New course: Decolonizing the Camera

This Fall the Newcomb Art Department is offering a new course ARST 3011: DECOLONIZING THE CAMERA, taught by visiting assistant professor Shabez Jamal.

In this course students will examine their own visual practice through the framework of decolonization. Through this process, students will engage with topics of race, representation, and power, while they build a visual practice that takes into account the complicated colonial legacy of photography. We will investigate the ways in which the camera has historically been used as a weapon of violence against those deemed as the Other. By approaching photography in such a way, students will gain a better understanding of how the camera works in racial time, which will result in a more informed and intentional practice of art-making. Throughout the course, students will engage in critiques, readings, and visual analyses that will support the cultivation of language to directly address the formation of otherness in image-making. Simultaneously students will be looking at contemporary lens-based artists who are working to correct this legacy from behind the camera in order to leverage the medium of photography as a tool of liberation. Students will employ these contemporary techniques to develop their own artistic practice.

Shabez Jamal is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. His work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Often turning the lens on himself, Jamal utilizes self-portraiture as a means of radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. 

M/W 3- 5:50pm, 204 Woldenberg Art Center

Barbara E. Mundy joins the faculty as Roberston Chair in Latin American Art

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Barbara E. Mundy to the faculty as Professor of Art History and the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art.

Barbara E. Mundy’s scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She has been particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century.

Mundy's current book project, "The Embodiment of the Word: European Book Culture and New World Manuscripts." Rather than considering Indigenous manuscripts as phenomena separate from European books, it situates native bookmakers in the midst of the new technological revolution brought about by the printing press. While Martin Luther’s innovations (and conflagrations) take up most of the oxygen in the history of print in the early sixteenth century, attracting less attention, but equally radical, was the Spanish crown’s use of the new technology to control, via standardization, governance, language, and history. The testing ground of this imperial project was the “Indies,” as their American territories were called, and it is within this context that her protagonists--Indigenous writers, painters and bookmakers--operated.

With Dana Leibsohn, Mundy is the co-creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Digital projects are a fundamental part of her teaching practice. Mundy was the 2021-22 Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress; she has had fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and at the John Carter Brown Library. She serves on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl and is the current president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a Professor of Art History at Fordham University in New York.

 

NOMA Gallery Talk with Curatorial Intern Ava Bush

This summer Ava Bush, the recipient of the 2022 Nell Pomeroy O'Brien Award for a Junior in Art History and a triple major in Art History, Anthropology, and Asian Studies, is a curatorial intern at the New Orleans Museum of Art. 

On Wednesday July 27th at noon, Bush will present a gallery talk at NOMA discussing the influences of Nanga and Zenga that can be observed in The Free Hermit Life: Images of Reclusion and Retirement in Japanese Edo-Period Painting.

Free with museum admission. Louisiana residents receive free admission to NOMA on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation. When you arrive at NOMA, check in at the front desk for directions to the appropriate gallery. To book your ticket in advance, click here and select the day for the gallery talk you’d like to attend.

2022 Newcomb Art Awards

On Friday, May 6th the Newcomb Art Department hosted its annual Student Art Awards ceremony in Stone Auditorium. Stephanie Porras, Professor of Art History and Chair, presented the Art History Awards and Teresa Cole, Professor of Printmaking, presented the Studio Art Awards.

Art History Awards

The Marilyn Brown Award for Outstanding Art History Major  Alex Landry

The Marilyn Brown Award for Outstanding Art History Major  Kamryn Pigg

The Marilyn Brown Senior Honors Scholar Award  Kamryn Pigg 

The Marilyn Brown Senior Honors Scholar Award Zoe Ariyama

The Henry Stern Prize Paper in Art History  Isa Zweiback

The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a Sophomore or Junior in Art History  Ava Bush

Studio Art Awards

The Class of 1914 Award in Painting  Yume Jensen

The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award in 3D Art  Sydnee Fagan

The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award in 2D Art  Sophie Bennett

The Sandy Chism Memorial Award in Painting  Ava Jeanne Davis

The Juanita Gonzales Ceramics Award  Lauren Bean

The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a Sophomore or Junior in Studio Art  Leah Baron