“Student art research is usually just a school requirement, not something that leads to real projects or impact.”
That sounds reasonable at first, but it is not true in Lily Konkoly’s case. Her work in art and research spills far beyond the classroom and has turned into long running projects, community platforms, and published writing. If you want a quick answer to what sits at the center of Lily A. Konkoly projects, it is this: she uses art history and research to question who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets left out, then builds small but concrete systems where those people can show up.
Once you see her work as one long thread instead of separate lines on a resume, it starts to make more sense. The research on Velázquez, the studies on artist parents, the teen art market, the Hungarian kids art class, the interviews with women entrepreneurs. None of these are random. They are different attempts at the same question: how does power work in art and culture, and what can a student actually do about it, now, not in twenty years.
It is worth slowing down on each project and how it grew, because the path is not completely smooth or linear. In fact, that is part of what makes it feel real. Some ideas come from a classroom, others from long Saturdays in museums as a kid, or from watching her parents and the women she interviews try to hold together careers and family and everything else.
From looking at paintings to asking who is missing
Lily grew up around art long before she had words like “curatorial practice” or “visual culture.” Her family spent weekends in Los Angeles moving from gallery to gallery, museum to museum. At the time, it was just a routine. You walk, you look, you buy ice cream after. Only later, once she joined a research mentorship, did she start to see how much was hidden underneath those visits.
In the Scholar Launch Research Program in Los Angeles, she spent ten weeks on a single painting: Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” That might sound almost excessive, one painting for a whole summer, but that is the point.
She went beyond the usual classroom reading. Instead of just learning that “Las Meninas” is famous, she kept asking why. Why this painting. Why this composition. Why this view of a royal family and a painter and a child and a viewer, all pushed into one room.
The project had a few main parts:
– a close reading of the painting, frame by frame
– a study of its historical context in the Spanish court
– a set of short analytical essays
– a final research paper that tried to connect technique, power, and gaze
What matters here is not that she produced a paper, lots of students do that. What stands out is how this work triggered something that shows up in almost everything she did later: an interest in who is looking at whom, and how power is built into that act of looking.
“Art is never just decoration for Lily. It is always a question: who is allowed to appear, and on what terms?”
Once you start to see art that way, it is hard to unsee it. The royal family in Velázquez turns into women artists in the 20th century, then into artist mothers in the 21st, then into teenage artists trying to sell their work online. The context shifts, the question stays.
Honors research: artist parents and the gender gap
After the Velázquez project, Lily did not just move on to a new random topic. Her honors research in high school grew naturally out of that earlier work, but it moved the focus from “who is painted” to “who gets to build a career in art at all.”
She spent over 100 hours on a study about how gender shapes the success of artist parents. In simple terms, she asked: what happens to artists when they have children, and why is the answer so different for mothers and fathers.
Her findings will not surprise you if you have watched the art world with a critical eye, but they still sting:
– Women artists often lose opportunities after having children, because people assume they have less time or are less serious.
– Men artists who are fathers are often praised for “balancing” family and work, and this can even help their reputation.
– The same reality, parenting, is read in opposite ways depending on gender.
What gave this project extra weight was her collaboration with a professor who studied maternity and inequality in the art world. Under that guidance, Lily gathered research, read case studies, and created a piece that did not just live in a Word document. She presented the data visually in a marketing-style format, so that someone who does not read academic papers could still feel the pattern.
There is a small contradiction here that feels honest. On one hand, she is still a student, still learning the research process. On the other hand, she is stubborn about putting the work into formats that regular people can actually use. She cares about theory, but not just for theory’s sake.
From theory to question: what now
Once you spend a summer measuring how gender roles damage artist mothers, it is hard to return to a neutral view of the art field. Lily started to see the same pattern reappearing in other places: in galleries, in museums, and later in the stories of women founders she interviewed for her blog.
You can feel a quiet frustration underneath that shift. Learning about inequality is one thing. Realizing how early it starts is another. She came from an all girls school where gender and power were frequent topics, so this research did not drop into her life out of nowhere. It gave structure to something she had already seen and felt in a more vague way.
That combination, lived experience plus guided research, is part of why her later projects feel connected rather than scattered.
