Research Programs
March 27 Transformational Pedagogies
Symposia September 13 Fashion, Objects, and Concepts: New Research Held in conjunction with the exhibition French Fashion, Women, and the First World War, this symposium brought together scholars who think critically about fashion’s materiality to present their latest research and examine questions including how has the material turn contributed to producing a discursive space where questions about clothing become central?
October 18 Re-Forming Modernism: Craft, Design, and Architecture at the Bauhaus This symposium engaged with the history and legacy of the Bauhaus as a school of craft and design within the context of design reform during the modern period. Paul Betts (University of Oxford) gave a keynote lecture entitled “The Shock of the Old: Some Reflections on the Bauhaus at 100.”
November 8 Conserving Active Matter: Philosophy—Degradation as an Aesthetic Value This symposium was part of our Cultures of Conservation initiative. The symposium focused on how humans have accepted and exploited inherent instability, which is a property of all materials, in the face of the tension that so frequently arises between
58 Research and Exhibitions
The following events were cancelled because of COVID-19.
acceptance of mutability and attempts to arrest it. Philosophical issues such as this were explored in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural manner. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
February 7 Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century This symposium brought together archaeologists who study nineteenthcentury free African-American communities, many of which were bulwarks in the abolition and early civil rights movements yet have largely been left out of mainstream history. Presenters looked at what their research reveals about these communities and what these communities, in turn, reveal to us about living in our own divided time.
February 28 Eileen Gray: New Research and Methodologies Held in conjunction with the exhibition Eileen Gray, this symposium included presentations by leading international historians, curators, and architects who are currently investigating Eileen Gray’s highly versatile career. The symposium elucidated the range of her architectural projects, her pioneering role as a Parisian gallerist and as an artisan of lacquer, among other topics.
Organized by Cheryl Finley, Cornell University, whose book Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018) won BGC’s 2018 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, this symposium was devoted to the long history of the slave ship icon in American and AfricanAmerican art. The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize Symposium
April 10 Refresh/Reset/Reformat: Giving Voice to the Past in the Digital Age As we increasingly rely on digital technologies for memory and preservation, these tools can also help us to recover, redefine, and reimagine the past, particularly through the exploration of lost and marginalized voices and cultures. This symposium aimed to highlight digital projects that draw attention to these forgotten and overlooked histories, illuminating their importance and encouraging dialogue that has the ability to shape how we understand their legacy and impact.
May 1 The Future as Cultural Artefact Material culture is often described as a “survival” of the past in the present, be it in the form of evocative fragments or as “traces” enlisted in historical inquiry. The implicit preoccupation with our relationship with the past has diverted attention from the relationship which past actors had with their future and the ways in which they relied on material culture to shape that relationship. In this symposium an international panel of material culture specialists aimed to explore how imagination and planning towards the future affected relationships between objects and people.
May 8 Conservation Thinking in India This symposium was part of our Cultures of Conservation initiative, which acknowledges in its title that there is more than one way to think about what it means to conserve, what it means to practice conservation, and what it means to be a culture. This symposium aimed to focus attention outside the Euro-American way of answering these questions and instead look at the relevant underlying notions, such as ideas about time, space, agency, authorship, matter, and representation. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Eileen Gray. Untitled, ca. 1930. Collage on paper. Peter Adam Collection.
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