Author Archives: visualculture

February 22, 2023 – Amber N. Wiley, PhD

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Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D.
Presidential Associate Professor in Historic Preservation/City & Regional Planning
University of Pennsylvania

“Barry Farm-Hillsdale: Reimagining Preservation for a Just Future”

This talk is about the fight to preserve a public housing project in Washington, DC, its local listing as a DC landmark, and subsequent (and ongoing) efforts to commemorate its history while also envisioning a new version of preservation that puts people first. Major themes include architectural integrity, cultural landscape theory student and community engagement in the visioning process, and the production of a documentary film.

There will actually be a screening of the film at Penn on March 1: https://cpcrs.upenn.edu/events/barry-farm-community-land-justice-washington-dc.

If unable to join us in person, please register here.

March 22, 2023 – Cassandra Good

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Associate Professor of History
Marymount University
“Seeing Women in Politics: Visual and Material Representations of Women’s Political Participation in America, 1776-1876.”
The political history of America’s first century is most often told as a story of great men. While gender historians have documented many ways that women could indeed participate in politics in this era, both our master narrative and our mental image of early American politics remain stubbornly male-centered. However, there is ample visual and material evidence that can change this picture. Most images of political gatherings in this period include women, and there are sometimes subtle signs in women’s portraits of their political involvement. Women also advertised their political beliefs in their homes and on their bodies, using objects from teapots to hair comb adorned with the faces and slogans of their favored candidates. Indeed, once we look closely, it is easy to see women everywhere in early American political life.

If unable to join us in person, please register here.

March 23, 2023 – Dipti Khera

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Associate ProfessorDepartment of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts
New York University

“Ecologies of Emotion: To Sense and See Udaipur’s Monumental Monsoon Moods, 1700-1900”

Bryn Mawr College
Carpenter Library B-21
4:30-6PM

Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Along with specializing in paintings, books, letters, and maps made in northern and western India, she has published on the crafting of colonial taste and foregrounded vernacular objects that reveal global art history’s blind spots in narrating stories of mobility, power, and emotional entanglements.

April 12, 2023 – Dr. Martha Lucy

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Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education
Barnes Foundation
“Men Watching Women Watching Themselves: The Curious Erotics of the Nineteenth-Century Toilette”

Toilette scenes showing women primping before a mirror—applying makeup, lacing up corsets, brushing out hair—were everywhere in late nineteenth-century Paris. This talk will explore the widespread practice, detailed in French novels as well as in art and visual culture, of men paying for the privilege of watching a woman perform these intimate rituals. Why did the fashioning of one’s self-image hold so much erotic potential in the nineteenth-century imagination? How might we deconstruct the complex network of gazes at work in these images?

If unable to join us in person, please register here.

April 19, 2023 – Dr. Ikem Stanley Okoye

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Associate Professor, and Associate Chair
Department of Art History, University of Delaware
“Captive Audience”
The talk will explore the deployment of art as an instrument of fear and terror in the 19th-century era of transatlantic slavery. ‘Art’ and ‘Slavery’ may seem like uncomfortable bedfellows. One typically exists in the sanitized and civilized worlds of high culture, the other engages in the arena of something rather abject. My talk nevertheless brings them together in an exploration of the depiction of captivity in southern Nigerian art, especially through the appearance of states of captivity in a specific group of southern Nigerian works. Through these objects and a construction for them of an art history of their production and reception in the light of a fuller understanding of local history, I will explore what they tell us about how different ‘classes’ of Africans understood and represented the idea of slavery.
If unable to join us in person, please register here.