Hello Alumni,

Well…I got my wish for snow! I hope those of you on the East Coast held up okay through last weekend’s blizzard. Last Saturday, I schlepped through the city to see a contemporary series of ballets at Lincoln Center. It was a joy to see Eva LeWitt’s chromatic sets for Justin Peck’s Partita. Her large-scale loops installed in precise, circular forms created a simultaneously flat and sculptural effect that was a cheerful contrast to the uneven terrain of snow and slush outside.

As we continue to endure expected and unexpected winter weather, please feel free to send me your news, either by email or through the online form. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the sampling of Lunar New Year and Black History Month events below.

Here’s to the Year of the Tiger!

With Care,
Rachael Schwabe (MA ‘20)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

Remi Dyll (‘03), collection manager for the Bayou Bend Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be giving a talk on February 22 as part of a virtual series for fascinating objects in the Collection. Her talk will focus on a cast-iron dumb stove and will prompt a discussion about African American ironworkers. For more information about the series, please visit the link listed in the “Virtual and In-Person Events in the World” section.

Select Career Opportunities

Select Events at BGC

Penned by Encounter: Central Africans, Capuchin Friars, and Their Images in Early Modern Kongo and Angola
Tuesday, February 8
12:15–1:15 pm ET
Early modern central Africa comes to life in the vivid full-page paintings Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of the Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. Their ‘practical guides’ present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily visual catechization methods they devised for the region. Cécile Fromont’s paper will analyze this overlooked visual corpus to demonstrate how such visual creations, though European in form and craftsmanship, did not emerge from a single perspective but rather were and should be read as the products of cross-cultural interaction. Fromont said, “With this intervention, I aim to model a way to think anew about images created at the crux of cultures, bringing to the fore the formative role that encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation.”

The King’s Rollodex
Wednesday, February 9
12:15–1:15 pm ET
A persistent myth in the history of the book in the west is that the roll gave way to the codex. This idea is often encountered in the prepositional formula, “from roll to codex,” as ubiquitous as the phrase “from manuscript to print.” Over the last two decades, an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to the abundant variety of scrolls and rolls in medieval Europe has offered welcome pushback to this supersessionist model of book history. Yet, the roll and the codex were not the only formats available for the book arts of the Middle Ages. Sonja Drimmer’s talk will focus on a recent acquisition made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a manuscript genealogy of King Edward IV that is both roll and codex, and examine the political significance of codicological diversity during the Wars of the Roses. Nearly one hundred genealogical rolls survive from fifteenth-century England, across which scribes and illuminators fashioned remarkably experimental approaches to the narration of genealogical history, approaches that defy our own genealogical narrative of the history of the book.

Sugar, Silver, and the Bourbon Sucriers: Sweetening Slavery in Eighteenth-Century France
Thursday, February 10
12:15–1:15 pm ET
Inseparable from the rise of sugar within the economies of international trade in eighteenth-century Europe was the Caribbean slave trade: in France, whose primary source of sugar for local consumption and re-export was its principal colony of Saint Domingue, the trade in enslaved persons swelled directly in tangent with the sugar business throughout the 1730s and beyond. But because all of the steps in harvesting and producing sugar, apart from some of the most elaborate refining processes, were carried out in the distant island colonies, such interdependency, to say nothing of the coerced labor it entailed, was invisible on the French dining table. A startling exception to this submersion of the harsh facts of how sugar cane was harvested is found in a pair of silver sugar casters (sucriers) that depict a man and woman laboring beneath bundles of sugar cane, as if physically “delivering” their sweet crystals for the elite dessert. Sarah Cohen’s talk will explore the diverse implications of the sucriers within the context of international trade; the physical and cultural interconnections of sugar and slavery; and elite French practices of dining and festive entertainment in the early eighteenth century.

Artist-in-Residence Talk with Jazmine Catasús 
Tuesday, February 15
12:15–1:15 pm ET
Join Jazmine Catasús for a talk about her artist residency at BGC. Jazmine is an artist and educator primarily working in print and papermaking. She is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA from CUNY-Hunter College. She was trained as a papermaker at Pace Paper and Dieu Donné Papermill. She is currently the studio coordinator at EFA-Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and a printmaking technician at the Cooper Union School of Art, and she serves on the board of Hand Papermaking Inc.

Puppets, Objects, and Modernity: “The Thing That Isn’t There”
Wednesday, February 16
12:15–1:15 pm ET
John T. Bell’s presentation will consider the power and agency of objects in modernist contexts—especially puppets, masks, and performing objects—and the difficulties modernity and modernism have had in recognizing and accepting such aspects of material culture. Looking at the history of material culture performance with the help of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, this talk will consider early twentieth-century avant-gardes from Symbolism to Futurism, Dada, and Bauhaus, as well as late twentieth- and early twenty first-century examples of material performance, and the persistent power of objects.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events Out in The World

MOCA Lunar New Year Family Festival: Year of the Tiger
Friday, February 4–Friday, February 11 
Various Times ET
Hip Hip Hu (虎) – rray— it’s almost time to celebrate! Usher in the Year of the Tiger with over a week of free virtual festivities for the whole family from Fri, Feb. 4 through Fri, Feb. 11.