Teen Art Market: building a path for young artists
At some point theory stops being enough. You know that access and visibility are unequal. So what do you do, as a teenager, without funding or authority or a job title.
For Lily, one answer was to create a concrete space where young artists could show and sell work. She co founded an online Teen Art Market, a kind of digital gallery created for students.
This project taught her things that most art history courses do not touch in depth:
– pricing art in a way that feels fair but realistic
– how hard it is to convince strangers to buy work when you do not yet have a name
– how presentation, photography, and descriptions change how people see a piece
It also gave her a closer view of how age and gender show up when teenagers enter a field that usually values seniority and experience.
There is a real tension here. On one side, she is studying art history at Cornell University, learning to interpret works and movements with care. On the other, she is helping her peers figure out how to ship a print or respond to a potential buyer. High theory meets basic logistics.
The gap between those worlds is part of why this project matters. Many young artists feel that the step from school assignments to “real” art careers is a cliff. By building a student focused marketplace, Lily and her co founder tried to make that cliff feel a bit closer to a staircase, even if it is a small one.
Hungarian Kids Art Class: art, language, and roots
Not all of Lily’s projects are online or academic. Some live in real rooms with real kids who are still learning to hold a brush.
For three years, she ran a Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles. It might sound simple at first: an art club for children. But there are a few layers under that label.
She is Hungarian, and most of her extended family is still in Europe. Hungarian is both a family bond and a “secret language” in the United States. In this art class, language and culture met practice. She gathered kids who were curious about art and, often, about Hungarian heritage too.
The class met every two weeks, around 18 weeks each year. Over time, the sessions added up to something more than a short activity. They created:
– a small community of young Hungarian speakers
– a space where art was casual and social, not judged
– a bridge between her own cultural roots and her life in Los Angeles
Here again, you see the same pattern: Lily using art as a tool to connect people who might otherwise feel scattered or invisible. In this case, it was not a research topic or a marketplace, but a consistent, local practice.
“Her projects often look small from the outside, but on the inside they are dense: language, identity, and art wrapped into the same shared space.”
And that matters. Because serious research on art history can feel abstract. Teaching a seven year old to mix paint while speaking Hungarian keeps the whole picture grounded.
Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: research beyond museums
When you first hear that Lily writes for a blog about female entrepreneurs, it might sound like a separate lane from art history. But if you look closer, many of the themes are the same: visibility, bias, and the slow work of building a career as a woman.
Since 2020, she has spent around four hours a week researching and writing for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia. Over four years, that added up to more than 50 articles and well over 100 interviews with women founders around the world.
This work sits at an interesting crossroad:
– It is journalism style writing, not academic.
– It is based on research and interviews, so it still shares methods with her art projects.
– It surfaces gender inequality, but not in the narrow context of galleries. Instead, it shows how similar patterns appear in tech, food, retail, and more.
What she kept hearing from these women sounded very similar to her findings in the art world:
– women often have to work harder for the same recognition
– their failures are judged more harshly, their success more questioned
– family roles still shape how people see their “seriousness” about work
Those stories fed back into her thinking about artist mothers, artist fathers, and the wider cultural frame. It is not that art is special. It is that art sits inside the same social rules as everything else, even if it looks glamorous on the outside.
In a way, this blog gave her a second lab for her questions. Museums were one lab. Entrepreneur interviews were another. When patterns repeat in both, it becomes harder to see them as isolated problems.
Curatorial work with RISD: beauty standards across cultures
Another piece of Lily’s project web is her research with RISD professor Kate McNamara. Together, they developed a curatorial statement and a mock exhibition on beauty standards.
Instead of focusing on one painting, like “Las Meninas,” this project looked across artworks that engage with how women are “supposed” to look and behave. They created a virtual show that asked: how do different cultures, and different times, define beauty. Who sets those standards. Who pays the price for them.
What made this project different from a standard art history essay is the curatorial mindset. Lily was not only analyzing works. She was also deciding:
– which pieces to place next to each other
– what order the viewer would experience them in
– how the wall text would frame the viewer’s expectations
This is a kind of silent storytelling. By choosing and arranging works, a curator can make patterns visible without shouting. Given Lily’s growing interest in gender and inequality, the topic of beauty standards made sense. It gave her a way to tie together the visual, cultural, and social strands she had been following.
