Meetings

During the academic year, the Center organizes scholarly meetings that range in size and duration from multiday gatherings and individual lectures with audiences to small roundtable discussions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all meetings were held virtually for the 2020–2021 academic year.

Colloquia are meetings in which current research is presented and discussed through multimedia lectures and audience participation. 

April 16, 2021

James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora

Defining Diaspora: 21st-Century Development in Art of the African Diaspora
Cosponsored with Howard University

Lisa Farrington, Howard University
Welcome and moderator

Steven Nelson, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Moderator

Erica Moiah James, University of Miami
Undress to Redress: African Diasporic Art History and Archives of Black Representational Bodies

Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Lifetime Achievement Lecture
Reflections on My Personal/Professional Journey That Continues amid Crises in the 21st Century

Kobena Mercer, Yale University
James A. Porter Distinguished Lecture
Flowback—How Africa Is Redefining Today’s Diaspora

Renée Stout, Washington, DC
Floyd W. Coleman Sr. Distinguished Lecture
Thank You for Talking to Me Africa: Trusting the Voice Within

Colloquies are small gatherings of curators, conservators, and researchers focusing on specific themes or topics relevant to the National Gallery of Art and related collections in the region.

May 4, 2021

Edmond J. Safra Colloquy

Working with Collections
Organized by Penelope Curtis, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, spring 2021

Participants
Rachel E. Boyd, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University
Kit Brooks, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Maria Castro, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Alisa Chiles [University of Pennsylvania]
Gwendolyn Collaço, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Patrick R. Crowley, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Penelope Curtis, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Tandazani Dhlakama, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Jessica Hong, Toledo Museum of Art
Shruthi Issac, Savara Foundation for the Arts
Annika Johnson, Joslyn Art Museum
Peter M. Lukehart, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Steven Nelson, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Therese O’Malley, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Julia Perratore, The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lauren Taylor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Kevin Tervala, Baltimore Museum of Art
Kjell Wangensteen, Indianapolis Museum of Art

The Center organizes a number of endowed annual and biennial lectures that are open to the public. Following most lectures, the Center hosts an incontro, a meeting for members of the Center and invited guests, led by the lecturer. Incontri provide opportunities for questions and further discussions.

October 30, 2020

Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art

Telling the Past Differently: Italian Renaissance Art in the Hands of the Beholder
Megan Holmes, University of Michigan

Collections of Italian Renaissance panel paintings were in many cases assembled through a process of connoisseurial evaluation. The National Gallery of Art collection is no exception. A number of its paintings passed that evaluative scrutiny in spite of surface damage in the form of intentional scratches—noted in later conservation reports as “vandalism.” Defacement and disfiguration are, in fact, fairly common features of panel paintings, but they are rarely mentioned in art-historical accounts. The paintings, once installed in religious, domestic, and civic spaces in Renaissance Italy, were acted upon and transformed by the people who encountered and used them in their daily lives. The recovery of representational scratches provides a timely opportunity to tell the history of Italian Renaissance art differently, revealing the complex earlier “lives” of paintings in the hands of beholders.
Watch Listen

November 2, 2020

Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art Incontro
Reading Italian Panel Paintings against the Grain
Megan Holmes, University of Michigan

New research demonstrates that in late medieval and early modern Italy, people routinely and intentionally marked and modified pictorial imagery in panel paintings when encountering these works in churches, palaces and town houses, and civic and corporate spaces. The tormentors of Christ and saints were defaced and disfigured; the devil and demons were entrapped within webs of incisions; devotional and apotropaic crosses were inscribed within narrative scenes; and panel surfaces were tagged with personal marks. Scratched panel paintings constitute a rich visual archive revealing a fascinating new dimension of reception history that involved complex cultural understandings about the activation, efficacy, and mediation of visual images. This reception history embraces a broad spectrum of viewers, including non-elite members of society, who are rarely considered in histories of art written about the Renaissance period.

This incontro was a timely opportunity to explore more profoundly with the Center community how “reading Italian panel paintings against the grain” can productively unsettle preconceptions and dominant narratives about Renaissance visual culture.

April 25–May 30, 2021

The 70th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print
Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

April 25: Pressure
May 2: Reversal
May 9: Separation 
May 16: Strain
May 23: Interference
May 30: Alienation
Watch

May 10, 2021

A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Incontro
Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University
70th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts

A discussion of the 2021 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print.

