Newcomb Art News
Matthew Rarey, Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History at Oberlin College, looks at a unique work of Black Atlantic visual culture: the map of Buraco do Tatú, a quilombo (primarily African-populated maroon polity) invaded and destroyed on the orders of the Viceroy of Brazil in September of 1763. Produced by a military cartographer immediately after the battle and today held at an archive in Lisbon, it is one of only two extant maps of the hundreds of such polities that existed in Brazil during its slavery period and by far the most detailed. With careful renderings of the quilombo’s fortifications, buildings, and agricultural plots, it presents a potentially rich archive of Africans’ lifeways in colonial Brazil. Yet its aerial view, textual narrative, and haunting rendering of Africans killed during the battle collectively testify to its ambivalence: a colonial attempt to freeze, and thus reckon with, a fugitive landscape as a precondition of its violent erasure. Looking to a small but rich visual history of mapping maronnage – and thus mapping that which was never meant to be mapped – and dialoguing with work on landscape studies, fetishism, and Black feminist cartographies, this talk presents some initial conclusions on how this unprecedented object demands new forms of ethical engagement with the archives of Atlantic slavery.
Monday, March 20 2023 at 5:30 PM
Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center
Attendees are asked to be aware of parking restrictions on Tulane's uptown campus. More info here: https://campusservices.tulane.edu/departments/parking/uptown
image: Unrecorded artist, Plan of the Quilombo called Buraco do Tatú (detail), 1763 or 1764. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal
Ina Kaur: ਇੱਕ ਦੂਜਾ (ik Duja) “the Other one”
As a woman and an artist living in a heightened global, political, ecologically imbalanced, and socially unequal and unjust world, Ina's work attempts to continuously move beyond cultural constructs, freeing from restrictive beliefs and assigned identities. As an interdisciplinary practitioner critiquing the otherness and oppressed identities, the work empowers the self to navigate freely and fluidly, embracing the 'other' and 'one's' own new unsettled freedom as it celebrates the ever-shifting and constantly evolving notion of self, home, and belonging.
Opening reception: Friday, March 10, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Exhibition on view: March 9 – March 17
website: www.inakaur.com IG: @studio_inkspace
As a first-generation Afro-Latine interdisciplinary artist, archivist and researcher, Maynard works across various forms of mediums to critique the way beings from the African diaspora past, present and future have been memorized by history. A direct analysis of how structures of colonialism, capitalism and time have directly impacted and shifted the experiences of descendants of the African diaspora.
Opening reception: Friday, March 10, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Exhibition on view: March 9 – March 17
website: www.photofelli.com IG: @photofelli
Stephanie Steele: Ocular Navigations of Internal and External Space
Stephanie E. Steele (S.E. Steele) is an educator and artist who blends printmaking and photographic techniques to create largescale works on paper. She examines the interconnection between our internal perception created through cognitive vision, and the navigation the external world experienced through optical phenomena.
Opening reception: Friday, March 24, 5:30-7:30pm
Exhibition on view: March 23 - April 7
website: https://www.sesteelefineart.com IG: @sesteelefineart
Erica Westenberger: Twisting in honey and swallowing dust
Erica Westenberger is an interdisciplinary artist who renders illusory narratives about experiences of internal conflict. Through graphite drawing and sculptural processes, she builds motifs that explore the complexities of mental health under the framework of myth. Tension is used as a recurrent theme within formal relationships and allegorical motifs to suggest the underlying states of apprehension that are a part of nuanced internal journeys.
Opening reception: Friday, April 14, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Exhibition on view: April 13 - 21
website: www.ericawestenberger.com IG: @erica.westenberger
Lee Laa Guillory: This is her body, which has broken for you
Guillory’s practice investigates, through ritual-based photographs and performance, the transgenerational trauma to which Black femmes in rural Louisiana have been subjected. Her intimate photographs, carefully staged and lit, frequently focus on hair and hair maintenance, and depict femmes in emotional states ranging from that of quiet reflection to that of raw fury.
Opening reception: Friday, April 14, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Exhibition on view: April 13 - 21
.jpg "Stanza della Segnatura (\"Room of the Signatura\"), Raphael Rooms, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City")
by Lisa Pon & Tracy Cosgriff
Monday, March 13, 6pm
Stone Auditorium
210 Woldenberg Art Center
Abstract Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, once the private library of Julius II, manifest a monumental thesis on Renaissance theories of word and image. The rediscovery of the Stanza’s collection of deluxe volumes demonstrates that the chamber was animated by a recursive chain of media, from painting to text. Using 3D technologies to reunite the books and the frescoes, this panoramic reconstruction illuminates new dimensions of the Stanza’s experience for its early visitors and elucidates the synergistic intellectual web on which the room's design was predicated. It asks: How was the Stanza engaged by its early modern audience? How might the spatial analysis of the pope’s literary collection shape our interpretation of the chamber’s meaning? How does the relationship of text and image inform our understanding of Renaissance cultures of reading? And how do these investigations inform current urgent discussions about what a library has been and could become?
Lisa Pon, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California
Lisa Pon specializes in early modern European art, architecture, and material culture, focusing on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance. Her first book, Raphael, Dürer and Marcantoni Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, was published with Yale University Press in 2004; Cambridge University Press published her most recent monograph, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, in 2015; and she is co-editor or co-author of three additional volumes. Her articles have appeared in venues including Art Bulletin, Art History, Word & Image, Print Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Boletín del Museo del Prado, and Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Tracy Cosgriff, Assistant Professor of Art History, College of Wooster
A lifelong student of Latin and Greek, Professor Cosgriff is interested in the relationship of word and image in Renaissance Italy, the reception of antiquity, and the history of the book. Her research focuses on the painter Raphael and his critical engagement with the classical tradition. She is currently completing a book on Raphael’s famous frescoes in the private library of Julius II, revisiting these canonical compositions in light of the pope’s collection of luxury manuscripts and printed books. Forthcoming publications reconsider aspects of Raphael’s pictorial practice and the legacy of his papal patrons. Other projects investigate the intersection of artistic and poetic design, including the visual inheritances of Horace and Dante.
This lecture is supported by the William L. Duren ’26 Professorship Program.
Daniel Alley was born in Anchorage, Alaska. He received his BFA in ceramics from Washington State University in 2003 and his MFA in glass from Tulane University in 2014. Dan frequently exhibits work throughout the city, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Center, Good Children, and The Front. His playful yet intellectual mixed-media sculptures combine his knowledge of material processes with an interest in history and science. As owner and operator of Denali Art Solutions, Dan now dedicates most of his time and knowledge in assisting museums, galleries, and artists from around the world with their custom art fabrication, installations, and logistical needs.
Attendees are asked to be aware of parking restrictions on Tulane's uptown campus. More info here: https://campusservices.tulane.edu/departments/parking/uptown
This book explores how the Renaissance artist’s style – one infused with borrowed visual quotations from other artists both past and present – proved influential in his relationship with associate Baldassare Peruzzi and in the development of the artists within his thriving workshop.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2022.352
Publisher's Synopsis As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks' role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal's Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.
Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.