Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Cartography: Brazil, September 1763

The Newcomb Art Department presents the 2023 Stern Lecture: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Cartography: Brazil, September 1763.

Matthew Rarey, Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History at Oberlin College, looks at a unique work of Black Atlantic visual culture: the map of Buraco do Tatú, a quilombo (primarily African-populated maroon polity) invaded and destroyed on the orders of the Viceroy of Brazil in September of 1763. Produced by a military cartographer immediately after the battle and today held at an archive in Lisbon, it is one of only two extant maps of the hundreds of such polities that existed in Brazil during its slavery period and by far the most detailed. With careful renderings of the quilombo’s fortifications, buildings, and agricultural plots, it presents a potentially rich archive of Africans’ lifeways in colonial Brazil. Yet its aerial view, textual narrative, and haunting rendering of Africans killed during the battle collectively testify to its ambivalence: a colonial attempt to freeze, and thus reckon with, a fugitive landscape as a precondition of its violent erasure. Looking to a small but rich visual history of mapping maronnage – and thus mapping that which was never meant to be mapped – and dialoguing with work on landscape studies, fetishism, and Black feminist cartographies, this talk presents some initial conclusions on how this unprecedented object demands new forms of ethical engagement with the archives of Atlantic slavery.

Monday, March 20 2023 at 5:30 PM

Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center

Attendees are asked to be aware of parking restrictions on Tulane's uptown campus. More info here: https://campusservices.tulane.edu/departments/parking/uptown

image: Unrecorded artist, Plan of the Quilombo called Buraco do Tatú (detail), 1763 or 1764.  Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal

Reimagining Raphael lecture by Lisa Pon and Tracy Cosgriff

Please join us for the 2023 Terry K. Simmons Lecture

Pages, Plaster, and Computer Screens: Reimagining Raphael and the Library of Julius II

by Lisa Pon & Tracy Cosgriff 

Monday, March 13, 6pm
Stone Auditorium
210 Woldenberg Art Center

Abstract Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, once the private library of Julius II, manifest a monumental thesis on Renaissance theories of word and image. The rediscovery of the Stanza’s collection of deluxe volumes demonstrates that the chamber was animated by a recursive chain of media, from painting to text. Using 3D technologies to reunite the books and the frescoes, this panoramic reconstruction illuminates new dimensions of the Stanza’s experience for its early visitors and elucidates the synergistic intellectual web on which the room's design was predicated. It asks: How was the Stanza engaged by its early modern audience? How might the spatial analysis of the pope’s literary collection shape our interpretation of the chamber’s meaning? How does the relationship of text and image inform our understanding of Renaissance cultures of reading? And how do these investigations inform current urgent discussions about what a library has been and could become? 

Lisa Pon, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California
Lisa Pon specializes in early modern European art, architecture, and material culture, focusing on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance.  Her first book, Raphael, Dürer and Marcantoni Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, was published with Yale University Press in 2004; Cambridge University Press published her most recent monograph, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, in 2015; and she is co-editor or co-author of three additional volumes. Her articles have appeared in venues including Art Bulletin, Art History, Word & Image, Print Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Boletín del Museo del Prado, and Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Tracy Cosgriff, Assistant Professor of Art History, College of Wooster
A lifelong student of Latin and Greek, Professor Cosgriff is interested in the relationship of word and image in Renaissance Italy, the reception of antiquity, and the history of the book. Her research focuses on the painter Raphael and his critical engagement with the classical tradition. She is currently completing a book on Raphael’s famous frescoes in the private library of Julius II, revisiting these canonical compositions in light of the pope’s collection of luxury manuscripts and printed books. Forthcoming publications reconsider aspects of Raphael’s pictorial practice and the legacy of his papal patrons. Other projects investigate the intersection of artistic and poetic design, including the visual inheritances of Horace and Dante.

This lecture is supported by the William L. Duren ’26 Professorship Program.

 

Michelle Foa to lecture at Cleveland Museum of Art

LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT
 
“Destined to be born and perish with equal quickness”: The Making and Unmaking of 19th-Century Paper”

Michelle Foa, Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University
 
Friday, January 20, 2023, 5:30 p.m.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Morley Family Lecture Hall
 
The nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of paper that had far-reaching effects on the arts. This lecture, organized to complement the exhibition Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, situates the changes that paper underwent in the context of key developments in trade, cotton cultivation, and textile production and consumption around the world. It also highlights artists’ and writers’ reactions to these shifts, revealing their profound concern about the longevity of the paper supports of their pictures and publications.
 
Michelle Foa is associate professor of art history in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University. Her research focuses on 19th-century French art and visual and material culture.  
 
This event is supported by the Getty Foundation as part of The Paper Project initiative and by the Wolfgang Ratjen Foundation, Liechtenstein.

