Hello Alumni,

Happy Lunar New Year to you all, and welcome to the year of the Water Rabbit! 🐰 As 2023 is now really underway, I keep thinking about the artist Jessi Rado’s thoughtful zine, The Museum of Healing Attention, whose publication was coordinated by a colleague at MoMA. I’m inspired by the zine’s framing question, “What makes you feel alive and fully present?” as well as the prompts to consider spaces whose conditions support healing. Whatever hopes or intentions you’ve carried with you into the new year, I hope that you encounter new and old places of belonging.

Please continue to get in touch with the goings on in your lives, either by email or through the online form. I enjoy being able to lift your news with this community! 

Best wishes,
Rachael Schwabe (Wood Dog 🐶)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

Matthew Keagle (PhD ’20) will be giving a virtual evening lecture at BGC on February 1 entitled, “Military Material Culture.” Details for the lecture are listed below in “BGC Events” and alumni are invited to access tickets using the code BGCALUM.

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Military Material Culture
Wednesday, February 1
6 pm 
Military history and its related material culture elicit strong opinions. The objects of war shape the technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies of everyday life and reveal their own historiography. In this Alumni Spotlight Lecture, Fort Ticonderoga curator Matthew Keagle shares his experiences working in military material culture and the challenges and distinct opportunities this field offers for scholars and amateur historians.

Photography and the Surveillance of Blackness
Wednesday, February 8
6 pm
Join us for the first of three events in which Bard Graduate Center faculty member Drew Thompson explores the Polaroid as an object of Black material culture. In this conversation, Thompson is joined by Simone Browne, sociologist and author of Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness, and the acclaimed contemporary artist American Artist.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events in the World

Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias, and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Friday, January 27
6 pm ET (In Person)
A public lecture from the historian Victoria Wolcott on her recent book, Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, which illuminates the importance of utopian communalism in the Black freedom struggle. 

Yoruba Egungun Masquerade Performances for the Ancestors
Saturday, January 28
2 pm CT (In Person)
Yoruba arts are essentially dynamic and performative, so it should be no surprise that Egungun, like most masquerade performances organized by this West African culture, is a multimedia and multisensory tradition. Bolaji Campbell, professor of African and African Diaspora Art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), shares how music, poetry, and choreography are essential to the aesthetic experience of Egungun masking traditions as practiced by the Yoruba of West Africa and their descendants in the diaspora. This program complements the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition The Language of Beauty in African Art, which brings together more than 250 sculptures and other art forms from dozens of distinct cultures across the African continent.

Lunar New Year Celebration at the Queens Museum
Sunday, January 29
1 pm–4 pm ET (In Person)
Celebrate the Lunar New Year 2023 as the New York Chinese Cultural Center (NYCCC) returns to Queens Museum with its signature program. Together we will be celebrating the year of the rabbit with folk dances, Lion Dance, Kung fu demonstrations, and traditional arts and crafts. The event will showcase a 45-minute performance program featuring professional artists and students of NYCCC’s School of the Arts, as well as a hands-on Chinese calligraphy and ink brush painting workshop for kids and adults. Queens Museum’s education programs will offer all-ages art-making workshops on rabbit paper bag puppet making in English and Spanish, and a lantern making workshop in English, Spanish and Mandarin.

The Textile Museum Journal: Gaussian Curvature and Weaving a No-Waste Garment
Wednesday, February 1
12 pm ET
As a part of our online interview series for The Textile Museum Journal, contributing scholar Eva Knoll will discuss her weaving practice that applies theories of hyperbolic geometry to the weaving of fabric on an eight-shaft loom, resulting in a three-dimensional, woven-to-shape garment for the upper part of a human body. Cloth woven on a handloom is inherently flat and rectangular, unlike the surface of the human body, which is composed of a combination of surfaces that are variously curved. In this talk, Dr. Knoll will demonstrate the way that an understanding of Gaussian curvature can develop a method for creating woven-to-shape garments, which creates an item of clothing that accommodates the curves of the body and eliminates the need to cut individual pieces of fabric.

Families and Folk Art
Saturday, February 4
10 am
In honor of Black History Month, join the American Folk Art Museum for a special virtual program about David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter. An exquisitely skilled artist who used his own unique methods to create his pots and jugs, Drake was also extremely brave. At a time when it was forbidden for enslaved people to know how to read and write, Drake often inscribed his work with his name and lines of poetry. Families who register by January 25th will receive a package in the mail containing the supplies to make a pot inspired by Drake’s methods. Families who register after January 25th are welcome to join us and provide their own air-dry clay. Live American Sign Language interpretation will be provided for this program.

Science, Art, and the Search for Meaning: Opening Conversation with Dario Robleto
Saturday, February 4
2 pm CT (In Person)
For Dario Robleto, the practice of art shares a key aspiration with scientific endeavor: both artists and scientists strive to increase the sensitivity of their observations. In her contribution to The Heart’s Knowledge catalogue, Jennifer Roberts (Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University) writes that “the act of measurement cannot be separated from the search for meaning.” What are the tools that artists and scientists use to observe and measure the unknown? How might we use those tools collaboratively to construct new pathways of human understanding across time and distance? How might shared values of empathy, care, and curiosity guide such pursuits? In this opening conversation, Robleto and Roberts will be joined by Lucianne Walkowicz, astronomer and co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and curator of The Heart’s Knowledge, to reflect on these questions.

A Hidden Empire: Ibadi Control of the Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean Slave Trades, c. 760-1055
Wednesday, February 8
6:30 pm ET
Under Ibadi Muhallabid rule of Ifriqiya in the late 8th century CE, Ibadi merchants settled in the Sahara and Sahel, introduced local communities to Islam, and dominated the trans-Saharan slave trading networks. In this talk, I will make the novel argument that when Muhallabi governors simultaneously ruled the province of Sind in the late 8th century, they deployed the same strategies of settlement, conversion, and economic expansion along the Swahili Coast, where they developed a lucrative trade in East African slaves. In short, the early Islamicate history of Black African enslavement is largely an Ibadi story and an exceptional one at that, for the scale of what became the 1200 year trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades probably exceeded that of later European merchants in the early modern Atlantic.

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