From the Moon: Mapping the Uncharted

Our very own Prof. Leslie Geddes was interviewed for the current season of the Triennale Milano's podcast, From the Moon.

Listen in to Episode 4: Mapping the Uncharted, where Prof Geddes talks about how maps reveal the ways in which we try to expand beyond the limits of our vision and how mapmaking can help uncover the mysteries of the world around us through representing vantage points we can't see or experience firsthand. From the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana to an icy moon of the distant planet Saturn, the episode goes to see how geography and design, as well as art and science fuse to create the maps we often take for granted.

Available here: https://triennale.org/en/magazine/from-moon-2-episode-4
and wherever podcasts are found!

Perception, Ritual, and Memory in an Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditationes Vitae Christi

This month, Professor Holly Flora delivered the Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her talk, titled “Perception, Ritual, and Memory in an Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” discussed how medieval Clarissan nuns in Siena used a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript for imaginative devotion.

Professor Flora's new book The Meditationes Vitae Christi Reconsidered New Perspectives on Text and Image (co-edited with Peter Toth) is a collection of critical essays on this fourteenth-century Sienese illuminated manuscript.

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

PUBLICATION ALERT: Art History alum Zoe Ariyama (BA, 2022) recently published an article in the Brooklyn Rail on the New Orleans Museum of Art's current exhibition “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers.”

Art History alum Rebecca Villalpando (MA, 2022) contributed to this exhibition during her time as a graduate curatorial intern at NOMA.

Read the article here: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/artseen/Called-to-the-Camera-Black-American-Studio-Photographers

[James Presley Ball, Alexander S. Thomas, ca. late 1850s. Quarter plate daguerreotype. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum]

Newcomb Art Department Holiday Sale

After a two-year hiatus, our beloved holiday sale is back! Please join us on December 9th and 10th for the Newcomb Art Department Holiday Sale featuring works in glass, ceramics, printmaking, fiber, works on paper, painting, and more. All works are by Tulane undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and alumni. 

PLEASE NOTE RE: PARKING
There is no visitor parking on campus without a permit before 5:30 pm on Friday.
You may park on Audubon Blvd. (2-hr) or Broadway at that time. We will have two spots near the gallery reserved for those needing assistance.

Parking on campus is permitted on Saturday.

Please email Laura Richens lrichens@tulane.edu for more information.

Dutch Americas Symposium

On December 9-10, 2022, the Newcomb Art Department will host a symposium marking the end of the first iteration of the Dutch Americas humanities lab, co-taught by Stephanie Porras at Tulane and Aaron Hyman at Johns Hopkins. On Friday, December 9th, Professor Carrie Anderson will deliver a keynote address on the topic of the Dutch West India Company’s presence in the Atlantic world. 

Material Matters in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhout’s Paintings of an African Man and Woman

lecture by Carrie Anderson, Middlebury College

Friday, December 9 2022 at 5:30 PM 

Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center

download symposium program (pdf)

 

The following day, graduate students from Johns Hopkins and Tulane will be presenting their final projects - object-based research on the visual and material culture of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The WIC, founded in 1621, traded across the Atlantic, with footholds in regions of New York, Curaçao, Guyana, Brazil, Suriname, Ghana and Benin – dealing primarily in fur, tobacco, sugar, gold and enslaved Africans. Modeled on laboratory courses in the sciences, the seminar saw teams comprising of students from both schools working on a specific geography (New Netherland/New York, the Caribbean, West Africa, Brazil) working together in order to identify, research, catalog, and publish relevant items in a web-based database. This symposium celebrates and reflects on this groundbreaking foundational research in an emerging field of art historical scholarship, the assembly of a corpus of objects, sites, and materials related to the Dutch trading companies present in the Americas. 

The Dutch Americas Symposium is supported by Johns Hopkins and the Newcomb College Institute’s Dorothy Beckemeyer Skau Art and Music Fund.

