Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture Series with Andrea Vázquez de Arthur
Pottery as Ritual Tech in the Ancient Andes: A Revisionary Study of Wari Faceneck Vessels Monday, November 6, 2023 at 6:00 PM In-Person and Virtual Lecture* Advance registration is required
The Institute of Fine Arts 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075 and on Zoom
The faceneck vessel is a prolific, yet enigmatic ceramic form popular among the Wari civilization, a powerful polity with widespread cultural influence during the Middle Horizon of Andean prehistory. Sometimes described as effigies, other times lumped in with all other narrow-necked jars, the classification of these objects fluctuates between the ritual and the utilitarian. Are they representational images or decorative dinnerware? At the heart of this conundrum is the issue that Andean pottery operates in ways that are unfamiliar to Western traditions, and many ancient Andean vessel types have no counterpart outside the Americas. An important distinction of the faceneck is that it also has a body, imbuing the vessel with an acute sense of personhood. Drawing on theories of Andean perspectivism, an ontological viewpoint that considers the significance of feasting rituals and ancestor veneration within an animate world, this presentation will address the potential for faceneck vessels to have participated as social agents in complex rituals involving valuable offerings and communion with the dead.
Andrea Vázquez de Arthur is an assistant professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, specializing in the ancient, modern, and contemporary visual arts of Latin America. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a PhD in art history from Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at FIT, Dr. Vázquez de Arthur was the Leigh and Mary Carter Director’s Research Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition “Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá.” Her research focuses on the diverse archaeological cultures of the ancient Andes, primarily from the Middle Horizon and the Late Intermediate Period. Through studies of comparative analysis, her work investigates systems of visual language, Indigenous ontologies, and gender representation in the visual culture of various societies including Moche, Wari, Lambayeque, and Chimú.
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees. JOIN US IN-PERSON JOIN US VIRTUALLY
Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 6:00 pm In-Person and Virtual Lecture* Advance registration is required
The Institute of Fine Arts 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075 and on Zoom
In Looking at Picasso Pepe Karmel approaches Picasso’s work through the lens of art rather than biography, showing how he invented countless new visual languages and transformed the traditional themes of Western art. After tracing Picasso’s evolution from the Rose and Blue Periods to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Karmel surveys the development of Cubism, beginning with crystalline facets and ending with overlapping planes glowing with color and texture. Turning to Picasso’s surrealist work, he demonstrates how the artist’s abstract constellations and interlaced figures of the early 1920s led to his so-called “monsters” as well as to sensual reveries like Girl Before a Mirror. Another chapter explores Picasso’s creation of multiple classical styles, from his 1919 drawings of ballet dancers, inspired by Pompeian frescoes, to the Greek tragedy of the 1935 Minotauromachy, evoking Rembrandt. A final chapter follows Picasso from Guernica, his 1937 vision of terror and destruction, to the abstract sign language of The Kitchen (1948), to his disturbing late work.
Pepe Karmel, Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003), Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and Looking at Picasso (fall 2023). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as for the New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees.
Monday, May 8, 2023 at 6:00 PM In-Person and Virtual Lecture* Advance registration is required
The Institute of Fine Arts 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075 and on Zoom
The recently released volume Duke House and the Making of Modern New York; Lives and Afterlives of a Fifth Avenue Mansion offers an investigation of the history of the edifice which is home of the Institute of Fine Arts since 1959.Edited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Daniella Berman, and Jon Ritter, the publication collects contributions authored by graduates of the Institute, established and emerging scholars, and practitioners to reconstruct the genesis of the Dukes’ home in the context of early 20th century Manhattan, analyzing its design, its construction, its decoration, and its metamorphosis from an elite residence to an educational institution.
Join us on May 8th to celebrate the publication with a presentation by the editors on this collective project and its contribution to the history of New York’s architecture, followed by a conversation with many of the book’s authors! More about the Book Featuring new archival research and previously unpublished photographs and architectural plans, this volume fundamentally revises our understanding of the development of modern New York, focusing on elite domestic architecture within the contexts of social history, urban planning, architecture, interior design, and adaptive re-use. Contributions from emerging and established scholars, art historians, and practitioners offer a multi-faceted analysis of major figures such as Horace Trumbauer, Julian Francis Abele, Robert Venturi, and Richard Kelly. Taking the James B. Duke House, now home to NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, as its point of departure, this collection provides fresh perspectives on domestic spaces, urban forms, and social reforms that shaped early-twentieth century New York into the modern city we know today.
