October 23, 2023 | Anne Feng (Boston University) | Luminescent Visions: Transparent Materiality in Medieval China

Modern ideas of transparency are often associated with industrial technology and utopian social forms. In the ancient world, however, transparent objects gave rise to interpretive uncertainties and posed epistemological questions concerning the sense of sight. This talk examines a constellation of translucent materials in medieval China from natural phenomena such as water and ice, to imported exotica such as rock-crystal and glass from the Sassanian and Byzantine empires. By linking murals of Buddhist paradises to reliquary containers, a crystal karmic mirror, glass bottles, and lead-glazed earthenware, Feng shows optical effects of transparency were associated with concepts of emptiness, and destabilized perceptions of form and substance, opacity and clarity, the mundane and the miraculous. Feng argues that writers and painters began to embrace aesthetics of the liquid, as they saw “transparency” less as a stable material property, than as a phase wherein an object’s qualities unravel and new possibilities for transformation are opened up. This process of “seeing through” things led to new developments in painting techniques and stylistic choices that embraced varied textures and surfaces, such as gossamer textiles, biomorphic patterning, and wash effects.

November 3, 2023 | Bridget Alsdorf (Princeton University) | Hammershøi’s Shadow

This lecture will explore shadow as a philosophical motif in nineteenth-century Danish culture, from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, to Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings. Hammershøi’s many paintings of the apartments he shared with his wife and primary model/collaborator, Ida, are austere, proto-abstract interiors that respond to a long tradition of “artist’s studio” scenes. Alsdorf argues that shadow in these works is more than a shape-shifting element of design or realist detail; it is a metaphor for the pairings vital to understanding Hammershøi’s work.

Bridget Alsdorf is Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council at Princeton University, where she teaches European art from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Her work explores the central role played by artists in illuminating problems of broad philosophical import; the social nature of artistic creation and form; and the cross-fertilization of artistic media, including literature, theater, and film.

March 1, 2024 | Krista Thompson (Northwestern University) | The Art of Black Study: Tom Lloyd and the Art Workers’ Coalition

In January 1969, the electronic light sculptor Tom Lloyd became a founding member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, a group of artists and critics who pressured New York’s mainstream museums to be more inclusive in the range of artists they exhibited and collected. This talk examines Lloyd’s labors within the group and how they informed his work with light and electronic technologies. It focuses on “the art of Black study,” his engagement with study as a site, tactic, and medium to center Black and Puerto Rican art in museums. The talk explores Lloyd’s (and his collaborator, Faith Ringgold’s) use of polls and surveys, his efforts to start a center devoted to Black and Puerto Rican art at the Museum of Modern art, and his design of neighborhood Illuminated Sound Environments, which were attentive to the aesthetics of Black life.

Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Performance Studies. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Award for distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016). She is currently working on two books related to archives: Refracting Light: Tom Lloyd and the Effect of Art Historical Disregard, a manuscript about art and activist Tom Lloyd, electronic light, and archival recovery in African American art (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) and The Evidence of Things Not Captured (forthcoming, Duke University Press), a book that examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in colonial and postcolonial archives in Jamaica.

March 8, 2023 | Shahzia Sikander, Yasmeen Siddiqui, Vijay Iyer, Holly Shaffer | The Glass Mosque

Please join the Brown Arts Institute, The Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, and The Department of the History of Art & Architecture for a wonderful conversation with visual artist Shahzia Sikander, writer Yasmeen Siddiqui, composer Vijay Iyer, and Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor in the Humanities, Holly Shaffer. They discuss The Glass Mosque; a collaboration among Sikander, Iyer, poet Bhanu Kapil, and author Fred Moten. Sikander, Iyer, Kapil, and Moten are equal partners in this three-year creative project which began in 2022. The Glass Mosque will be realized as a book produced by Siddiqui and potentially an artwork.

March 11, 2024 | Athanasios Papalexandrou (University of Texas) | “Light for Gods, Light of Gods: The Ecospatial Dimensions of Divine Radiance in the Ancient Mediterranean”

A fundamental dimension of divine essence in ancient Mediterranean beliefs is the radiance of divine beings. How was it experienced in ritual practice? And how did space, natural or artificial, condition modes of interaction with the divine?

Athanasios Papalexandrou is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Princeton University focusing on the ritual dimensions of Early Greek figurative art. Prior to teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, he taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and spent the 2001–02 academic year as a research fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC. His first book, The Visual Poetics of Power: Warriors, Youths, and Tripods in Early Greece, was published in 2005. In 2021 he published a book titled Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder: Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean (University of Texas Press).