Category Archives: Special Lectures

March 19, 2024 – Dr. Verena Krebs

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The Center for Visual Culture, Medieval Studies, MECANA, Museum Studies and the Office of the Provost present

Dr. Verena Krebs, FRHistS, Medieval Cultural Realms and Their Entanglements
Historical Institute, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

“Ethiopian Queens and Ferenji Painting: Global Histories of Medieval Art”

Tuesday, March 19, 2024, Carpenter Library, Room B21
4:30 PM

Ethiopian painting is often perceived as an isolated branch of Orthodox Christian sacred art. Yet, the visual and material culture from the late medieval Christian kingdom of Solomonic Ethiopia reveals a web of political and artistic connections that spanned continents. This talk delves into the role of Solomonic queens and princesses as patrons who actively commissioned and imported sacred art objects from workshops across medieval Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean to consolidate and showcase their political power in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Ethiopia, highlighting African-European artistic interactions that reconfigure the history of pre-modern cultural entanglement.

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.

March 14, 2022 – Special Evening Lecture with Artist and Curator, Elia Alba

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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.

September 13, 2021 – 7 PM Evening Lecture with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

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Associate Professor of English
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
University of Southern California

“Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of Blackness”

Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator, Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstractions” and figurations “that point to discourse beyond medium and art movements,” alternately affirming nothing or attuning to the indeterminacy and incalculability of blackness, whether blackness be attributed to person, place, or thing. This is not to suggest that double-consciousness and its deposits can be easily uprooted, but rather that perception and its organization are meaningful and necessarily remain a ground of contestation. This talk concerns the reflective and refractive potentialities of blackness as well as its density or fullness that exceed the capture of mimetic representation. It highlights works that critically explore the received terms and limits of representation in the interest of the dissolution of given categories and conceptual forms. Focusing particular attention on Faith Ringgold’s Black Light and American People series, this talk explores blackness as varied, multi-dimensional, and a light source in its own right.

Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.

This event is co-hosted by the Bryn Mawr College Africana Studies Program and the Haverford College Visual Studies Program.

7:00 pm (via zoom).

Register here.