In June 2024, British author Bernadine Evaristo used her invitation to speak at the Sir Thomas Gresham Annual Lecture Series to talk about the power of stories. As Evaristo summarized so eloquently, “We are stories. Stories are us. We breathe stories. We create stories. Stories are made up about us…
Liberté, Égalité, Festivité: The Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics – by Matthew Gin
On July 26, the 2024 Olympic Games opened in Paris with a pageant staged on the Seine. For the Parade of Nations, tour boats ferried athletes from the Pont d’Austerlitz to a temporary rostrum in front of the Eiffel Tower where they were greeted by President Emmanuel Macron and VIPs…
Smell of the Sea: A Review of the Musée National de la Marine – by Kelly Presutti
Paris’s Musée National de la Marine, reopened in November 2023 after a multi-million-euro, six-year renovation, originated in 1748 with a donation of model ships from the naval engineer and renowned naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. The initial collections were intended for study, open only to students and officers of the…
Curators’ Notes: Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-Making – by Clara Drummond and Sarah K. Rich
Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-MakingSeptember 2023—January 2024Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State This exhibition grew out of a book. Two years ago, the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CV/MS), housed in the Department of Art History at Penn State, approached the university’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library…
Curators’ Notes: Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories – by Joe Baker and Laura Turner Igoe
Our exhibition, Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, was held at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Pennsylvania from September 9, 2023 to January 14, 2024. The first room featured a salon-style hang of prints, paintings, and textiles incorporating images of Penn’s Treaty, also known as the Treaty…
Portraits of Resistance: An Interview with Jennifer Van Horn – by Elizabeth Bacon Eager
The cover to Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art under Slavery (Yale University Press 2022) features a striking portrait of an aging Black woman, shoulders draped in shining stripes and head wrapped in a madras tignon (Fig. 1). While it is virtually impossible not to be captivated by…
When Blue and White Obscure Black and Red: Conditions of Wedgwood’s 1787 Antislavery Medallion
Andrea Feeser First issued in 1787, Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion appears in several versions: black figure on a white or cream ground, white figure on a blue ground, and copper red figure on a black ground, the second color combination now synonymous with Wedgwood (Figs. 1, 2, and 3). In…