April 19, 2023 – Dr. Ikem Stanley Okoye

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Associate Professor, and Associate Chair
Department of Art History, University of Delaware
“Captive Audience”
The talk will explore the deployment of art as an instrument of fear and terror in the 19th-century era of transatlantic slavery. ‘Art’ and ‘Slavery’ may seem like uncomfortable bedfellows. One typically exists in the sanitized and civilized worlds of high culture, the other engages in the arena of something rather abject. My talk nevertheless brings them together in an exploration of the depiction of captivity in southern Nigerian art, especially through the appearance of states of captivity in a specific group of southern Nigerian works. Through these objects and a construction for them of an art history of their production and reception in the light of a fuller understanding of local history, I will explore what they tell us about how different ‘classes’ of Africans understood and represented the idea of slavery.
If unable to join us in person, please register here.

Special Lecture: Giorgia Lupi: Data Humanism-October 25, 2022

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Join the President’s Office for a talk about “data humanism” with Giorgia Lupi, an award-winning information designer and a partner at Pentagram design studio in New York City.

Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and artist whose research and practice uses data as a tool to better understand human nature. Lupi, an advocate for data humanism, uses data visualization as her expressive medium to narrate what she discovers. As we are impacted by algorithms, infographics, and big data, Lupi analyzes this data to create informational graphics that translate into narratives, visual, and tactile structures, immersive websites, and interactive experiences that render the data approachable and enable the viewer or participant to understand the information and locate its relevance in their lives and the lives of others.

4:30PM – 5:30PM
Carpenter Library, Room 21

October 26, 2022 – Paul M. Farber, PhD

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Paul M. Farber, PhD
Director and Co-Founder, Monument Lab
Senior Research Scholar, Center for Public Art and Space, University of Pennsylvania

“Monument Lab: On Civic Practice and Possibility”

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/

November 2, 2022 – Linda Kim

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Linda Kim
Associate Professor of American and Modern Art, Drexel University

“Reciprocal Models: Imperial and Racial Formations at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair”

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/

 

November 9, 2022 – Dr. Mia L. Bagneris via Zoom

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Dr. Mia L. Bagneris
Associate Professor, Art History & Africana Studies
Director, Africana Studies Program
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (Bulbancha)

Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art and Visual Culture, c. 1865-1880
 
Using works like John Bell’s Octoroon (1868) and Robert Gavin’s Quadroon Girl (ca. 1872) as case studies, this talk explores Britons’ pronounced and continued fascination with the figure of the enslaved American mixed-race beauty—even and especially after the abolition of slavery in the United States rendered the potential of such figures as tools for abolitionist suasion obsolete.  I analyze marked visual and rhetorical echoes between representations of the so-called “tragic” mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon and concurrent expressions of Orientalism.  Ultimately, I argue that, against the upright image of Victorian England, the American South—and especially Catholic Louisiana—could be imagined as a place of luxury, debauchery, and desire, a perfect echo to the “Orient” in the British popular imagination and one made stronger by the perceived association of both regions with the traffic in pretty women as “sex slaves”.
This event will be offered via Zoom. To register, please go to https://visualculture.blogs.brynmawr.edu/