Black History Month: Nature in Poetry Hike in Van Cortlandt Park
Sunday, February 6
1–2 pm ET (In Person)
Celebrate Black History Month with the Urban Park Rangers. On this hike, we will highlight some of the nature that served as inspiration for pieces written by well-known Black poets.

Parsons School of Design presents, Jenn M. Jackson: Speaking Truth to Power
Monday, February 7
4:30–6:30 pm ET
Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is a queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s primary research is in Black politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. They are a senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Dr. Jackson will discuss a chapter from their book, Policing Blackness, called “Speaking Truth to Power.” It’s an examination of the ways that first-hand experience with policing and racial trauma activate abolitionist ideals in young Black Americans. 

MFA Houston Virtual Series: Making History with Objects
Tuesdays, February 8, 15 & 22
7 pm CT
Over three evenings, the Bayou Bend Collection illuminates unusual facets of American history through objects that have something interesting to say. These fascinating finds include a rare book of printed plates from early Texas industry; a mug that offers a window into deaf culture in the early nineteenth century; and a stove that marries mid-nineteenth-century heating technology with a presidential icon. Speakers include experts from the MFAH and other institutions.

Lunar New Year with the New York Philharmonic
Tuesday, February 8
7:30 pm ET
Celebrate the Lunar New Year—and welcome the Year of the Tiger—with the New York Philharmonic. Violinist Stella Chen joins the orchestra in Bizet’s Carmen Fantasie and Ma Sicong’s Nostalgia. Hera Hyesang sings songs by Dvořák, Cho Doo-nam, and Lim Geung-soo. Earl Lee conducts audience favorites by Berlioz and Dukas, as well as Li Huanzhi’s Spring Festival Overture.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: Edmund de Waal and E. Randol Schoenberg in Conversation
Wednesday, February 9
2–3 pm ET
In The Hare with Amber Eyes, celebrated artist Edmund de Waal investigates his illustrious family history, their journey from Odessa to Vienna and Paris in the nineteenth century, and how they lost everything during the Holocaust except a collection of rare Japanese netsuke, which were rescued by a family maid. This collection is now the subject of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York. In this talk, de Waal will be joined by well-known attorney, philanthropist, and genealogist E. Randol Schoenberg for a discussion about the book and family history, the exhibition, and how family heirlooms can function as storytelling devices to perpetuate the legacy and memory of a family throughout generations.

Decorative Arts Trust Virtual Dialogue with Isabella Rosner and Melinda Watt
Thursday, February 10
1 pm ET
Isabella Rosner, PhD Candidate in History at King’s College London and recipient of a recent Decorative Arts Trust Research Grant will uncover the contradictions in a variety of seventeenth-century Quaker needlework from public and private collections and will investigate the reasons for these contradictions. Seventeenth-century needlework made by girls and women in the Society of Friends is heavily opulent, surprising given the Society’s investment in and promotion of plainness from its very beginning. Embroidering highly decorative objects with high-quality materials allowed Quaker girls to learn how to use the goods produced, handled, and sold by their parents, future husbands, friends, and other members of the London Quaker community, many of whom were merchants involved in the textile trade. After sharing her research, Rosner will be joined in conversation by Melinda Watt, chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago. The program will close with a live Q and A with the audience.

Masterpiece Symposium: Museums, Research and Discovery
Tuesday, February 15–Wednesday, February 16
Various Times BST
Masterpiece London is delighted to host a programme of digital debate and discussion, co-organized by the Fair and writer and critic Thomas Marks, to bring together pre-eminent museum curators and conservators with the leading figures in the art and antiques trade, with the aim of encouraging constructive discussion, networking and the exchange of knowledge and practical advice.

Blasting into Space: The Poetics of Faith and Astronomy in Seventeenth-Century England
Wednesday, February 16
7:30–9 pm PT
In this lecture, Wendy Wall, professor of the humanities at Northwestern University, describes how a seventeenth-century woman, Hester Pulter, sick and confined to her bedroom after giving birth to her fifteenth child, sought solace in an unusual way: she wrote poems about taking off into space to explore planets in the heliocentric universe. While intellectuals of the day feared that new conceptions of astronomy undermined cherished religious beliefs, Pulter was exhilarated by incorporating cutting-edge ideas about space into a new type of devotional poem. How can this relatively newly discovered female poet enlarge our understanding of ways that writers used poetry to connect religion, science, and the imagination? How might Pulter’s poetry reveal previously unacknowledged ways that early modern women engaged in intellectual production and the mapping of the heavens, even from their remote estates or bedrooms?

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Visit our online store at store.bgc.bard.edu for 40% off all items. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive the discount.

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