Emery K. Tillman , 3D art shop manager

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to introduce our newest team member, Emery K, Tillman, 3D art shop manager. 

Emery Kate Tillman (they/them), originally from New Orleans, holds a B.A in studio art from College of Charleston and an MFA in studio art from Louisiana State University. They consider themself a material investigator in their studio practice and have a heavy mixed media background with mediums spanning from textiles, glass, wood, metal as well as digital fabrication tools. 

In their practice they explore what queer joy looks like when joy is used as a form of rebellion and power. They play particular interests in interpersonal communications in this community and what the visual language of vulnerability looks like. They have shown throughout the country as well as in Thailand and the Czech Republic. They have a background in making spaces more accessible and look forward to continuing this work at Tulane.

Black Arts Consortium Graduate Working Group Workshop

On Friday, November 4, 2022, Tulane’s Studio Art graduate program welcomed scholars from Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium Graduate Working Group for a series of workshops/studio visits. Throughout the day, each of the participants (all of whom are working towards the completion of their dissertation/ thesis) were given the opportunity to briefly speak about their works in progress and receive diverse and affirming feedback from peers. 

This workshop was supported by the Katherine Steinmayer McLean Visiting Studio Artist Fund.

Anne Lafont: "Tying, publicizing, adorning: The buttons of Toussaint Louverture"

The Newcomb Art Department presents the 2022 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture

"Tying, publicizing, adorning: The buttons of Toussaint Louverture"

by Dr. Anne Lafont, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris


Abstract The legend and reality of the 18 buttons kept at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York force us to take a close look at their making in the latter part of the eighteenth century Caribbean and in the light of one of its most illustrious black personalities: Toussaint Louverture, pioneer of the Haitian revolution, emancipated slave, ally of the European powers, deposed prisoner and captured by Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies, who died in exile in a French dungeon. The function, iconography, medium and biographical fortune of this series of buttons inform an exceptional history where Caribbean, French and American figures intersect over two centuries. Unfolding the panoply of buttons and following their phenomenology, on a formal and social levels, from manufacture to use, is to write a piece of the history of art of the Black Atlantic.

Anne Lafont is an art historian and professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is interested in the art, images, and material culture of the Black Atlantic, as well as in historiographical questions related to the notion of African art. She has published on art and knowledge in an imperial context, on gender issues in the art discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries, and more recently she published a book : L'art et la race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'oeil des Lumières. It was awarded the 2019 Fetkann Maryse Condé Literary Prize and the 2020 Vitale and Arnold Blokh Prize. Anne Lafont participated, as a member of the scientific committee, in the Musée d'Orsay exhibition The Black Model (2019). In 2021, she was awarded a residential fellowship from the cultural services of the French Embassy in the United States, the Villa Albertine, and served, for the academic year 2021-2022, as the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College (Massachusetts). Her most recent book : L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle (La découverte, 2022) is co-edited with François-Xavier Fauvelle.

Wednesday, December 7 2022 at 6:00 PM

Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center
View Map

This lecture is supported by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund.

Objects in Focus: Clothes by Betsy Packard, MFA 1978

Join us for this month’s Objects in Focus gallery talk, which will focus on work of Betsy Packard (MFA, 1978).
 

Friday, November 4, 12 pm

Newcomb Art Museum

This talk will be led by Alex Landry, Curatorial Assistant at the Newcomb Art Museum and a 2nd-year Art History MA student.

This event is free and open to all.

"Paper, Ivory, Feathers: Viral Materiality in the Early Modern World"

On Friday October 14th Dr. Stephanie Porras will present on the materialilty and mechanics of early modern globalization at the Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota. The talk will also be streamed live via zoom.  Stephanie Porras is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. She is a scholar of the visual and material culture of early modern Europe, particularly Northern Europe and the Spanish world. She is the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (2016), The Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce, Devotion (2018) and the forthcoming The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp and the early modern globe.

