The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture with Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen
Clement A. Price Institute, Rutgers University–Newark

Tuesday, November 23, 12:15 pm on Zoom

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen will present a talk entitled “Unlearning by Undoing: Towards a Pluriversal, Enlivening Cultural Practice, Poetics, and Politics.”

Tchen writes, “We share many overarching, overwhelming anxieties during what Arundhati Roy frames as this ‘pandemic portal.’ We are simultaneously in a moment of regeneration and exhaustion, and a moment of reflexive possibilities and of seeking comfort. All are necessary but not sufficient. In this moment, I’ve had the privilege of organizing two online gatherings, Hacking the University Reckoning with Racial Equity, Climate Justice, and Global Warming (2020) and Dismantling Eugenics (2021), as collaborative aligning efforts, or what Arturo Escobar would call exercises in ‘pluriversal design.’ What’s at stake? Decolonizing and what we can call de-eugenicizing our universities. Our collaborative task is to reimagine and to enact a regenerative way of being.”

Attendees are invited to browse The Anti-Eugenics Project and read Jack Tchen’s personal eugenics story here.

The Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture on the Gothic with Hannah Baader
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institute

Tuesday, November 30, 6 pm on Zoom

Hannah Baader will present a talk entitled “Eco-Gothic, Titian, and the Crossing of the Red Sea.”

In 1549, an otherwise unknown Venetian printmaker published a large-scale print by the then highly esteemed and demanded painter Titian. The piece must have been a re-edition of a lost first version, developed by the artist approximately thirty years earlier. The woodcut is covering a surface of 290 x 100 cm of paper and therefore has the size of a panel painting. Spreading over several sheets, Titian has represented the biblical theme of the Crossing of the Red Sea. As has been noticed, the main protagonist of this representation are the agitated waters, but the meaning of this artistic choice still needs explanation. The work unfolds a dynamic investigation into divine and naturalized powers, political forces or fears and early ecological thought, calibrated with high artistic skills on the surface of the paper sheets.

The Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture with Debora Silverman
University of California, Los Angeles

Wednesday, December 1, 12:15–1:15 pm on Zoom

Debora Silverman will present a talk entitled “Gold Rush, Congo Style: Gustav Klimt’s Marble Mosaic Frieze in the Brussels Palais Stoclet, 1905-1911.”

Gustav Klimt achieved what he considered the highpoint of his experiments with ornament not in Vienna, but in Brussels, where he designed, with unlimited budget, a large-scale frieze of gold and bejeweled mosaics to wrap the dining room walls for the Palais Stoclet (1905-1911). This remarkable work revitalized Klimt’s career and changed his style. The Stoclet project also concentrates myriad and unrecognized connections to Africa. Klimt became enmeshed in a web of links that tied his patron and circles of Brussels elites to the Congo and to Egypt. These shape not only the circumstances of his commission but the stylistic forms, raw materials, and figural compositions that he devised for it. Vienna, golden style, is reborn in the gold rush of the Belgian empire. By restoring imperialism to the center of the story, this talk identifies two coordinates for our analytic field. First, the stylistic development of Klimt’s “golden style,” offering new evidence for his reliance on Egyptian tomb art for his Brussels project. Here Silverman suggests a link between ancient Egyptian archaeology and Belgian occupation of the Congo as conduits of modernist primitivism. Second, the Stoclet house as an imperial Gesamtkunstwerk, embodying not only a resplendent unity of all the arts but a voracious entitlement to global bounty, exemplified in Klimt’s patron, the banker-engineer Adolphe Stoclet. By close focus on this work of Gustav Klimt and his patron, a missing chapter of what Silverman calls “imperial modernism” comes into view. This history makes visible what has been invisible: the facts, artifacts, sources, resources—both financial and cultural—and raw materials that are inextricably linked to European expansionism in Africa.

These events will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 10 am on the day of the event. All events are presented live with automatic captions.