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.

Simmons Lecture in Art History - Acts of Translation: Black Artists and "The Song of Hiawatha"

 

2021 Terry K. Simmons Lecture in Art History

Acts of Translation: Black Artists and "The Song of Hiawatha"
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology & African American Studies, Princeton University

Tuesday, February 2, 7:30 pm via Zoom

An epic in its time, “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry W. Longfellow had a long afterlife in visual art. This paper focuses on the work of Robert S. Duncanson, Robert Douglass, Jr., and Edmonia Lewis, three artists who included representations of Native Americans in their artistic production. Thinking of these works as sites of convergence, Dr. Arabindan-Kesson examines their intermediality - the ways these artists translated poetry into paint and marble - in their depiction of colonial encounters. In working through their acts of translation, she wants to ask how these artists negotiate acts of reading and looking and what their representations – troubling as they might appear to us now – reveal about constructions of freedom in the United States, not in relation to the state, but as it could be envisaged in cross-cultural encounters between African Americans and Native Americans in the pre- and post-Civil War years.

Zoom Link: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/95500128526?pwd=cC9BWGhFZ0NLczB6TUMxM3pzOEdZUT09
Password: ART

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  

The Materiality of Insurgency in the Colonial Andes

Please join us this Thursday, October 29 at 5pm via Zoom for a talk by Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University), "The Materiality of Insurgency in the Colonial Andes."  This presentation explores themes of loss, erasure, and effacement of artworks in eighteenth-century Peru and Bolivia, positing the modification of material culture as a form of world-making by considering case studies from the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions, which sought the overthrow of Spanish colonial rule. 

Traditional art historical studies that focus exclusively on fully intact or “museum quality” artworks distort our understanding of fraught periods of history, and particularly rebellions and uprisings, due to severe censorship campaigns in their aftermath that sought to restore colonial order through targeted iconoclasm. This presentation offers new insights for writing about art’s entanglement with political violence, underscoring the gains that can be made through interdisciplinary methodologies for recovering Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous artists and subjects that have been erased from the official archive. 

This talk is part of the year-long "Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art" lecture series organised by the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.  Dr. Cohen-Aponte's lecture is also co-sponsored by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and is the 2020 Terry K. Simmons Lecture in Art History for this year. 

Zoom meeting info:  https://tulane.zoom.us/j/98937431062