Stephanie Porras: "Paper, Ivory, Feathers: Viral Materiality in the Early Modern World" 
 
Fri, Oct 14, 2022 | 12:15 - 1:30 pm

1210 Heller Hall, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Event Registration
Cosponsored by the Department of Art History and the Early Modern Atlantic Workshop.
This is a hybrid event. Click the registration link to sign up for the Zoom webinar.

Ina Kaur: artist residency at MIAD

MFA candidate Ina Kaur was invited to be one of twelve artists who participated at MIADprint artist residency/workshop at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in Milwaukee, WI from September 26- 30, 2022. 

During her visit Ina engaged the MIAD community through an artist lecture and was part of the panel "Contemporary art practices: artistic journey across cultural boundaries and ethnic borders." The works created during the residency are on display at the MIAD galleries until Oct 08, 2022. 

 

Ina's interdisciplinary practice uses various mediums, and she continues to push the material boundaries in her work. Her newest project titled, “coloniality of expression” utilized lithography, etching, ceramics and stitching.

#miadprints2022 #miadprintmaking #tulaneart 

IG: @studio_inkspace

Dr. Anagnost's new book reviewed in Art Journal

"Anagnost has done a superb job of reuniting the discussions of art and architecture, reminding us of the intense exchanges between people working on different media and at different scales."

Professor Adrian Anagnost’s new book Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022) is reviewed by Fernando Luiz Lara in the current issue of Art Journal.

Dr. Adrian Anagnost is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane. Her new book explores the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s. It shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil’s colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development.

Dr. Fernando Lara is the Potter Rose Professor in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Citation: Fernando Luiz Lara, review of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires and Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil in Art Journal 81, no. 3 (2022): 116-118, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2022.2110425

Adrian Anagnost and Leslie Geddes - “Military Ecologies in the Americas: The French Fort of La Balise”

On October 1st, Tulane art history professors Adrian Anagnost and Leslie Geddes presented their paper,  “Military Ecologies in the Americas: The French Fort of La Balise,” as part of the Carceral and Military Ecologies panel at the (Re)thinking Landscape: Ways of Knowing/ Ways of Being conference at Yale University.

Abstract: The French fort of La Balise, built in the early eighteenth-century, was at the nexus of marshland and sea in the Mississippi River Delta. Originally, the fortified settlement aimed to protect French colonial interests and secure access to the Mississippi River at a crucial juncture. Today, due to land loss along the Gulf of Mexico, the fort lies underwater at most tides, but visual evidence remains: a series of ink and watercolor maps produced for administrative oversight and sent to the Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies.
Recognizing both advantages and hazards of the landscape, these maps document the enmeshment of fort and the Mississippi Delta’s complex ecosystem. Passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the river was fraught with peril, evident in references to shipwrecks alongside pictorial and textual demarcations of currents and oceanic depths. Simultaneously, French mercantile and social orders were imposed on the landscape, with a brickyard and designated settlement for enslaved Africans on an adjoining island. Exploitation of natural resources and racialized spatial segregation were formative to the colonial project in the Americas. We argue that depictions of the fort’s construction, amidst the ever-shifting environs of the Gulf South, reveal how topographic variability posed difficulties to pictorial rendering. Troubling rigid conceptualizations of landscapes and seascapes, maps reveal interpenetrating salt and freshwaters, shoals, and islands. As the French sought to make militarily secure this mutable terrain, the land itself challenged visual discernment, with colonial expansion, imperial power, and enslavement set against a natural landscape that thwarted cartographic fixity.

Gene Koss: solo exhibition at Ohr-O'keefe Museum

Always an admirer of Frank Gehry's architecture, Gene Koss is excited to exhibit in a stainless steel Gehry designed pod on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum campus. The huge steel panels and exposed beams in the raw, unfinished interior of the pod contrast and complement Koss’s sculpture.

The exhibit covers a span of Koss’s sculpture career from 1990 to 2019 and was curated by David Houston, the Ohr-O’Keefe executive director.  Included is Arc, a large-scale sculpture of steel, stone and glass; Totem, a large wooden timber sculpture; as well as several multi-media maquette sculptures. 

