Rebuilding the City of Ceramic: A New Project for the Sèvres Museum
March 1 at 6 pm
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

This lecture by Charlotte Vignon will unveil current plans for a major renovation of the Sèvres Museum, which will both transform its displays and highlight its historical and physical links to the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. At its beginning, the museum was considered  a technical resource, a conservatory of materials and techniques intended to inspire craftsmen and artists working at the prestigious French manufactory by providing them with varied examples of ceramic from many periods and places. Now a true national treasure, Sèvres seeks to contribute to the world of tomorrow by balancing today’s quest for instantaneity and start-ups with a new art of living that affirms the values of artistic creativity, scientific experimentation, and cultural diversity.

“It is, Indeed, a Sister’s Form”: Black Feminist Pictorial/Poetic Imperatives in an Abolitionist Friendship Album
March 2 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Around 1837, Sarah Mapps Douglass, a prominent member of Philadelphia’s free Black elite, painted a lovely watercolor of a floral bouquet in the friendship album of Elizabeth Smith, a white abolitionist teenager with whom she taught Sunday school. The paintings and drawings made by Black women in nineteenth-century friendship albums represent the earliest signed artworks by African American women, and Elizabeth Smith’s album offers two of the most compelling examples: this work by Douglass and a stunning “remix” of abolitionist emblem and verse by Sarah Forten. Mia L. Bagneris examines how both artists created sophisticated pictorial-poetic texts that wed word and image to extraordinary effect, radically transforming popular discourses of genteel femininity and hackneyed antislavery tropes.

This series of conversations among MacArthur Fellow from the fields of the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences, explores the significance of conservation as a human practice with consequences for how we think about ourselves and our society, both past, and future. With artist Jeffrey Gibson, behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan, entomologist Marla Spivak, and poet Campbell McGrath. Moderated by MacAthur Fellow and dean of Bard Graduate Center, Peter N. Miller.

Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Mind Over Matter? Exploring Making is a three-part creative research workshop that fosters your understanding of objects by exploring the processes by which they are made. The interaction of mind, hand, and material is at the heart of what this course is all about. Do we always design and plan objects before making them? Or do forms and things emerge organically? Join BGC PhD students, Geoffrey Ripert and Nicholas De Godoy Lopes, as they take you on a deep dive into the way shape influences our understanding of objects. With Lunder Institute for American Art Research Fellow Hadley Jensen.