May 3, 2021

Edmond J. Safra Lecture

Space and Time in the Museum
Penelope Curtis, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, spring 2021

Penelope Curtis was director of Tate Britain (2010–2015) and of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian (2015–2020). At the former, she had the chance to manage a rehang of the entire collection (16th century to present day) to coincide with the remodeling of the gallery in 2013. At the latter, she brought together two collections (the Founder’s Collection and the Modern Collection) into one museum, and in light of this devised a new pattern of programming. The Gulbenkian’s exhibition Art on Display 1949–69 was planned to mark the museum’s 50th anniversary and bring to light some of the thinking about the new postwar museum. New research in the archives led to a fuller understanding of the international prototypes at play, which were then placed in comparison with contemporary examples by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, Carlo Scarpa, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Lina Bò Bardi, made at 1:1 scale. This lecture was an informal review of some of the thinking that lay behind these initiatives in terms of how we use museums, consciously and subconsciously, and how we navigate their spaces and meanings.

Colloquia, presented by the senior members of the Center, and shoptalks, given by the postdoctoral fellows, predoctoral fellows, and guest scholars, occur throughout the academic year and are by invitation.

Colloquia CCCXVIII–CCCXXV

October 15, 2020
Dell Upton, Kress-Beinecke Professor
Graven Images: Monuments Beyond the Confederacy

October 29, 2020
Stuart Lingo, Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Bronzino’s Bodies and Mannerism’s Masks

November 19, 2020
Madhuri Desai, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
Sacred Geographies: Mughal Temples and the Politics of Empire

December 3, 2020
Elena M. Calvillo, Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, fall 2020
Drawing Collection and Cultural Brokerage in Late 16th-Century Italy

January 7, 2021
Byron Ellsworth Hamann, William C. Seitz Senior Fellow
A History of Mexico through Histories of “The Conquest”: The Lienzos of Tlaxcala Remade, 1552–2012

February 18, 2021
André Dombrowski, Paul Mellon Senior Fellow
Monet’s Minutes: On the Temporality of the Instant

March 18, 2021
Oscar E. Vázquez, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
The Body of Work: Life Drawing in Academies of Art

April 1, 2021
Patrick R. Crowley, Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, spring 2021
Death, Indexicality, and the Look of Roman Portraits

Shoptalks 243–251

October 26, 2020
Ellen Tani, A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Objectified beyond Recognition: The Early Systems Art of Charles Gaines

November 9, 2020
Kimia Shahi, Wyeth Fellow
“Peculiar” Pictures: Martin Johnson Heade and the Science of Shorelines

December 14, 2020
Teresa Soley, Samuel H. Kress Fellow
Carving Out a Reputation: Knightly Tombs in the Early Portuguese Empire

January 11, 2021
Thadeus Dowad, Paul Mellon Fellow
A Tale of Two Sultans: Empire and Portraiture Between Paris, Cairo, and Istanbul, 1798‒1817

January 25, 2021
Melanee C. Harvey, Paul Mellon Guest Scholar
Charting a Tradition: 19th-Century African Methodist Episcopal Aesthetic Practices

February 1, 2021
Andrew Sears, David E. Finley Fellow
Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins: Patron Saints of Trade

March 1, 2021
Susan Eberhard, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow
Placing a Six-Sided Silver Teapot, c. 1682

March 15, 2021
Johanna Sluiter, Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow
Building Evolution: ATBAT and Habitat in Late Colonial North Africa

April 12, 2021
Ziliang Liu, Ittleson Fellow
Cosmic Bronze in Western Han China

Seminars are small gatherings focused on a particular topic. Each year, a Center postdoctoral fellow designs and directs an intensive weeklong seminar for the predoctoral fellows in residence.

July 6–10, 2020

A. W. Mellon Predoctoral Seminar

Rethinking Art-Historical Geographies and Temporalities
Organized by Rachel Grace Newman, A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

This seminar thought through current divisions within the discipline of art history, many of which are designated by geographic and temporal models that reinscribe colonial modes of thinking. For example, the term “medieval art” signals a focus on European medieval art, while other art from that period is included in distinct geographic regions (Islamic art, African art, etc.) This seminar considered geographic and temporal divisions by asking what happens when we begin to draw art-historical threads around bodies of water, trade routes, diasporas, and Indigenous concepts of geography and temporality. What happens when we truly consider the implications of these divisions and the alternatives that might exist for art-historical pedagogy?