Contributions by Daniella Berman, Mosette Broderick, Alisa Chiles, Grace Chuang, Jean-Louis Cohen, Isabelle Gournay, Christie Mitchell, Theodore Prudon, Jon Ritter, and Matthew Worsnick.
The book is available from Brill. The Editors Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Trained as an architect and an art historian in Paris, Cohen has curated many exhibitions and published more than forty books.
Daniella Berman is an art historian and curator specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Trained at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, Berman has contributed to various exhibitions and their publications including Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022).
Jon Ritter is Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, Urban Design and Architecture at New York University. President of the Society of Architectural Historian’s New York Chapter, Ritter holds a doctorate from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees. All in-person attendees must be in compliance with NYU’s COVID-19 vaccination requirements (fully vaccinated and boosted, once eligible and by NYU’s deadline) and be prepared to present proof of compliance. Please review the University’s COVID guidelines in advance of your visit.
Ancient Egyptian art is full of bodies, a fact that has not been lost on modern Western audiences who have long delighted in mummies, reliefs of kings “walking like an Egyptian”, and the miniature proportions of shabti figurines, workers for the afterlife who were included by the hundred in tombs. This talk will argue that the bodily preoccupation of ancient Egyptian art is one reason why it has proven unusually appealing to modern audiences; we have until now, however, received Egyptian art through the lens of our own bodily understandings, which has led to problematic scholarly interpretations that sometimes unconsciously reproduce the modern body politics of racist, sexist, and colonial modes of thought. This talk will examine several case studies of the modern “translation” of bodies in ancient Egyptian art and demonstrate how the nexus between ancient and modern body worlds continues to affect our understanding of Egyptian artistic production.
RSVP Wednesday, February 16, 2021 Livestream at 6:30 PM ET
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal.
By Richard Kagan, Robert Lubar, and Edward J. Sullivan
Jonathan Brown was a pioneering art historian who brought the study of both Spanish and Viceregal Mexican art to wide public and academic attention with his teaching, voluminous writing and exhibition curating, from the 1960s until the present decade. He died at home in Princeton, New Jersey on January 17, 2022. Jonathan Brown was the son of Jean (Levy) Brown and Leonard Brown, well known collectors of Dada, Surrealist, Fluxus, and especially Abstract Expressionist art. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on July 15, 1939. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, he became interested in Spanish language and literature. His love of Spanish art was fostered by classes at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where he attended New York University’s junior year in Spain program in 1958-59. Brown received his PhD in art history in 1964 from Princeton where he taught in the Department of Art and Archaeology from 1965 to 1973. Jonathan Brown and Sandra Backer were married in 1966. Their house in Princeton, New Jersey, has been the family home for many years. Jonathan was recruited by NYU to be Director (1973-78) of the Institute of Fine Arts, the university’s graduate center for the study of art history and fine arts conservation. He remained at the Institute until his retirement in 2017, serving as the Caroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts. Brown instructed several generations of advanced students in his field, many of whom went on to have prestigious careers as academics, museum curators and directors. His fundamental books and exhibition catalogues on the greatest figures of Spain’s “Golden Age,” including El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, among others, earned him praise at home and abroad. Brown’s 1991 survey The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (expanded in 1998 and published as Painting in Spain 1500-1700) remains the standard volume on the subject.
Brown’s art historical methodology, with its emphasis on such contextual issues as patronage, the demands of the art market, changing currents of spiritual belief, along with intellectual, political and social milieu in which artists lived and worked, offered new, often bold interpretations. His openness to both interdisciplinary approaches and scholarly collaboration is abundantly evident in the book A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, written with renowned British historian John Elliott and published first in 1980 with an expanded version in 2003.
In Spain, Brown was both a revered and a sometimes-controversial figure. His analyses of art, highlighting socio-political, economic and religious readings, were often at odds with the more traditional form of descriptive art history that was the rule in Spain until recent decades. Established Spanish scholars often questioned the value and importance of Brown’s ideas and expansive understanding of Spanish culture, but they held enormous appeal for a younger generation of scholars eager to turn their backs on the isolation imposed by the Franco regime. Many of them, including the current director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, found their way to New York to attend Brown’s seminars at the IFA. Brown’s numerous collaborations with Spanish museums, joint projects with Spanish colleagues, and the prestige of his writings (many of his books quickly appeared in Spanish editions) made him into an “art historical legend” in the country he knew and loved so well.
