"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  

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]

ASAP/10 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present will hold its 10th Annual Conference in New Orleans, October 17-20, 2018, hosted by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and Pelican Bomb. Wednesday evening, October 17th, the Newcomb Art Department will host the opening night's Artists Talk, the Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, "Machine Visions," with Trevor Paglen, at 6pm in Freeman Auditorium, 205 Woldenberg Art Center. 

The following Tulane faculty, staff, and students will participate as hosts, presenters, and moderators at ASPA/10: Adrian Anagnost, Amy Crum, Kate Baldwin, Laura Blereau, Courtney Bryan, Joel Dinerstein, Christopher Dunn, Brian Edwards, Megan Flattley, Denise Frazier, Eric Herhuth, Z’etoile Imma, Zachary Lazar, Amy Lesen, Monica Ramírez Montagut, Cheryl Naruse, Adriana Obiols, Christopher Oliver, John Ray Proctor, Ama Rogan, Matt Sakakeeny, Daniel Sharp, Rebecca Snedeker, Red Vaughan Tremmel, Emily Wilkerson, and Edie Wolfe. 

For more information, please visit the ASAP/10 website: https://asap10.tulane.edu.