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.

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

 

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. 

Artist's Talk: Andrea Fraser

Prospect New Orleans in collaboration with the Newcomb Art Department and the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund present:

Artist’s Talk by Andrea Fraser

 

Monday, September 16

6:00 pm

Freeman Auditorium (Rm. 205, Woldenberg Art Center)

Tulane University

Andrea Fraser performed Not just the few of us for the opening of Prospect.3: Notes for Now.  Not just the few of us is an interpretation of one public confrontation with racist systems in contemporary New Orleans: a 1991 City Council hearing regarding the official desegregation of the unofficially self-segregated Mardi Gras krewes. For Prospect.3 Fraser also installed Um Monumento as Fantasias Descartadas in the Newcomb Art Gallery. 

Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural institutions, fields, and groups. She is Professor, Interdisciplinary Studio Area Head, and Chair of the UCLA Department of Art. Retrospectives of her work have been presented by the Museum Ludwig Cologne (2013), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and MUAC UNAM Mexico City (both 2016). Her most recent book, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018)—co-published by the CCA Wattis Institute, Westreich/Wagner Publications, and MIT Press—documents the political contributions of the board members of over 125 major US art organizations in the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath, examining the intersection of cultural philanthropy and political finance in the age of plutocracy. She serves on the boards W.A.G.E, Grex (the West Coast Affiliate of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on the Artist Council of the Hammer Museum.

Casey Reas: Earthly Delights

Please join us for the 2019 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture

Casey Reas: Earthly Delights

Thursday, February 7, 7:00 pm

Freeman Auditorium

Woldenberg Art Center

Reas’ software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations, and he balances solo work in the studio with collaborations with architects and musicians. Reas’ work is in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences and a bachelor’s degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001; Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

image: Casey Reas, KNBC (December 2015), 2015, custom software, digital video, computer, projector,  dimensions variable, Sound by Philip Rugo

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.

Trevor Paglen: Machine Visions

The Newcomb Art Department presents the 2018 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, Machine Visions, an artist's talk by Trevor Paglen, on Wednesday, October 17 at 6:30 pm in Freeman Auditorium, 205 Woldenberg Art Center.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. Trevor Paglen’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Berkeley Art Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Nevada Museum of Art. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist, and Artforum. He is a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Award. Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

2018 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture: Darby English

Pope.L, 2008

2018 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture Series presents:

Darby English

Differing, Drawn:  Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings

Monday, February 26, 7pm

Freeman Auditorium
Woldenberg Art Center
Newcomb Art Department
Tulane University

Darby English’s research probes art’s interaction with instituted forms of historical subjectivity and experience. Recent research has focused on artistic and other cultural manifestations of optimism, discomposure, and interculture. More theoretical formulations of English’s work examine the difficulty of studying the foregoing themes as historical objects while having also to negotiate their implications as sources of anxiety about historical change. English is the author of 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007). A new monograph, To Describe a Life: Essays at the Intersection of Art and Race Terror, will be published by Yale University Press this autumn (2018). This book synthesizes material first presented as the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University in November 2016. Current projects include a small book on discomposure; monographic essays on the art of Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard, and Silke Otto-Knapp; and, a collection volume entitled Among Others: Blackness at MoMA. English also serves as Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

For more information, please call 504.865.5327

Arlene Shechet: Working Over Time

Arlene Shechet
Working Over Time : an artist’s talk
Thursday, November 17, 7 pm
Freeman Auditorium
205 Woldenberg Art Center
reception immediately following in Woodward Way

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for the 2016 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, Working Over Time: an artist talk by Arlene Shechet.

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor living and working in New York City and the Hudson Valley. All at Once, a major, critically-acclaimed 20-year survey of Shechet’s work, was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015. Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe wrote: “It’s in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, sputter, and sing. If they really are the great analogs to interior life that I feel them to be, it’s because Shechet knows that this life, expertly attended to, has its own folds and wrinkles, its own hollows and protuberances; that it is at once fugitive and monumental ... and ultimately unknowable.” All at Once was also hailed by The New York Times as “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal.” 

Shechet was featured in Season 7 of PBS’s ART21 in 2014 as well as Season 4 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Artist Project in 2016. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow- ship Award in 2004, the Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Award, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2010, as well as several New York Foundation for the Arts awards. 

Visiting Artist Lecture: Cullen Washington, Jr.

The Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund for Recent Trends in Contemporary Art presents a free public lecture by visiting artist Cullen Washington, Jr. on Wednesday, January 27th at 6:00pm in Stone Auditorium, room 210 Woldenberg Art Center.  

Washington,  a Louisiana native, is currently an instructor at SUNY Purchase. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in solo shows in London and Tokyo. He has partaken in several well known residency programs including the Skowhegan School of Painting in 2010 and was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award in 2009. His lecture will focus on his personal artwork which explores human interconnectivity through mixed media and found object paintings. 

This week @NewcombArt

Doreen Garner, The Observatory, 2014

W Ceramics Talks, Jeffrey Thurston / Michelle Swafford, MFA artist lecture | Wednesday, November 11, 6pm | Freeman Auditorium

TH An Inter-American Standoff: Marisol, MoMA and the Cold War, Art History Works in Progress & the Stone Center for Latin American Studies lecture by Delia Solomons | Thursday, November 12, 6pm | 209 Woldenberg Art Center

F Visiting Artist Doreen Garner | Friday, November 13, 5:30pm BBQ, 6:00pm lecture, 7:00pm performance | Pace-Willson Glass Studio, Woldenberg Art Center | sponsored by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund for Recent Trends in Contemporary Art

Visiting Artist Jim Gaylord meets with Abstraction class

On Tuesday September 29 visiting artist Jim Gaylord of Brooklyn met with Aaron Collier's Intermediate Painting (Abstraction) class which has 18 undergraduates. The students had recently completed a Geometric Abstraction assignment which they reviewed together.  It was a real hit: students were really thankful, and were sharpened by the experience.  Gaylord also offered a public lecture in Stone Auditorium Tuesday night.  His visit with us was generously supported by CELT, the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund, and the Newcomb Art Department.

Artist Lecture: Jim Gaylord

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for a lecture by artist Jim Gaylord on Tuesday, September 29 at 6:30pm in Stone Auditorium, 210 Woldenberg Art Center.

This event is co-sponsored by the Newcomb Art Department,  the Center for Enganged Learning and Technology, The Sandra Gerrard Memorial Fund, and the Perry K. Simmons Endowment.

Tulane Glass welcomes visiting artist Mick Meilahn