Over the course of his career Brown received numerous honors including the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes (1986); Comendador de la Orden de Isabel la Católica (1986); the Grand Cross of Alfonso X (1996); The Sorolla Medal from the Hispanic Society of America (2008); and recognition by the College Art Association of America in 2011 as Distinguished Scholar. Brown was elected a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), a Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (Valencia) and, in 1988, membership in the American Philosophical Society. Between 1986 and 1996 he served on the Board of Directors of the Spanish Institute in New York City.
Among the themes closest to Brown was the phenomenon of collecting. His 1994 Andrew W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.) were published in 1995 as Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth Century Europe. This was also the subject of a 2002 exhibition at the Prado, organized in collaboration with Sir John Elliott. Brown’s passion for this subject led to the founding in 2007 (following Brown’s inspiration) of the Institute for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and the Frick Art Reference Library. Brown organized five exhibitions at the Frick, including the popular show “Goya’s Last Works” (with Susan Grace Galassi). His re-assessment of the final paintings and graphic work of this great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artist mirrored the acuity that Brown had brought to his analysis of earlier Iberian master painters.
Beginning in 1994 Jonathan Brown’s attentions turned to the Spanish American world. An invitation to teach at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City provided the opportunity to examine firsthand masterpieces of what has been called “colonial art,” a mode of painting that Brown insisted on calling “Viceregal,” a term that has since gained considerable traction. His courses at the Institute of Fine Arts, his public lectures and his participation in a ground-breaking exhibition “Pintura de los reinos” (Painting in the Spanish Realms”), at the Prado and in Mexico City, attested to his new-found passion for Latin American art of the Early Modern era. In the spring of 2013, he curated the exhibition “Mexican Art at the Louvre: Masterpieces from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” 2015 saw the publication of Brown’s co-authored (with Luisa Elena Alcalá and other contributors) volume entitled Painting in Latin America, 1550-1829. His final publication attested to his wide-ranging interests within his first love, the art of Spain. No solo Velázquez (2020) was compiled by Estrella de Diego and Robert Lubar Messeri and contained an author’s prologue and nineteen Spanish language versions of Brown’s essays concerning painting, sculpture and architecture from the late Middle Ages to Picasso. In his introduction Brown stated that “My principal stimulus was the desire to reintegrate Spanish art within its European context.”
Jonathan Brown is survived by his wife Sandra, his children Claire, Michael and Daniel and their spouses David, Jamie and Sarah and his four grandchildren, Benjamin, Leo, Jake and Max.
RSVP Wednesday, February 16, 2021 Livestream at 6:30 PM ET
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal.
The Seminar on Ancient Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts invites you to “Sign and Sense in Mid-Republican Rome.” This lecture will preview a manuscript in progress on the semiotics of the Roman Middle Republic. Inspired in conception and execution by Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij’s The Semiotics of Russian Culture, the manuscript scrutinizes those sign systems through which Romans and becoming-Romans of the Middle Republic communicated with each other and with the wider social and naturecultural world. For this lecture, I will focus on two sign systems: (1) divine figural representations (2) human names. Although each of these sign systems privileges particular media for their routing of communications, what I will emphasize through several case studies is the multi- and intermediality of mid-republican Roman culture.Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is associated with the Department of African American Studies and affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (PUP 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (CUP 2017). Current projects include a study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism (co-authored with Denis Feeney and under contract with HUP), A People’s History of Rome (under contract with PUP), a volume on new approaches to the Middle Roman Republic (co-edited with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone), and a manifesto on race and racism in the disciplinary identity of Classics (co-authored with Sasha-Mae Eccleston). He has written for the public-facing Classics journal Eidolon and published pieces for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, the NYT, Fabulist, and diaphanes.
SPECIAL EVENT IN COLLABORATION WITH SILSILA, CENTER FOR MATERIAL HISTORIES, NYU
“MATERIAL CULTURES OF ISLAMIC CHINA: NEW PERSPECTIVES”
A collaboration with the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, China Workshop
Friday, November 19th
10:00am-1:00pm
Over the past decades, archaeological excavation in China has brought to light a wide range of portable objects produced in the medieval Islamic world. Many of these come from dated contexts, providing fixed points in their chronology that are sometimes lacking in their place of production. The material culture of the various Muslim communities of China itself is also attracting increasing attention. In addition to architecture (as witnessed, for example, in Nancy Steinhardt’s 2015 book, China’s Early Mosques), this includes a wide range of portable arts. The recent appearance of Yuan and Ming Qur’an manuscripts closely related to Qur’ans from Ilkhanid Iran but making use of distinctive scripts is a case in point. But the range of relevant materials extends to other media and materials, including ceramics and jade. The contribution of Central Asian craftsmen and designers to Qing court culture is also coming into sharper focus, in addition to the growing scholarship on export ceramics, enamelware, reverse-glass paintings made for Islamic markets in South and South-East Asia and further west. This workshop offers an introduction to some recent work on the Islamic or Islamicate art of China and its relationship to the artistic traditions of the Islamic lands that lay to the west and south.