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art  386 Beach Blvd, Biloxi, MS 39530
Open to the public:  10am-5pm Tuesday – Saturday; 1pm-5pm Sunday

Artists Respond: Post-Roe Louisiana

Artists Respond: Post-Roe Louisiana is a juried exhibition that will feature artwork in a variety of media by artists from Louisiana, in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in June of 2022.  The exhibition will be on view in the Carroll Gallery of the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, and will include student work as well as artwork by established and emerging artists from throughout the state.  

The exhibition’s Panel of Jurors is comprised of:
Dr. Clare Daniel, Administrative Associate Professor, Newcomb Institute
Dr. Maurita Poole, Director, Newcomb Art Museum
Laura Richens, Curator, Carroll Gallery, Newcomb Art Department

The exhibition will be on view from Oct. 4 – 28, 2022, and will include a Panel Discussion and Exhibition Reception on Thursday, Oct. 13.  

Panel discussion: 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm, Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center
Exhibition reception:  6:30 - 8:00 pm, Carroll Gallery, Woldenberg Art Center

Moderators:  
    Dr. Clare Daniel, Administrative Associate Professor, Newcomb Institute
    Kelsey Lain, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health Intern, Newcomb Institute
Panelists:
    Dr. Karissa Haugeberg, Associate Professor of History, Tulane University
    Lakeesha Harris, Co-Executive Director, Lift Louisiana
    Amy Irvin, Executive Director, Creative Community League

The panel discussion will be in-person, and also accessible via Zoom .

Link to Zoom with the QR code above, or:  https://bit.ly/ArtistsRespondLA

Read the Artist Statements here: https://qrco.de/bdOCJ1

Please contact Laura Richens at lrichens@tulane.edu for more information. 

*Thank you to the Newcomb Institute for their generous support of this project.

Degas, New Orleans, and the Transatlantic Cotton Trade

On September 14th at 6pm, Dr. Michelle Foa will present on the influence of Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of the cotton trade to his work. This in-person lecture will take place at the Gallier House, 1132 Royal Street, New Orleans. Registration is required through eventbrite. 

About this event

Join Dr. Foa in-person at the September Gallier Gathering as she discusses the French painter Edgar Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of cotton and the transatlantic cotton trade to his work and European society at large.

About this Event

Edgar Degas’s stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the textiles in his countless pictures of dancers, laundresses, and bathers and to his works’ paper supports, this lecture will demonstrate the centrality of the material to the artist’s body of work. More broadly, Degas’s Cotton Office paintings, as well as drawings and correspondence from his time abroad, reveal that the artist had begun thinking about the world, his work, and the subjects depicted therein in more geographically expansive and interconnected terms. These pictures and letters reflect his newfound understanding of the ties that joined the Old and New Worlds to one another and the global circulation of people, goods, and communications in the later nineteenth century.

Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, and her research focuses on nineteenth-century French art and visual and material culture. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a book on Degas, and part of this research published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize in 2021. Her research and teaching have been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event is made possible by funding from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Funding for 2021 Rebirth grants has been administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Faculty spotlight: Michelle Foa

Michelle Foa has received several research and teaching fellowships, prizes, and grants in the past year.  She is at work on a book on Edgar Degas, and an article drawn from this research published in The Art Bulletin and titled “In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old,” received the annual article prize from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.  She also received a grant from the National Endowment from the Humanities to undertake a major environmental humanities curricular initiative at Tulane.  A Studio in the Woods and the ByWater Institute awarded her a scholarly residency to be completed during the upcoming year.    

 

At commencement this past May, Professor Foa received the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Undergraduate Education, the university’s top undergraduate teaching prize. She was also recently appointed as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Solon R. Cole, MD, and Siegel Professor in Social Entrepreneurship at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center.  Venues of recent and forthcoming lectures on her research include the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, Saint Andrews University in Scotland, University of Virginia, College of William and Mary, Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western University, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Lecture Series at Gallier House.  She chairs the virtual speaker series for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History of Art.