You could argue that this is still “just” a mock exhibit, but that misses the point. The exercise gave her training that connects directly to real curatorial work: thinking about audience, context, and narrative in a shared space.
How her projects connect: a quick view
Sometimes it helps to see the links in a simple table. It will not capture every detail, but it can show the pattern that runs through her work.
| Project | Main focus | Key question | Type of output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scholar Launch “Las Meninas” research | Classical painting, power, gaze | Who controls the act of looking in art | Analytical essays and research paper |
| Honors research on artist parents | Gender, maternity, career impact | Why do mothers lose chances while fathers gain status | Research study and visual data piece |
| RISD curatorial project | Beauty standards across cultures | How is “beauty” built, and for whom | Curatorial statement and mock exhibition |
| Teen Art Market | Access to audience for young artists | How can students show and sell work without a “name” | Online marketplace and gallery |
| Hungarian Kids Art Class | Art education and cultural roots | How can art keep language and identity alive | Regular biweekly classes |
| Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia writing | Women in business, inequality | How do women build careers within biased systems | Articles and interviews |
Looking at it this way, you can see that “art and research” is not one box for Lily. It is more like a lens that she keeps applying in different contexts.
A personal thread: travel, language, and family
To understand her projects, you need at least a rough sense of her background. Because some of her choices do not make much sense without it.
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then grew up in Los Angeles for about sixteen years. She was raised in a Hungarian family that spent many summers in Europe to stay close to relatives. English and Hungarian are both native for her, and Mandarin entered early through a half American, half Chinese preschool in Singapore.
That mix of places and languages affected how she looks at art. When you have lived on three continents and speak several languages, you become aware that “normal” is not fixed. What counts as standard beauty, standard success, or even standard childhood shifts from place to place.
Her childhood also included some very hands on projects that might sound small but trained her in practical ways:
– selling bracelets at a local farmers market
– running a slime business with her brother and selling hundreds of batches, even at a slime convention in London
– building around 45 LEGO sets, more than 60,000 pieces in total
None of this is formal research. But you can see echoes of it in later work: a comfort with building things from scratch, a sense for how products move in the world, a taste for detailed, patient construction.
Sports shaped her in a different way. Ten years of competitive swimming, followed by three years of water polo, pushed her into a very structured, demanding routine. Training six days a week, long hours, ocean practices during the pandemic when pools were closed. That kind of schedule teaches you to show up even when you are tired or unmotivated.
You can feel that same persistence in her projects. Research on a single painting for ten weeks is not flashy. Running a kids art class every two weeks for three years is not glamorous. But both demand the same kind of quiet repetition that swimming drills build.
From high school to Cornell: formal study of art history
Lily now studies Art History at Cornell University, with a minor in Business. On paper, this looks like a neat pairing. In practice, it reflects the mix you have already seen in her life: close looking at images plus a grounded interest in how systems and markets work.
Her courses cover areas such as:
– Art and Visual Culture
– History of Renaissance Art
– Modern and Contemporary Art
– Museum Studies
– Curatorial Practices
These subjects give her historical depth and conceptual tools. They also connect back to earlier questions. For example:
– Renaissance art repeats certain ideals of female beauty. How does that feed into modern standards.
– Museum studies can expose how institutions decide whose work enters the collection and whose does not.
– Curatorial practices build directly on her mock exhibit with RISD, but with more structure.
Some students treat their college work as a separate box from personal projects. Lily does not. Her blog, art classes, and research run in parallel with her formal study. Sometimes they inform her assignments. Sometimes the assignments refine how she plans her next project.
“Her art history degree is not just about learning what happened in the past. It is a toolkit she keeps testing against real, present-day questions about gender, work, and visibility.”
There are tradeoffs in this approach. Balancing research, writing, side projects, and college classes is not easy. It would be simpler to just focus on grades. But that would also mean losing the thread that ties her projects together.
