This Week:

Through the Priest’s Ear: An Entangled Story of Life and Death at the Jesuit Church of San Ignacio, 1610–2021
October 26 at 6 pm
Zoom

Felipe Gaitan-Ammann will examine multiple avenues of interdisciplinary research arising from a vast archaeological dataset recently recovered at the Jesuit church of San Ignacio, one of the most significant colonial buildings still standing in the historical district of Bogotá, Colombia.

“A Map Is Not The Territory:” Documenting The Navajo Nation Through Visual Storytelling
October 26 at 6:30 pm
Zoom

For the first event in NYU Gallatin’s series Currents and Protocols: Conversations in Critical Indigenous Studies and Contemporary Art, photographer and Diné cultural consultant Rapheal Begay and BGC and American Museum of Natural History Postdoctoral Fellow Hadley Jensen will discuss their work on land-based and relational practices of Navajo weaving.

Next Week: 

Object Biography: The Life of a Concept
November 2 at 5 pm
Zoom

The object biography has gained popularity in art history, material culture studies, archaeology, history, conservation and restoration, and museum studies. As a concept, the biography creates attention for the individual trajectories of objects and how these change over time; it enables the connection of different approaches, usually dealt with by sub-disciplines (i.e. research into making, provenance, exhibition history, conservation, reception); it offers entry points even if no information is available and encourages interdisciplinarity as objects straddle many fields. Finally, the object biography stimulates new forms of writing because it lends the object a voice and foregrounds narrative. Ann-Sophie Lehmann presents a brief history and theory of the concept of the object-biography, from its literary and didactic origins in the eighteenth century to its recent critics, asking what the concept can help us see, which we otherwise would not.

Writing the Hamat’sa Virtual Book Launch
November 4 at 6 pm
Zoom

Bard Graduate Center, Documentary Education Resources (DER), and UBC Press invite you to join author Aaron Glass, Kwakwaka’wakw descendant Andy Everson, and moderator Philip Deloria for an engaging discussion about Writing the Hamat’sa. Over ten years in the making, this comprehensive publication covers two centuries of writing about the Hamat’sa, famously known as the Cannibal Dance. The dance is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia. In 2004, Aaron Glass produced a 33 minute film about his research on the dance called “In Search of the Hama’tsta.” Please join us as Aaron reads from his book and shares a short clip of the film, followed by a discussion about Writing the Hamat’sa.