RECON exhibition reunites artists in the Carroll Gallery

The 2020 BFA graduates of the Newcomb Art Department are pleased to present RECON, an exhibition of new artwork, following the cancellation of their undergraduate thesis exhibitions nearly 28 months ago.

The root word "recon" evokes gathering, reunion, and the search for knowledge, splintering into a multitude of connotations. After time apart, we tap into the empowerment of community, with collaboration as a driving force. We rekindle the playful experimentation of our undergraduate years while still approaching our practices with the greater respect and seriousness afforded with time and experience. The artwork presented offers a portrayal of a young group reuniting to create - not in competition or exclusion - but in the interest of growth, resurrection, and collective success.

RECON was able to take place due to the generosity of Tulane University, the Newcomb Art Department, the Carroll Gallery, and Laura Richens. To everyone who contributed to RECON, thank you for showing up in every way that matters.

RECON is curated by Emma Conroy and includes new artwork by Parker Greenwood, Alex Lawton, Andrew Mahaffie, and Eli Pillaert.

On view: August 11 - September 19, 2022

[Photos of exhibition by Alex Lawton]

Team Lead, 2021, by Andrew Mahaffie

 

 

Untitled no 7 by Alex Lawton

Lady Fingers, 2022 by Eli Pillaert

Ink painting by Parker Greenwood

1000 Places by Andrew Mahaffie

Blas Isasi solo exhibition at The Front

"An idea is just the shape of a flower" is a solo exhibition of new work by Blas Isasi, visiting assistant professor of sculpture at Tulane. The exhibition will be on view at The Front from August 13 through September 4, 2022. nolafront.org

Artist Statement

The Peruvian coast consists of a long and narrow strip of desert squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, and crossed by a series of oasis-like river valleys. Given its long history of human occupation, ancient ruins have been one of this arid landscape´s most emblematic features. Abandoned temples and settlements that were gradually reclaimed by the desert sands were then turned into venerated shrines and cemeteries by subsequent kingdoms and their societies. After the Spanish conquest of Peru, this continued under new forms as those practices became more syncretic (e.g. witchcraft), together with the then nascent and still ongoing looting of tombs and temples. The latest development in this long history is the commodification of the past under a neoliberal regime that renders ancient artifacts and archeological sites as tourist attractions: inert, sterilized and “disenfranchised” relics of the past. Peru´s coastal desert is a scarred landscape, one whose scars work as mnemonic devices and indexical marks. Past and present populations have systematically engaged in a complex, dynamic and often conflictive process of negotiating memory through an editing process that sometimes involves the erasing of these marks, others their unearthing, resignifying and reinvention altogether resulting in a living palimpsest.

Following in the footsteps of numerous past Peruvian artists like Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, Juan Javier Salazar, and most notoriously Jorge Eduardo Eielson in making the desert a subject of their work, in "An idea is just the shape of a flower" I try to bring into play different key aspects, fragments, materials and symbols characteristic to this unique cultural landscape. By deploying various strategies, I intend to animate some of its most representative elements such as sand, clay, bones, etc. so as to put them in dialogue with each other in ways that seem counterintuitive, suggesting not only new connections and meanings but also other possible worlds. The accompanying presence of seamless metal structures in my installations hint to cartesian reason on the one hand, while evoking 20th century Modernist design on the other, the quintessential aesthetics that symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of progress in the context of the Global South. The resulting tension from the juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing sets of elements is meant to, in the words of Raymond Williams, convey a “structure of feeling”: the feeling of things before we are able think them; the feeling of a different world before we can imagine it. In short, mine is a humble attempt to reenchant the world and sow the seeds of hope in a bleak and perilous age.

Last but not least, this exhibition is meant as a heartfelt and critical homage to the arid and stunningly beautiful land I grew up on.