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.

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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.

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Lecturer in The Department of History of Art
Director of the Center for Visual Culture
Bryn Mawr College

Director’s Introduction.

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Art of Liberation

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally.

Co-sponsored with the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art

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Grégory Pierrot
President, Amiri Baraka Society
Associate Professor, English Department
University of Connecticut at Stamford

From Rude Boys to Proud Boys: A Short History of Hip, Fashion and Fascism

The presidential debates and the subsequent failed coup of January 6th made a household name of the Proud Boys, the militia created by journalist-turned-fascist-goon Gavin McInnes. Seemingly diverse in its membership, claiming “Western chauvinism” rather than white supremacism, the Proud Boys and their intentions may seem puzzling from the outside. Still, recent events have convincingly exposed their commitment to fascist action and beliefs. 21st American fascism is a self-aware structure, powered by an engine dedicated to whitewashing the cultural references that fuel it. This presentation proposes a diagnostic.

(Group photo of 60s/70s rude boys/skinheads taken by Toni Tye. Photo of Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys taken by Maranie R. Staab).

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American artist, writer and performer

Strophe: A Screening and Studio Visit with Ellie Ga

Strophe, a Turning is Ellie Ga’s ode to a message in a bottle. The video lets drifting objects carry her unexpectedly to the Greek island of Symi, and then to the shores of its neighbor Lesvos where she joins a team of volunteers aiding asylum seekers and refugees. The poetics of accidental drift turn into an urgent reckoning with political and humanitarian reality.

Co-sponsored by the Special Collections Department

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Assistant Professor
Department of Art History
Northwestern University

“Sculpting Whiteness on the Eighteenth-Century Dining Table”

With the emergence of material culture studies, the eighteenth-century aristocratic dining table has become an important locus for understanding the history of porcelain, French culinary practices, and modes of elite sociability, yet little has been written on the intermingling materials used to create these elaborate tablescapes. With the advent of biscuit soft-paste porcelain at the Sèvres Royal Porcelain Manufactory, matte white unglazed statuettes were placed side by side expensive sugar sculptures as the centerpieces of elite dining tables. The replication of whiteness—the primary characteristic aesthetically linking porcelain and sugar—has been read as evidence of the prevailing importance of Academic sculpture and the explicit antique connotations of marble. However, the eighteenth century’s fetishization of porcelain and the violent conditions of sugar’s production must be put in dialogue with the white forms adorning the dinner tables of the aristocratic elite. In doing so, this paper argues that the replication of whiteness in materials with colonial and imperialist histories alludes to a deeper political and social ideology of a society attempting to assert ideas of racial difference and hierarchy while simultaneously representing the expanding global purview of eighteenth-century Europe.

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g1(host): a series 7 years in the making: An Open Forum & Performance Research Virtual Tour with nia love and Lela Aisha Jones

nia love is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She is a radical thinker, artist, performer and professor that focuses on Modern dance, Post-Modern dance, and West African dance.

Lela Aisha Jones is Assistant Professor of Dance at Bryn Mawr College

Co-sponsored by the Dance & 360 Programs.

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Deborah Jack
Artist and Writer
C.C. McKee
Assistant Professor of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

Waves of Memory and History from a Caribbean Lens: Deborah Jack and C.C. McKee in conversation

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The Politics of Art and Race in France

On the walls of the National Assembly in Paris, a fresco commemorates the first abolition of slavery in France (1794). Why is this piece using the codes of racist iconography? The presentation will explain how the painting has remained on display for 30 years, although it seems to be defeating its own symbolic purpose. Exploring the multiple layers of denial that protect this “work of art”, we will highlight its organic connection with the repression of France’s colonial history and with the post-racial utopia that the country has built for itself.

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