Mia L. Bagneris Director of Africana Studies

Associate Professor Mia L. Bagneris has been appointed Director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane.  On June 25th she was interviewed by Tulane School of Liberal Arts Dean Brian T. Edwards for the Give Green Tulane campaign. You can read Prof. Bagneris’s new essay, “Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell’s Octoroon” in June issue of The Art Bulletin (102, no. 2) June 2020, pp. 64-90. In her words: “[A]nalysis of The Octoroon contributes to a growing body of recent scholarship that seeks to address a lacuna within art history by probing the relationship of art and visual culture to the histories of race, slavery, colonialism, and empire.” Her book, Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias  was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.

Carroll Gallery pop-up events - Fall 2020

The Carroll Gallery will be hosting a trio of pop-up art events for the Tulane community this fall. The series kicks off Thursday, October 15th with an Interactive Chalkboard Mural inspired by Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” project + #ColorOurCollections, inspired by a project launched by the New York Academy of Medicine, with large-scale coloring sheets based on collections from museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world.

On Thursday, October 22nd, join us for Recycled Journal Making. Stop by and make a small hard-cover journal out of recycled cardboard and hardware.

On Thursday, November 12th we will make Solar Prints. Gather materials to create a photogram using light, water, and photo-s ensitive paper. Inspired by Man Ray’s Rayographs.

All pop-up events are open 9:00 am – 4:00 pm in the Carroll Gallery.
 Free and open to the Tulane community. 
Social distancing: Limited to 10 people at a time in gallery.

Michelle Foa: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton

Michelle Foa's article "In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old," was just published in the September 2020 issue of The Art Bulletin. Edgar Degas’ four-month stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his first experience crossing the Atlantic, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Foa’s article analyzes the important connections between Southern cotton, the textiles that fill the artist’s pictures of dancers, laundresses and bathers, and the paper he used for many of his drawings. 

This year she has given lectures at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (virtually) and Wofford College. In July she joined the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History of Art.

Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art

A new virtual lecture series has been organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and is being co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Featuring a diverse array of scholars, such as Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Jennifer Van Horn, and Caitlin Beach, Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art will showcase research that centers BIPOC people as artists, as subjects of representation, and as viewers.Talks in the series will illuminate the intersections of race and representation, including strategies of resistance employed by artists and spectators of color, in the visual and material cultures of the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean from the early modern period through the nineteenth century.All talks will be presented via Zoom and will be free and open to the public.

Please join us for the inaugural lecture  by Jennifer Van Horn, Associate Professor of Art History and History, University of Delaware. 

 ‘No one could prevent us making good use of our eyes’: Enslaved Spectators and Iconoclasts on Southern Plantations
Thursday, September 10, 6pm CDT

The lecture will take place online. 

Zoom Meeting ID: 928 2640 9178 Passcode: 165843

This lecture uses the portrait to tell an alternative history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture in acts of artistic defiance.It traces the ways that bondpeople denied planters’ authority and reversed dehumanization by gazing on white elites’ portraits, an act of rebellion that remains understudied.  This lecture is also supported by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. 

[Image Caption: Daphne Williams, Age about 100, 1936-38]