{image: Études de chiffonniers (detail), 1849. Gustave Doré (French, 1832–1883). Lithograph; 33.8 x 25.7 cm. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Photo: BnF}

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]

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
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This lecture is supported by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund.

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

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.

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

Magaret Rose Vendryes

We are deeply saddened to shares news of the death of Margaret Rose Vendryes on March 25. An accomplished and admired art historian, visual artist, and curator, she received her MA in Art History from the Newcomb Art Department in 1992, after having received her BA from Amherst and before going on to receive her PhD at Princeton. In her many creative and scholarly projects we see an astonishing array of approaches to thinking about and producing art. Among these, she published a book on Richmond Barthé (Barthé: A Life in Sculpture, 2008), curated Beyond the Blues at the New Orleans Museum of Art in partnership with the Amistad Research Center in 2010, and produced paintings for her African Diva Project series. She was Professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts and Director of the Fine Arts Gallery at York College at the City University of New York (CUNY). She was to become Dean of the School of  the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in June. Our thoughts are with the many who knew and loved her.

Adapt, Reject, and Remix: Ethiopian Christian Art in the Early Modern Era

Tulane's Newcomb Art Department presents the 2022 Terry K. Simmons Lecture in Art History

Adapt, Reject, and Remix: Ethiopian Christian Art in the Early Modern Era 

Kristen Windmuller-Luna, Curator of African Art, Cleveland Museum of Art
March 14, 6:00 pm, Stone Auditorium

Abstract: The rulers of the Ethiopian Christian kingdom (1270–1974) and its predecessor the ˀAksumite Kingdom (ca. 1st–8th century CE) had long sought luxury goods from across Europe and Asia. Locally-made and imported art, textiles, and religious objects contributed to a cosmopolitan Ethiopian Christian visual culture well-documented in local visual and textual sources. This paper focuses on the early modern era, when a 1557–1632 European Jesuit mission introduced new Catholic art to the kingdom and trade with India grew. Contrary to earlier scholarship that minimized Ethiopian Christian art as “conservative” or “derivative,” Dr. Windmuller-Luna presents a series of case studies to show how Ethiopian artists asserted considerable agency and innovation in their use of non-local models by selectively remixing, adapting, and even rejecting foreign influences while simultaneously using historical imagery to communicate sacred and political messages.

Image:
Virgin and Child with Archangels and Donor Figure (ˁətege Məntəwwab), Ethiopian artist, mid-18th century, Church of Narga Śəlasse, Ethiopia, photograph Kristen Windmuller-Luna, 2015
 

New art history course: Theories of Baroque Art

 

Registration for Spring 2022 courses is now open! Prof. Leslie Geddes will be teaching a new history of art course, Theories of Baroque Art, on Thursdays at 3:30pm in the Woldenberg Art Center.

This seminar investigates innovations in artistic media, primarily painting, sculpture, and architecture, that can be described as Baroque in diverse locales, including its origins in Italy to its diffusion in the present day.   

How do we characterize the strange and fertile period of art production associated with the Baroque? What happened to art production following the High Renaissance? In the latter half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, there was an explosion of new approaches to art making in diverse geographies. This time coincides with cultural upheavals and religious wars in Europe, with scientific discovery and new geopolitical landscapes. The period known as the Baroque is a historical style characterization rife with misunderstandings. The name itself derives from a term used by Portuguese jewelers for deformed pearls (barrueco). How can we best understand this time of remarkable artistic production, its early and late critics, and how does understanding art help us make sense of the rapidly changing, expanding world of the Early Modern period? Register today!

Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Jainero

 

 

 

 

 

 

TULANE'S SAWYER SEMINAR PRESENTS

SITES OF MEMORY: 

NEW  ORLEANS + RIO DE JANEIRO

EXPLORING DISPLACEMENT AND URBAN RENEWAL IN TREMÉ AND VALONGO WHARF 

This series of events highlights community activism in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro as ways to challenge disinvestment in Afro-descendent neighborhoods, raising questions about the tendency for these places to be subordinated to outward-facing urban “renewal”.

December 7 | 6 pm

Screening of "Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans”

In Stone Auditorium, 210 Woldenberg Art Center

December 10 | 3:30 pm 

Panel Discussion with Dr. Lorraine Leu, Sara Zewde, Freddi Williams Evans, Luther Gray

3rd Floor Newcomb Commons

December 12 | afternoon

Tour of the Tremé

Starting at the New Orleans African American Museum 

Tulane University’s 2021/2022 Sawyer Seminar, "Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Place-Based Histories of the Americas" – organized by the Newcomb Art Department and School of Liberal Arts and sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – takes New Orleans as a key case study for a broader understanding of settler-colonial, formerly slavery-fueled economies in the Americas using the theme of site-based public history and memorialization. 

