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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Catherine Opie

Tulane’s Newcomb Art Department presents

2022 Sandra Garrard Memorial lecture: Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH), is an artist working with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad and is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. Her first monograph, “Catherine Opie”, was recently published by Phaidon. Opie received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, and lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at UCLA where she is also Chair of the Department of Art.

Thursday, April 21, 6 pm, Freeman Auditorium

 

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
 

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

Black American Art and its Valorization, Effacement & Rupture in France

Please join the Newcomb Art Department and Tulane Africana Studies Program for the final lecture of the 2020-2021 lecture series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art, “Black American Art and its Valorization, Effacement & Rupture in France,” a lecture by Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University.

This talk explores how modern French culture interfaced with numerous black American visual artists, among them mid-nineteenth century printmaker Jules Lion (1810-1866), fin de siècle impressionist Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), jazz age painter Archibald Motley (1891-1981), 1960s expressionist Bob Thompson (1936-1966), and contemporary photographer Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953).  These encounters between a celebrated European destination and several African American sojourners resulted in work that, while of major art historical significance, hardly registers within the French cultural context, underscoring both the critical rifts and, paradoxically, the aesthetic confidence and freedom that such Franco-American liaisons have engendered over time.
 
Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art is a virtual lecture series organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Zoom: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/96841589553?pwd=dGl1WGdaU012TEFCYjc2RnpUcUZ1QT09
Meeting ID: 968 4158 9553
Passcode: 428296

[image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Daniel in the Lion's Den, Los Angeles County Museum of Art]

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.

Garrard Lecture: Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for a Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax, Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Thomas J. Lax is Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA (NY) where he is currently preparing the exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present with Linda Goode Bryant. He was the inaugural recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant, traveling to Brazil to meet artists and curators engaged in creating semi-autonomous spaces devoted to contemporary Black art. He also worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of the museum’s collection and organized Unfinished Conversations centered around John Akomfrah’s video portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Previously, he worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years.

Thomas is on the boards of Danspace Project and the Jerome Foundation and teaches at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. A native New Yorker, he is on the advisory committees of local and diasporic organizations including Contemporary And, The Laundromat Project, Participant Inc., and Recess Assembly.  

Garrard Lecture: Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax, Museum of Modern Art
Thursday, February 5, 6pm CST, Online
Zoom link: bit.ly/thomaslax

This event is supported by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund.