Blackboards, Illustrations, and Models: The Materiality of Higher Education Instruction in the Pre-Modern Era
February 22 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology) underscores the importance of classroom ‘furniture’ for better appreciation of the contribution of early modern institutions of higher learning to the dissemination and to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Indigenous Theories of Indigenous Arts in Transition
February 22 at 6 pm
Zoom

In Aotearoa, New Zealand, debates in art history, anthropology, museum studies, and curatorial writing have circled around the changing forms of “Māori art”: from “traditional”/customary practices such as weaving and carving, to “Māori modernism,” to “contemporary Māori art.” This lecture, presented by Conal McCarthy, considers two moments in this dynamic history.

In the world of making, color has a physical presence. This session explores what it means to think and work through the material nature of color. It looks at how designers and craftsmen have used different media as a means of manipulating color through matter. Join BGC PhD students Geoffrey Ripert and Nicholas de Godoy Lopes with speaker Jennifer L. Mass.

The Color of Modernism
February 24 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

One of the most enduring and pervasive myths about early modernism is that it was white. This talk, presented by Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney) and based on a new book with the eponymous title, will dismantle the myth of whiteness by examining five different theoretical interpretations of scientific and artistic color theory advanced by members of the German avant-garde.

Next Week:

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, it was considered as 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 between artists, scientists, humanists, and social scientists, explore the significance of conservation as a human practice with consequences for how we think about ourselves and our society, both past, and future. With Jeffrey Gibson, Sendhil Mullainathan, Marla Spivak, and Campbell McGrath. Moderated by Peter N. Miller.

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