Meredith Martin to give the annual Rosenberg lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art

Rosenberg Lecture: Power and Pleasure: Decorative Arts and Cultural Contact Between France and India in the 18th Century

Image: Mantel clock with figures of France and Mars, Martín à Paris, France, 1771, gilt bronze and white marble, lent by the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, 32.2019.20

Thursday, November 7, 7:00 p.m.

Location: Horchow Auditorium

Dr. Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of Art History at New York University, will explore commercial, cultural, and political exchanges between France and India in the 18th century through the lens of several fascinating art objects in the Rosenberg and DMA collections.

From the 17th century, a consumer craze for Indian textiles and other goods transformed French fashion and material culture and shaped the era’s key economic and social debates. It also brought scores of French traders and officials to India, where they commented not only on advanced techniques of manufacturing but also on a court culture that mirrored and in some cases surpassed France’s own. As France and Britain began vying for power and influence on the Indian subcontinent, local elites used art, architecture, and décor to forge alliances or make claims for cultural and political authority—culminating in a diplomatic embassy that Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, sent to France in 1788 to ask for military support against the British.

Dr. Martin is Associate Professor of Art History at NYU and the Institute of Fine Arts. She received her PhD from Harvard and her BA from Princeton. A specialist in French art and architecture from the 17th to 19th centuries, she is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011), and a co-editor of Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (special issue of Art History, 2015) and Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Ashgate, 2010). Along with Dr. Gillian Weiss, Martin has completed a book entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, for which she and Dr. Weiss were awarded an ACLS Collaborative Fellowship (2016-2018). She is currently working on several projects, among them an exhibition on the 1720 Mississippi and South Sea bubbles, that will open at the New York Public Library in October 2020, and a study of porcelain rooms from the 17th century to the present. Martin is a founding editor of Journal18.

This talk is part of the Annual Fête.

https://dma.org/programs/event/rosenberg-lecture-power-and-pleasure-decorative-arts-and-cultural-contact-between

Professor Kathryn A. Smith to lecture at Case Western Reserve University, November 7th

Panel Discussion: A Bridge Between You and Everything: Iranian Women Artists in Conversation

Monday, November 4, 6:30 pm
Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center
(enter at 32 Waverly Place, or 31 Washington Place for wheelchair access)

Working in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, contemporary Iranian women artists are embracing themes of gender identity, repression, religion, and memory. In this panel, artists will also discuss the complexities of cultural duality and the nuances of an evolving artistic discourse. Moderated by artist and curator Shirin Neshat, with artists Shiva Ahmadi, Afruz Amighi, Ala Dehghan, Roya Farassat, Nazanin Noroozi, Sepideh Salehi, and Hadieh Shafie.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), ArteEast, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery.

Offered in conjunction with the exhibitions Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection, on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, NYC, September 10–December 7, 2019, and A Bridge Between You and Everything, November 7-24, 2019, High Line Nine Galleries, 507 West 27th Street. Organized by the Center for Human Rights in Iran and curated by Shirin Neshat.

Free of charge, no reservations, capacity limited. All programs subject to change. Photo ID required for entrance to NYU buildings.

For information on the exhibition, please visit greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Silsila fall 2019 Lecture Series, Bonded “CRYPTO-MUSLIM EUNUCHS AND THE PROPAGANDA OF ROYAL MULTICULTURALISM IN NORMAN SICILY” Jeremy Johns, University of Oxford

A bilingual Latin-Arabic document in favour of the Church of St Andrew in Palermo, issued in the names of “the Eternal God and Our Saviour Jesus Christ” and of King William II, and signed by three royal eunuchs, who use cyphers (ʿalāmāt) to proclaim their adherence to Islam.

For seventy years (circa 1130–1198), the Norman kings of Sicily employed crypto-Muslim eunuchs as servants, ministers and scapegoats. Some also played a key role in the commissioning and execution of buildings, artefacts and public texts that together proclaimed Norman mastery over “Saracenic” — what today we would call Arabic, Islamic or Islamicate — language and material and visual culture. At the same time, the eunuchs sought to subvert the propaganda of royal multiculturalism by openly displaying coded messages that only fellow Muslims could decipher — messages that confessed their own faith, and predicted the inevitable fall of the infidel king and the ruin of all his works.

Jeremy Johns is Professor of the Art and Archaeology of the Islamic Mediterranean, and Director the Khalili Research Centre, at the University of Oxford. He has worked for more than forty years on the art history, archaeology, and history of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily. After thirty years devoted to the multicultural art and architecture that was imposed top down by the Norman kings, he has recently begun to investigate the very different manifestations of multiculturalism that developed from the bottom up, from the proximity and interaction of the diverse subject communities of Sicily under Norman and Hohenstaufen rule.

Date: Wednesday, Nov 6th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/xip6MaJYBkTX9LRo6
_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.}

“UMAYYAD POETS AND THE GREAT MOSQUE OF DAMASCUS” Nadia Jamil, University of Oxford

Bayt al-māl, Umayyad Mosque, 709-715, restored 1970. Khalili Research Centre Database.
Photograph Dr Kessler.

The poets of the Umayyad era combined their talents to construct the Umayyad caliphate as a sacral kingship of cosmic proportions. Poetic propaganda concerning the caliph al-Walid’s destruction of the Church of St John the Baptist in Damascus to make way for the construction of the Great Mosque, in 706, endowed that act with divinely inspired, Solomonic wisdom. The Mosque became the focus of a much harder religious stance, which aligned it with Caliph and cosmic centre.

Nadia Jamil is Senior Researcher at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. Her primary research interest has been in early Arabic poetry and the transformation of ideas from the pre-Islamic to the early Islamic period. She is currently concentrating on editions of the Arabic documents of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily as part of the ERC funded project, Documenting Multiculturalism, based at Oxford and Palermo Universities.

Date: Tuesday, Nov 5th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/rHzzkC3DRgjmUuBAA
_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.}

Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:

http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html 

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Today! Comes with PIZZA!

Hear Mosette Broderick speak about the Guggenheim on Fishko Files podcast

https://www.wnyc.org/shows/fishko

Fishko Files

Produced by WNYC. Airs Thursdays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The Guggenheim Museum celebrates 60 years since the opening of its arresting Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue. 

Undergraduate Art History Symposium

Exhibition Walkthrough with Conversation Wednesday, October 23, 6:30 pm Grey Art Gallery, NYU, 100 Washington Square East

With Summer A. Sloane-Britt, PhD student, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and Graduate Curatorial Assistant, Grey Art Gallery.

Free of charge, no reservations. All programs subject to change. Photo ID required for entrance to NYU buildings.

Offered in conjunction with Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection, on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, NYC, September 10–December 7, 2019.

For information on the exhibition, please visit greyartgallery.nyu.edu