For more information and questions about accessibility, contact ctucker6@tulane.edu or go online to sitesofmemorynola.org

2021 Faculty Awards | SLA Dean's Office

Outstanding Faculty Research Award

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Since 1994, Elizabeth has served as the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art. Author of six monographs, co-author of another two books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen other volumes, her work has been influential not only in art history, but in the related fields of history, anthropology and literary theory. In 2018, she was named the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, the first Latin Americanist art historian to receive this honor since its founding in 2001. She was also the first Latin Americanist to hold the Andrew Mellon Professorship at the National Gallery of Art in 2006-8. In 2010 she was Professor invitée at the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and recipient of the government of Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to Aztec scholarship. Her latest monograph book, Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021), is the first synthetic analysis of the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture created in the decades after the Spanish conquest. After 27 years at Tulane, Elizabeth is retiring at the end of this academic year. Her career at Tulane University has been extraordinary, to say the least, and we can think of no better tribute than to offer her the Research Award.

The April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Sean Fader

Since his arrival at Tulane in 2018, Sean has helped to rewrite curriculum in the photo area, separating darkroom and digital practices; he has also overhauled the digital and darkroom spaces, enhancing usability and access. His courses are always overenrolled and his teaching evaluations are superlative. Here are some examples of his student evaluations: “Sean is extremely supportive and knowledgeable about what he teaches. He makes material exciting, engaging, and relevant.“, and “He is Thanos with all the infinity stones.”

Art Chair Stephanie Porras says, “I would particularly like to praise Sean for making adjustments to his teaching this year – not only folding in the switch to hybrid teaching, but also readjusting all his syllabi to center BIPOC scholars and artists. By overhauling his syllabi in this way, Sean modelled what it means to decenter and question the artistic canon. He shared resources with other faculty in the department and encouraged all of us to revisit the readings and artists we use to teach the history, theory and practice of art.”

Art History Student Art Awards

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021 Art History Student Awards.

The Henry Stern Prize for Best Paper in Art History: Abigail McDade

Abby McDade wins the Henry Stern Prize for her paper, "Social Practice Art: The Role of Audience Encounter," which discusses works by California-based contemporary artist Suzanne Lacy and the Pittsburgh-based artist collective Conflict Kitchen. Abby examines how these artists' socially-engaged works attempt to grapple with structural violence, by promoting community-driven resilience through shared meals, community discussions, and civic actions, as well as exhibitions and traditional art objects. Abby's paper is notable for its innovative use of both art historical analysis and public health research by Kaiser Permanente and the Prevention Institute. Abby is graduating with a B.F.A. in printmaking, and will be moving to New York to continue developing her artistic practice.

 

The Marilyn Brown Award for Outstanding Art History Major: Lindsay Hardy

Lindsay receives this award for both her excellent performance in her art history classes, as well as her significant research and writing achievements in her honors thesis. Lindsay consistently contributes insightful comments to class discussions, and she has tackled some particularly challenging and ambitious research topics. Her honors thesis, “The Casa Group: Confronting Tradition and Modernism Through Art in Post Protectorate Morocco,” argues that the artists and teachers of the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca (the “Casa Group”) actively valorized Moroccan culture, and therefore Moroccan national identity, after the country gained independence from France in 1956. Her thesis is highly original and demonstrates Lindsay’s superb abilities as a researcher and writer.

 

The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a sophomore in Art History: Alessandra Fraim

Ali has performed exceptionally well in her art history courses thus far, proving herself to be an excellent writer, a valuable participant in class discussions, and a perceptive viewer of works of art.  But what stands out most about Ali is her admirable enthusiasm for learning and her eagerness to challenge herself.  I'm consistently impressed by these qualities in her, which make her a particular joy to work with.

The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a junior in Art History: Alex Landry

Alex is an extremely talented student who has performed at the very highest level in her art history courses. She combines a keen intelligence with a profound curiosity about the material, and she consistently makes tremendously astute comments in class, elevating any discussion that she is part of.  Alex is constantly pushing herself to delve deeper into the material and to take on important questions, engaging with whatever topic is at hand in a remarkably sophisticated way.  It's been a great pleasure to have her as a student.

 

The Marilyn Brown Award for Senior Honors Scholar: Reina Proetzel

Reina has been an outstanding student throughout her time at Tulane. Her honors thesis, “The AIDS Epidemic in the United States: The Artistic Response,” examines three artworks created in response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990 within the contexts of politics and postmodern theory. Reina is a brilliant writer, and her sensitive exploration of these historic issues surrounding the AIDS crisis retains a human dimension while deftly pointing to similar, contemporary issues surrounding the epidemic of Covid 19.

 

 

 

Alexis Culotta awarded NEH summer stipend grant

Alexis Culotta, Professor of Practice in Art History, was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her project, Fare la Bella Figura: Mapping and Documenting the Vanishing Tradition of the Roman Frescoed Façade. The funding will support archival research and fieldwork to document sixteenth-century frescoed façades in Rome leading to the creation of an online database and article.