Participants

Rachel E. Boyd, David E. Finley Fellow, 2017–2020
Alicia Caticha, Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2018–2020
Samuel Luterbacher, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2018–2020
Rachel Grace Newman, A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2018–2020
Julia Oswald, Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2018–2020 
James Pilgrim, Paul Mellon Fellow, 2017–2020
Miriam K. Said, Ittleson Fellow, 2018–2020
Michelle Smiley, Wyeth Fellow, 2018–2020

Symposia are open to the public and feature a number of presenters and/or panels on a specific topic. They may be planned in conjunction with exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art.

December 4–11, 2020

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Symposium

Feminism in American Art History

Friday, December 11
Panel Discussion
A discussion with all symposium presenters, moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Presentations were available to stream December 4–11, 2020.

Presentations
Kirsten Pai Buick, University of New Mexico
The Flesh Made Word: Soft Power, the Female Nude, and the Autobiography of Louisine Havemeyer

Aruna D’Souza, Williamstown, MA
Lorraine O’Grady, Simone Leigh, and the Problem and Power of Invisibility

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
The Radicality of Latina/x and Chicana/x Feminisms

Lisa Farrington, Howard University
Black Feminist Art: Genesis

Jessica L. Horton, University of Delaware
Diné-Mapuche Weaving and the Relational Roots of Ecofeminism

Jenny Lin, University of Southern California
Another Beautiful Country: Cross-Cultural Hauntings in Chinese American Art

Helen Molesworth, Los Angeles
How Many Feminists Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? More Thoughts on Lee Lozano

Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware
Shades of Her Ancestors: Early American Silhouettes and Enslaved Women

March 5–6, 2021

Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art, 51st Annual Sessions

Cosponsored with the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland

Friday, March 5
Evening Session
Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University
George Levitine Lecture in Art History
Modernity, Iconoclasm, and Anticolonialism—Other Statue Histories

Saturday, March 6
Morning Session
Steven Nelson, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Welcome

Therese O’Malley, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Moderator

Rachel Patt [Emory University]
Multum in Parvo: The Exquisite Portrait Miniature in Ancient Rome
Introduction: Professor Eric Varner

Kaylee P. Alexander [Duke University]
Selling Eclecticism: “Trickle Round” and the Market for Funerary Monuments in 19th-Century Paris
Introduction: Professor Neil McWilliam

Kristen Nassif [University of Delaware]
Seeing Blindness: Randolph Rogers’s Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii
Introduction: Professor Wendy Bellion

Brooke Wyatt [University of Pittsburgh]
Nature vivante: Material Innovation and Representational Inquiry in the Work of Séraphine Louis
Introduction: Professor Barbara McCloskey

Afternoon Session
Tess Korobkin, University of Maryland
Moderator

Sarah Edith Kleinman [Virginia Commonwealth University]
Kynaston McShine, Auteur-Curator
Introduction: Professor Margaret Lindauer

Alyson Cluck [University of Maryland]
Zilia Sánchez’s Classical Turn: Theater, Diaspora, and Politics in Antígona (1969)
Introduction: Professor Abigail McEwen

Tyler Shine [University of Pennsylvania]
Pictures More than Pictures: Dawoud Bey’s Abstract Polaroids
Introduction: Professor Karen Redrobe

Olga Zaikina-Kondur [The Pennsylvania State University]
Speech, Discourse, Space: Conceptual Art in Late Soviet Private Apartments
Introduction: Professor Sarah Rich

Workshops bring together a small group of scholars to plan a future publication or presentation of new research on a topic of current inquiry. 

May 17, 2021

Fragments and Frameworks: Illuminated Manuscripts and Illustrated Books in Digital Humanities

Organized by Matthew J. Westerby, Robert H. Smith Research Associate

Participants
Heather Bamford, The George Washington University
LauraLee Brott [University of Wisconsin–Madison]
Lisa Fagin Davis, Medieval Academy of America
John K. Delaney, National Gallery of Art
Elisabeth Doulkaridou-Ramantani, École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques
Michelle Facini, National Gallery of Art
Bryan Keene, Riverside City College
Matthew J. Westerby, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts