Michelle Foa: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton

Michelle Foa's article "In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old," was just published in the September 2020 issue of The Art Bulletin. Edgar Degas’ four-month stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his first experience crossing the Atlantic, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Foa’s article analyzes the important connections between Southern cotton, the textiles that fill the artist’s pictures of dancers, laundresses and bathers, and the paper he used for many of his drawings. 

This year she has given lectures at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (virtually) and Wofford College. In July she joined the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History 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]

Megan Flattley awarded Fulbright-Hays Fellowship

The Newcomb Art Department is thrilled to announce that Megan Flattley, PhD candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane, has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad) 12-month grant. She plans to conduct research in Mexico City June 2021 to May 2022. Her dissertation, “Out of the Fragments, New Worlds: Perspective and Spatiality in the Work of Diego Rivera, 1913-1933” analyzes how Rivera responded to Cubism’s break with linear perspective in his transition from easel painting to mural work. Her research foregrounds Rivera’s place in an international network of avant-garde artists concerned with modernist theories of space and revolutionary politics. Congratulations, Megan!!! 

Image: Rivera’s mural in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Art for Activism at the Carroll Gallery

The Newcomb Art Department's Carroll Gallery is pleased to announce its premier exhibition for Fall 2020. Art for Activism is an exhibition of over 40 works organized by Art for Activism, a group of Tulane artists made up of current students as well as alumni, in support of Black Lives Matter.
Artists included in the exhibition predominantly practice in New Orleans and responded to a Call for Artists, recognizing "the power that art has to inspire discussion, revision, and a shifting of opinions and culture in a way that words often can’t."

The work in the exhibition will be sold via silent auction with proceeds going to Mobilizing Millennials, a local organization dedicated to “recovering the fabric of true American democracy and promoting social equity and economic mobility.”  Artists have been asked to submit recent work that addresses themes of systemic and individual racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, with a goal of encouraging hope and a shifting of opinions and culture towards something better.

People can come see the work in the Carroll Gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition, August 10 - September 30, but the designated auction window will be Thursday, August 20th from 7:00 - 8:00 pm and will take place online. Art for Activism will be posting all work on their Instagram feed @art.foractivism in the weeks leading up to the auction.

Exhibition organizers:  Emery Gluck, Brandon Surtain, and Carlyn Morris
Opening date:  Monday, August 10, 2020
Gallery hours:  M – F, 9 am – 4 pm 
Silent Auction (online):  August 20th, 7:00 - 8:00 pm
Closing date: Thursday, September 3, 2020
Instagram: @art.foractivism @mobilizingmillennials

There will be no receptions in the gallery until further notice.  Viewers will be expected to wear face coverings and maintain social distance in the gallery. The Carroll Gallery is located in the Woldenberg Art Center on Tulane's uptown campus. (map )
 

Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature

Leslie Geddes, Assistant Professor of Art History at Tulane University, has authored a new book, Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature, published by Princeton University Press.

Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by him and his peers contributed to hydraulic engineering and the construction of large river and canal systems.

From drawings for mobile bridges and underwater breathing apparatuses to plans for water management schemes, Leonardo evinced a deep interest in the technical aspects of water. His visual studies of the ways in which landscape is shaped by water demonstrated both his artistic mastery and probing scientific mind. Analyzing Leonardo’s notebooks, plans, maps, and paintings, Geddes argues that, for Leonardo and fellow artists, drawing was a form of visual thinking and problem solving essential to understanding and controlling water and other parts of the natural world. She also examines the material importance in this work of water-based media, namely ink, watercolor, and oil paint.

A compelling account of Renaissance art and engineering, Watermarks shows, above all else, how Leonardo applied his pictorial genius to water in order to render the natural world in all its richness and constant change.

Faculty Awards Spring 2020

On Thursday May 28th, Brian T. Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, announced this year's faculty awards.

We are pleased to report that Teresa Cole, Professor of Printmaking, is this year’s George Lurcy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Professor Cole will spend a month in residence at the Academy working on a new printmaking project based on the intricate patterns and vibrant colors found in the medieval mosaic floors created by the Cosmati brothers. To inspire her new work she will study the mosaic floors and patterned columns in the Pantheon and S. Maria in Trastevere.

Faculty Research Awards were granted to the following Newcomb Art Department faculty: AnnieLaurie Erickson (Slow Light), Leslie Geddes (Weapons of Atlas: The Art and Science of Early Modern Cartography 1580-1650), and Kevin Jones (Decollage - a solo art exhibition).

"Art and Activism: Rights of Nature" course produces virtual exhibit at Antenna

duct tape over cracks in the sidewalk ARTISTS:
Yacob Arroyo
Sidney Astl
Chloe Coleman
Emily Fornof
Alex Lawton
Andrew Mahaffie
Anya Mukundan
Katy Perrault
Tyler Simien
William Sockness
Tess Stroh
C. Tweedie
Amelia Wiygul
 
Duct tape over cracks in the sidewalk is a group exhibition featuring work created by the thirteen students that were a part of the course Art and Activism: Rights of Nature at Tulane University. This course explored art making as a tool for change. We set out to expand our knowledge of both environmental problems and possible solutions through meeting with experts across disciplinary fields and cultivating our own civically engaged artistic practices. A specific topic of our initial focus was the devastating effects that the fossil fuel industry continues to have on our communities here in Louisiana. Our primary service endeavor was an intent to support and participate in the next iteration of Fossil Free Festival (initially scheduled for April 2020 in New Orleans). At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of our lives, and therefore work, shifted significantly; both Fossil Free Festival and our physical exhibition at Antenna had to be canceled. We did everything we could to troubleshoot projects virtually and/or make new work responding to our circumstances in quarantine. This online exhibition is the salvaged product of our unexpectedly thwarted efforts to create physical art and participatory experiences. Duct tape over cracks in the sidewalk is an expression of both our ambitions and humility, our sadness and our continued effort.

– AnnieLaurie Erickson, Associate Professor, Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University