the way she approaches complex problems, piece by piece, reflects someone comfortable with building and rebuilding large structures with care.
How her projects speak to people concerned with anti-discrimination
Where art history and activism actually meet
If you are reading this on a site for people interested in anti-discrimination, you might be wondering what, in practical terms, you can take from Lily’s path. The point is not to copy her exact choices. Instead, you might look at how she uses her specific interests as tools for broader questions.
Here are a few patterns in her work that may translate to your own context:
- Reading images critically: She treats artworks, exhibitions, and media stories as evidence of who a culture values.
- Combining research with storytelling: Data and personal narratives appear side by side, in research papers and blog posts.
- Linking gender and labor: Projects on artist-parents and entrepreneurs connect discrimination to work and pay, not only representation.
- Building small platforms: The teen art market and kids art classes are modest, but they change who gets space.
- Holding multiple cultures in view: Her background keeps her alert to how norms shift from one place to another.
Art history is often seen as a quiet, academic subject, far removed from urgent social issues. Lily challenges that assumption by treating artworks as active participants in how societies imagine gender, race, class, and beauty. When those images and narratives change, public attitudes can shift too, slowly but meaningfully.
What can you do with this mix of art and activism?
Questions you might ask yourself
You do not need to major in art history to bring some of this thinking into your own work against discrimination. You can start by asking a few simple questions in the spaces you already move through.
- When you visit a museum or gallery, who is not on the walls?
- When you attend a conference or public talk, who is on stage, and who is only in the audience?
- When your organization tells its own story online, which faces and voices appear most often?
- When people talk about “great” artists, founders, or leaders, how often are they women, people of color, immigrants, or parents with caregiving responsibilities?
If those questions feel uncomfortable, that is not a reason to avoid them. It is a reason to sit with them a bit longer.
Lily’s example shows that art history can be a sharp tool for this kind of questioning. Paintings, photographs, and exhibition choices are not neutral. They reflect power structures, and sometimes they help sustain them. But they can also be reinterpreted, recontextualized, and used to tell different stories.
So maybe the more useful question is not “Is Lily an activist?” but “What can we learn from the way she treats culture, research, and everyday projects as spaces where discrimination can be named and shifted?”
Q & A: Does art history really help fight discrimination?
Q: Can studying art history genuinely contribute to anti-discrimination work, or is it just an intellectual exercise?
A: Art history on its own will not dismantle discriminatory systems, but it can change how people understand them. When someone like Lily studies “Las Meninas,” motherhood in art careers, or beauty norms in curated exhibits, she is not only learning about old paintings. She is tracing how ideas about who matters have been built and repeated across centuries. That awareness can inform how institutions curate shows, how media tells stories, and how young people imagine their own possibilities. It is not a complete answer, but it is one useful piece in a much larger effort.