Category Archives: Weekly Colloquia

September 28, 2021 – Alexis Peskine

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Please note: This colloquium is on a Tuesday from noon to 2pm.

“Afro-Diasporic Alchemists: We Got The Gold”

Alexis Peskine’s signature works are large-scale mixed media ‘portraits’ of the African diaspora, which are rendered by hammering nails of different gauge, with pin-point accuracy, into wood stained with coffee and mud. By applying gold leaf to the nails he creates breathtaking composite images. He depicts figures that portray strength and perseverance, with energy reminiscent of the spiritually charged Minkisi ‘power figures’ of the Congo Basin. Peskine also produces striking photography and video works.

Register here.

ART AND RACE IN FRANCE

This series was made possible with the generous support from the Office of the Provost, the Department of French and Francophone Studies, the Film Studies Program, the Center for Visual Culture, the Africana Studies Program, the Museum Studies Program, the International Studies Program, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Department of History.

October 27, 2021 – Mariola Alvarez

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Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

“Abstract Painting and Diaspora in Brazilian Postwar Art”

This paper examines the evolution of postwar Brazilian abstract art considering in particular how Japanese immigrant artists negotiated between the influences of Japanese artistic and cultural traditions, the Brazilian debates between the concrete and informalist art schools, and the global proliferation of abstraction after the Second World War. Japanese Brazilian artists did not fit neatly into the Western model of artmaking, and moreover, called into question the national model at the center of the discipline of art history. Applying diaspora theory to the study of their art, I analyze their work as a way to de-center the U.S. narrative about postwar abstract art.

Register here.

November 1, 2021 – Amy Knight Powell – 7PM Monday evening colloquium

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Amy Knight Powell
Associate Professor of Art History
University of Southern California

“A Picture of an Interior in the Slave-fort at Elmina c. 1669”

In 1669, a forgotten Dutch painter named Pieter de Wit depicted the private quarters of the Director-General of the Dutch West India Company in Africa, luxurious rooms situated on the upper floor of the slave-fort in Elmina—well above the barracoons in the dungeon. This depiction of a seventeenth-century colonial interior offers a glimpse into the early modern formation of the racialized ideology of liberal personhood, which deploys domestic space as a metaphor for the interiority of the human subject.

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November 10, 2021 – Amanda Phillips

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Amanda Phillips
Associate Professor, Islamic Art and Material Culture
Department of Art, University of Virginia

“Seeing Labor: Textiles, Art, and Artisanship”

Textiles sit between several fields of study, and even between disciplines. Individual objects may be treated as works of art, while written sources and archaeology attest to the scale of their production, trade, and consumption, suggesting some types are best understood as commodities. Taking this tension into account, this talk makes a preliminary step in exploring how art historians and scholars of material culture might use extant objects to understand how artisans worked, and to propose some new ideas about processes and decision-making or perhaps even authorship. It uses several examples—a large silk hanging made ca. 1400, velvet upholstery woven ca. 1600, and a blue and white cotton made ca. 1700s—to work through ideas of labor, skill, and technology, and some possible implications for the study of art and craft.

Register here.

November 17, 2021 – Monica Huerta

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Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Princeton University.

“What’s in a Face?”

This talk is drawn from a larger research project in progress, Face Poetics. The larger project will reach back into the long, multi-disciplinary history of studying how to read faces to theorize the ethical quandaries of facial recognition technologies in the present moment and in light of current struggles against their use and implementation. The larger project’s goal is to theorize what humanistic visual inquiry and analysis can contribute to conversations at the cross roads of critical race and science and technologies studies, which tend to center political and sociological questions (for some important reasons). “What’s in a Face” will give an overview of larger scope of the project, while zeroing in on some of the problems for humanistic ways of knowing presented by the question of how twenty-first century power works when it interfaces with algorithmic knowledges.

Register here.