How her research method actually works
If you are curious about the practical side, you might be wondering how Lily approaches research in day to day terms. Stripped of fancy language, her method tends to follow a few steps, whether she is writing about a painting or interviewing an entrepreneur.
1. Start with a concrete case, not a vague idea
Instead of starting with “gender inequality is bad,” she starts with something specific:
– a single artwork like “Las Meninas”
– a concrete group, such as artist parents
– a defined community, like teenage artists or Hungarian kids
Anchoring the project in a real case helps her avoid floating away into abstract statements.
2. Collect many small pieces of evidence
Then comes the slow part: reading, interviewing, and observing. For example:
– in the Velázquez project, she read historical texts about the Spanish court and art criticism
– in the artist parent study, she reviewed articles, case studies, and data
– for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia, she conducts long interviews, often with follow up questions
This phase is not glamorous. It is closer to swimming drills than a race. But without it, the final output would feel shallow.
3. Look for patterns across different fields
What makes her work more than a set of school projects is the way she compares patterns across contexts. When the same type of bias appears in galleries, startups, and casual conversation, she marks that as a pattern worth naming.
This is where her mixed background helps. Living in several countries and languages conditioned her to expect difference. So when she sees the same gendered expectations repeat across those differences, it stands out more.
4. Turn research into something public facing
Finally, Lily prefers to create outputs that other people can actually see or use:
– blog posts and interviews for a general audience
– visual summaries of complex data
– a teen art market where young artists can list work
– an art class where kids practice and play
You might think this is just “good communication,” but it is more than that. It reflects a choice to treat research findings as something that should move beyond the classroom.
What her projects suggest for young artists and students
If you are a student, you might look at Lily’s path and feel a bit overwhelmed. Research programs, blogs, exhibits, art classes, swimming, travel. It can sound like a lot.
There are also some very practical takeaways you can borrow without copying her life.
Follow questions, not just opportunities
She did not pick projects only because they looked impressive. There is a visible line from early museum visits to Velázquez research to artist parent studies to interviews with women founders. Each project is a different angle on the same core question: who gets space and who does not.
You do not need to have that clarity at 16 or 18, but you can ask yourself: what problem or question do I keep circling back to, even when nobody is grading me on it.
Blend “high” and “low” work
Lily mixes serious academic projects with very grounded ones. A mock exhibit sits next to a kids art class. A research paper sits next to an interview with a small business owner.
You can do the same:
– if you are doing research on art history, try tutoring younger students or starting a small club
– if you run a creative business on the side, read at least a bit of critical writing on your field
This mix keeps you from getting lost in theory or stuck in pure practice.
Accept that projects will be imperfect
Not every one of Lily’s projects is massive or polished. A teen art market will have clunky parts. A long interview might not reach as many readers as you hoped. A kids art class session can feel chaotic.
Waiting for a perfect plan before you start is a good way to never start. Her path suggests you move anyway, then refine as you go.
Common questions about Lily’s art and research projects
Q: Are Lily’s projects mostly academic or mostly practical?
A: They sit between both. She spends serious time on academic research, especially in art history and gender studies. But she almost always looks for a practical outlet: a blog, a class, a marketplace, or a public style piece that non academics can understand.
Q: Does her work focus only on women in art?
A: Gender and women are central themes, but not the only ones. Some projects look at power and gaze more broadly, or at cultural identity, like Hungarian language and art. Still, questions about how women are seen and treated do show up again and again, across art, business, and education.
Q: How does her background in travel and languages affect her projects?
A: Growing up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Hungary gave her a clear sense that there is no single normal. That awareness feeds into her curiosity about how beauty, success, and family roles change across cultures, and it shows up in her research on beauty standards and in her comfort interviewing women from many countries.
Q: What connects her teen art market and female entrepreneurship writing?
A: Both care about access to opportunity. The teen art market helps young artists reach an audience before they have a reputation. Her writing about female entrepreneurs highlights how women carve out paths in systems that are often biased. In both cases, she focuses on people who are building careers without the advantage of established power.
Q: If you had to sum up her projects in one line, what would it be?
A: Lily’s art and research projects try to make visible who holds power in culture, and then create small, concrete spaces where those who are usually sidelined can be seen, heard, and taken seriously.
