Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History - a lecture by Denise Murrell

Please join us for the 2021 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History, a lecture by Denise Murrell, Associate Curator of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Denise Murrell will present an overview of her 2018 exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, and its iterations at the Musée d’Orsay Paris and at the Mémorial ACTe, Guadeloupe. She will discuss the project’s representation of the Black presence in the artistic milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris as central to the development of modern art. She will explore the legacy of this iconographic lineage for successive generations of artists from the early twentieth-century modernists of the Harlem Renaissance and the School of Paris to the global contemporary art of today. She will conclude with observations on the project’s relevance for art history in the current moment of renewed focus on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in art history.

Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History 

Thursday, March 18, 6:00 pm Central Time, Online

Zoom link https://tulane.zoom.us/j/92592796500?pwd=NjVEcjZxZDVzVWFEUXNuTEJGaCtEQT09
Passcode: 530332

This lecture is part of a year-long series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

"The Greek Slave on the Eve of Abolition"

Please join us on Thursday, November 12 at 6pm for the last of the lectures in the Representation & Resistance  series for this term, "The Greek Slave on the Eve of Abolition" by Caitlin Beach, Associate Professor of Art History, Fordham University. The lecture will take place online.  https://tulane.zoom.us/j/91351100042 

What kind of image can enact change? 

Many nineteenth-century viewers posed this question when seeing Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (first version, 1844), anticipating that its depiction of a Greek woman in chains might raise metaphorical connections to the urgent matter of slavery’s abolition in the antebellum United States. But as scholars have pointed out, the white marble statue was fraught with complexity in terms of its materiality and subject matter, deflecting as many associations to the enslavement of African Americans as it evoked. 

This talk draws on new archival material to rethink the Greek Slave’s relationship to antislavery discourse. Its exhibition intersected the machinations of racial capitalism in the Black Atlantic, concerns that emerged in sharp relief during the sculpture’s American tour and in the city of New Orleans in particular. There, the sculpture’s display was inextricable from the acts of seeing and surveillance central to the institution of slavery and human trafficking. Yet in these same years, the Greek Slave’s closeness to slavery in the U.S. South would become a flashpoint of Black activism and antislavery critique on the global stage. In an age of slavery and abolition, Powers’ sculpture stood on shifting ground. 

This lecture is supported by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and part of the lecture series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art, organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Image caption: Photographer unknown (American), [Hiram Powers' Sculpture of the Greek Slave], ca. 1850, Metropolitan Museum of Art  

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.

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]