Assistant Professor
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Middlebury College

“Textiles and Trade in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhout’s African Man and Woman”

Art historians have largely abandoned the notion that Dutch artist Albert Eckhout’s (1610-1665) series of so-called ethnographic portraits—today in the National Museum of Denmark—offer transparent portrayals of the people with whom the Dutch had contact in New Holland, the name given to the northeast region of Brazil during Dutch occupancy (1630-1654). Instead, scholars have more recently posited nuanced and careful critiques of these paintings that identify and challenge the Eurocentric assumptions and hierarchies integral to the conception and interpretation of the series.  Acknowledging the critical importance of these studies, this talk seeks to reframe the parameters of the discussion by reestablishing the crucial connections between material culture and cultural identity—which are evident even when bound by the pictorial conventions of oppressive colonial forces.  Drawing from global, material culture, and literary studies, this talk will focus on the blue-and-white textiles worn by Eckhout’s African figures, garments that gesture towards the complexities of Dutch global trade networks, but also make visible the complex negotiations that informed cultural identities in the early modern Atlantic world.

Assistant Professor
Department of Art History
The Pennsylvania State University

“Making Up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act”

Over the roughly half-century that he plied the medium of sculpture, Donatello (1383/6–1464) produced a number of works which, although differing in key respects, all take up the same basic conceit. Broadly speaking, these are sculptures wrought from one material that masquerade as a different substance entirely, always a substance more costly or prestigious than the first. To affect these transformations Donatello and his collaborators would rework the raw substrate of these sculptures – their “skin” – dramatically, applying subtle films of pigment, varnish, gold powder, resin, wax, brick dust, and a host of other materials that work in concert to make terracotta resemble marble or glass mosaic; stucco simulate precious stones; to give limestone the look of porphyry. While the range of activities to which Donatello’s dissimulated materials might be compared was broad, this talk explores the possibility that the sculptor and his peers were reminded of one pursuit in particular:not painting per se, but its less dignified offspring cosmetics, the artificial enhancement of a body with rouge. Contemporary anecdotes, gossip, popular poetry, and payment records offer insight into Donatello’s appetite for cosmetic experiment.By resurrecting these sources, this talk identifies an underappreciated discourse surrounding Donatello’s “made up” materials, at once exalted for their artifice, and marked by a deep-seated distrust of false appearances, in sculptural media and flesh alike. Throughout, I will attempt to remain faithful to the belief among his contemporaries that what distinguished Donatello within his culture was a special aptitude for cunning – my proposal, in fact, is that this quality is most explicitly manifest in how the sculptor treated surface itself, and a key to understanding the facets of his practice that posterity left behind. For unlike Donatello’s better-known works in marble and bronze, which became a rich quarry for posterity to mine, his cosmetic experiments were not once reprised in the sixteenth century.

Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation & Education
Barnes Foundation

“Renoir, Impressionism and the Value of Touch”

Information Designer
Pentagram

“The Human Side of Data”

co-sponsored by Computer Science and the President’s Office

Today, data are everywhere. But what do data really mean, and how can we extract real value from them in our daily lives? In this illustrated talk, information designer and Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi will discuss our new data reality and “data humanism,” her unique philosophy for understanding and working with data.

Surveying her diverse work over the last decade, Lupi will introduce her distinctive approach to data visualization and offer a look into the far-reaching applications of her work in data and design, from corporate, to institutional, to personal.

Giorgia will encourage creatives (and non!) to harness data as a design tool, while respecting human privacy and experience in their output.

Assistant Professor of History of Art on the Emily Rauh Pulitzer ’55 Professorship
Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“Shades of Revolution: Guillaume Guillon Lethière and Neoclassicism’s Other Environments”

This presentation explores the neoclassical oeuvre of Guillaume Guillon Lethière—a mixed-race painter who was born in Guadeloupe and ascended to the heights of the French Academié in the early-nineteenth century. Taking up a body of works executed over the course of the French and Haitian Revolutions, this paper centers on the inclusion of Caribbean ecological markers in Lethière’s history paintings. From this perspective, Lethière’s oeuvre articulates a relationship to the Caribbean as an ecology of blackness counterintuitively represented through Classicism. This is an ecology in its broadest sense; it encapsulates not only the psychic machinations of an individual mixed-race artist, but also the diffusion of raced identity into the landscape itself, and the co-mingling of blackness and the botanical in an independent Haiti. Lethière and his painting practice are a distinct node at which multiple colonial dialectics converge: the tumultuous politics of Revolutionary France and Haiti, the liberatory political possibilities of the Classics and botany for black subjectivities, and the interpenetrating psychological and environmental ecologies that opened as much as they foreclosed for Lethière.

Associate Professor of German and Chair
Department of German and German Studies
Bryn Mawr College

“Female Desire, Pop-Rock, and the Tiananmen Generation: The Synergy of Sexual and Political Revolutions in the Banned Chinese-German Film Summer Palace (颐和园, 2006)”

1989 comprises a vital part of the Tiananmen generation’s memory and identity. Yet, any attempt to address the turbulent events in mass media, however oblique, carries a high risk of censorship. Lou Ye, a prominent Sixth Generation director, took that risk in his film Summer Palace (2006). His iconoclastic exploration of sex and politics at a thinly disguised Beijing University was banned in China and languishes in relative obscurity in the West. This talk teases out the rich and complex texture of this masterpiece by undertaking an expository reading of Summer Palace’s plot in conjunction with its musical soundtrack and many intertextual references. The film’s narrative arc stretches from Beijing to Berlin, linking two cities where communist rule was openly challenged in 1989, and using a delayed death in Berlin as an opportunity to commemorate the dead of 1989, constructing an alternative site of mourning for the victims in Beijing.

Lecturer in Discipline of Chinese Art History
Columbia University

“Cui Bai’s Magpies and Hare: A Political Allegory”

In the eleventh century of the Northern Song (960-1127), Cui Bai painted Magpies and Hare, a sensitive depiction of an autumn scene in which a hare has startled two magpies. Cui Bai’s Magpies and Hare is classified as a bird-and-flower painting. That is, it is grouped with paintings that are considered primarily decorative with auspicious meanings. It is celebrated as an example of highly-finished and technically accomplished painting. I would like to propose that Cui Bai’s masterpiece can be enjoyed as an autumnal scene and can also be understood as a response to an imperial scandal that began in the fall of 1060 and continued through 1061, the year inscribed on the painting. During that period, court officials critiqued Renzong (r. 1022-63) for failure to manage his family. The precipitating incident involved Renzong’s attractive daughter, who preferred the company of eunuchs to that of her husband. I will argue that through carefully assembled images, Cui Bai alluded to the eunuch, the princess, her husband, and to the court officials who commented on the tangled affair.

Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art & Architecture
Temple University

“Consuming Copies: Napoleon Sarony & the Circulation of Nineteenth-Century Public Images”

Napoleon Sarony was among the first celebrity artists in the United States and during the late nineteenth century he was revered as the “father of artistic photography in America.” His modern legacy however has been obscured by perceptions that his work was too commercial in nature and that he was more invested in Barnumesque self-promotion than in art. This talk examines how the system of networked authorship that structured Sarony’s early career in popular lithography shaped his later priorities, and considers whether his assertion of singularity in the face of emerging mass visual culture may actually have been a radical gesture.