Sovereignties of the Imagination: Worlding from the Ethnographic Museum

April 2, 2024
6 pm

Wayne Modest of the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam takes up some of the more recent explorations of the concept of “worlding” to think about possible futures of the so-called “ethnographic” or “world cultures” museum. Despite the challenges associated with ethnographic museums’ roots in colonial history and calls for their closure, he suggests that these museums inhabit an important conjuncture today—precisely because of their histories—and that they hold important material and political potential for imagining a new museum for the future.

Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Decisive Museological Action of French Historicizing Painters

A Françoise and George Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture by Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros (Sorbonne Université)

April 3, 2024
6 pm

On January 10, 1907, the Société de l’Histoire du Costume was founded in Paris to create a “Musée du Costume.” Sixteen of the founders were painters, and most of them were artists who historicized the eighteenth century. In this lecture, curator and scholar Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros considers the influence of artists such as Maurice Leloir (1853–1940), Gustave Jean Jacquet (1846–1909), and François Flameng (1856–1923) in the formation of the eighteenth-century fashion collection of the Palais Galliera and the construction of its image.

Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother

A pop-up installation and conversation by Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus), Andy Everson, Doenja Oogjes, Kate Hennessy, Hannah Turner, and Laura Allen

April 10, 2024
6 pm

Bard Graduate Center presents a triptych of pieces by Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus), a contemporary Indigenous weaver from British Columbia of Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw descent, working in collaboration with a team of anthropologists, technologists, and artists.

Join us starting at 4 pm for a special viewing of the works and stay for a conversation at 6 pm with O’Brien along with Everson, museum anthropologists Kate Hennessy and Hannah Turner, and design researcher Doenja Oogjes, moderated by curator Laura Allen.

The Golem: How He Came into the World

A Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation film screening and talk by Maya Barzilai (University of Michigan)

April 17, 2024
6 pm

Join us for a screening of this seminal German Expressionist film from 1920, which tells how an artificial clay monster, known as Golem, is formed and animated to protect the Jews of sixteenth-century Prague from expulsion. Following the film, scholar Maya Barzilai will help us explore the Gothic architecture of Hans Poelzig’s film and illuminate how the golem was molded into a cinematic object.