Anthony S. Foy
Associate Professor of English Literature
Swarthmore College
“Racial Publicity and the Self Unseen: Black Autobiography after the Halftone”
We encourage everyone who is on campus to join us for this in-person talk in Old Library 224. If you are not able to join us in person, please register for the Zoom link at https://visualculture.blogs.brynmawr.edu/
Sonal Khullar
W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies
Department of History of Art
University of Pennsylvania
“Decolonizing the Field: Art, Event, and Environment in India”
Referring to uses of the ‘field’ in art historical and anthropological discourses, this presentation considers a turn to site-specific, socially engaged, and collaborative artistic practices in India over the past two decades. Contemporary artists have assumed the role of fieldworkers, moving across scales and between sites over an extended period to critique modernist and capitalist systems. Through new languages of art and forms of relation, their practice challenges the organization of the art world. The affect and address of this art resonates with new modes of protest, demonstration, and gathering and with old patterns of pilgrimage, procession, and public action in South Asia. It demands reflection on methods in art history and the work of the art historian.
Bryn Mawr Film Institute
824 Lancaster Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
11am-1pm
A collaboration between Special Collections and the Center for Visual Culture.
For more information, see www.brynmawr.edu/elliega
Assistant Professor
Department of Africana Studies
Smith College
2021-2022 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow, The LatinX Project, New York University
“Visualizing Indigenous Blackness: A Visual Ethnography of Garifuna New Yorkers”
Please register here.
Professor of History, Howard University
“Exhibiting Slavery: A Visual History of Slave Collars”
Several permanent and temporary exhibitions in Europe and the Americas have attempted to represent slavery by featuring physical punishment. To achieve this goal most exhibitions display instruments of torture such as chains, shackles, and collars. To understand the broad implications of these representations of violence, this lecture attempts to build a visual history of slave collars. First, I retrace the use of lave collars to Antiquity. Second, I use engravings and paintings dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to show how the representation of slave collars was widespread in European art during this period, therefore confirming the visible presence of enslaved people in Europe. Third, I connect these representations to similar devices today housed in museum collections in the Netherlands, Portugal, England, Brazil, and the United States. Finally, I discuss the broad implications of displaying this kind of torture device in museum exhibitions today.
Please register here.
Monday, 7PM
Assistant Professor of Art History, Swarthmore College
“Aesthetic Conversions and Generational Takeovers at an Art Biennial in the US/Mexico Borderlands”
Please register here.
Monday, 7PM
Artist talk.
Elia Alba (she/her) was born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, identity and the collective community. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Those include the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Science Museum, London; Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid. Awards include the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program 1999; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant 2002 and 2008; Anonymous Was A Woman Award 2019; Latinx Artist Fellowship 2021. Collections include the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, Lowe Art Museum. Her book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (Hirmer 2019) brings together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States.
Please register here.
Professor of the Practice & Director of Curatorial Studies
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Tufts University
“The Art of Whiteness and Empire”
Please register here.
Assistant Professor
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
University of Toronto
“Images of Abundance, Networks of Consumption: Early Research on the Marine Ecology of Colonial Canada”
Please register here.
Associate Professor, Department of Art History
UCLA
“On Slavery, Instrumentality, and the Image in Medieval Islam”
Please register here.
