Penned by Encounter: Central Africans, Capuchin Friars, and Their Images in Early Modern Kongo and Angola
February 8 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Cécile Fromont (Yale University) analyzes the overlooked visual corpus of “practical guides,” full-page paintings composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries, 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. With this intervention, she aims 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
February 9 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Focusing on a recent acquisition made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a manuscript genealogy of King Edward IV that is both roll and codex—Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) examines 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
February 10 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Sarah R. Cohen (University at Albany, SUNY) 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.

Next Week:

Ritual of Ornament
February 15 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Jazmine Catasús (BGC 2021–22 Library Artist-in-Residence) examines the role of ornamentation in building knowledge systems. This project delves into how we manipulate matter to enhance political power, to affirm identity, and to connect with the cosmos. Catasús is interested in the actions we take to include the decorative in our lives and how it functions in psychological and physical spaces.

Mind Over Matter? Exploring Making: Rhythm
February 15 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

From the methodical gestures of the maker to the give-and-take of the material, rhythmic motion has always been at the heart of the making process. This session of Mind Over Matter explores how we can read the rhythms of the creative process within the object itself, whether produced by hand or by machine. Join BGC PhD students, Geoffrey Ripert and Nicholas De Godoy Lopes with guest speaker Drew Thompson.

The Dutch Colonial Imaginary
February 15 at 6 pm
Zoom or In-Person

Claudia Swan’s (Washington University) recent book on early modern Dutch investment in the exotic—Rarities of these Lands. Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton, 2021) explore how rarities were obtained, exchanged, stolen, valued, and collected, tracing their global trajectories and considering their role within the politics of the new state. This lecture builds on that account through an examination of power relations less explicitly operative within Dutch culture of the time: slavery, Swan argues, was an animating force of the Dutch colonial imaginary.

Puppets, Objects, and Modernity
February 16 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Puppeteer and theater historian John T. Bell considers 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.

Reckoning with Erasure
February 18 at 12:15pm
Zoom

The triad of cultures that make Dominican culture are muddled. As a young immigrant, Lissy Mineo-Gonzalez (BGC 2021–22 Library Artist-in-Residence), lost out on learning her ancestral history on the small Caribbean island. Reckoning with Erasure is a talk that traces back her roots, celebrates the matriarch that brought her to New York City, and examines both the personal and historical loss of culture caused by multiple forces.