10.15-10.40 Sylvia Wu, University of Chicago, “Inscribing Piety: Monumental Inscriptions from Quanzhou”
10.40-11.05 Eiren Shea, Grinnell College, “Quanzhou to Fustat: The Movement of Satin Damask in the Fourteenth Century”
11.05-11.30 Jinyi Liu, NYU Institute of Fine Arts, “Doubling the Efficacy for Apotropaic Protection: A Jade Magic Square from the Lu Family Tomb of the Ming Dynasty in Shanghai (1500s-1620s)”
11.30-11.55 Yu-wen Weng, National Palace Museum, Taipei, “A Preliminary Study on the Transmission of an Islamic Style of Official Kiln Porcelain in Early Ming”
11.55-12.20 Xu Xiaodong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Canton Enamels for the Islamic Market”
12.20-1.00 Questions and Discussion
Sylvia Wu
Title: Inscribing Piety: Monumental Inscriptions from Quanzhou
Abstract: Quanzhou’s Ashab Mosque has often been discussed for its foreign-looking architectural forms and the material choice of stone. Few have contemplated the Quranic verses that were carved onto both the interior and exterior walls of the mosque complex. These monumental inscriptions constitute the majority of the sober decorative program in this Muslim sanctuary and are imbued with iconographic meanings that speak to piety. This paper examines the inscriptions found in the Ashab Mosque and around the city of Quanzhou and explores the pious messaging behind their formal, iconographic and material qualities.
Sylvia Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She studies the architecture and material culture of the medieval Indian Ocean, with a particular focus on China’s coastal areas. Her dissertation, Mosques of Elsewhere, examines how knowledge of legendary monuments of the Islamic world informed the blueprints of mosque building in China’s southeastern ports, or rather distracted us from recognizing the mosques’ local attributions.
Eiren Shea
Title:Quanzhou to Fustat: The Movement of Satin Damask in the Fourteenth Century
Abstract: A series of satin damask textile fragments allegedly excavated in Fustat and thought to have been woven under the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty in China are evidence of a trend for East Asian motifs on textiles and other media that flourished under the third reign of the Mamluk sultan Nasir al-Din Muḥammad (d. 1341 CE). The fragments also raise questions about the transmission of satin damask weaving technology from China to West Asia. This paper traces the routes of exchanges between East and West Asia to uncover how these textiles found their way to Egypt and role of the Mongol empire in the transmission of weaving technology across Eurasia.
Eiren Shea is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where she offers classes on arts of pre-modern Asia. Her research interests include the arts and visual cultures of China from the 10th-16th centuries, Asian textiles, and premodern cultural exchange in Asia. Her recent book, Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange, investigates the role of dress in the Mongol Empire and the impact of Mongol textiles on Asian and European art and society. Her work has been published in The Textile Museum Journal, Arts Asiatiques, and Ming Studies.
Jinyi Liu
Title:Doubling the Efficacy for Apotropaic Protection: A Jade Magic Square from the Lu Family Tomb of the Ming Dynasty in Shanghai (1500s-1620s)
Abstract: Among the large number of high-quality mortuary goods from a Shanghai Ming tomb discovered in 1969, one object stood out—a jade plaque carved with Arabic letters and numbers. In particular, there are sixteen numbers individually contained in small squares created by the four-by-four table which seem to represent the Islamic magic square. According to Islamic belief, the design of the magic square, used since at least the ninth century, possesses talismanic efficacy against evil harnessed from the powerful numeric combinations. Why and how did this object end up in a Ming official’s tomb? Deciphering this question reveals how the design, form, and material of the amulet were most likely chosen to evoke a heightened sense of “foreignness” yet grounded in a local cultural tradition, which made the object especially potent for its talismanic function. Having had made its way into the burial space of non-believers, this magic square makes visible an interest in the astrological and esoteric knowledge of Islamic culture in Ming China.
Jinyi Liu is a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a focus on Chinese art and material culture of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Her areas of interest include the production of decorative arts, objects of early modern global trade, and the visual and spatial experience of urban landscape.
Yu-wen Weng
Title:A Preliminary Study on the Transmission of an Islamic Style of Official Kiln Porcelain in Early Ming
Abstract: There have been considerable researches on the Islamic art styles of the porcelains in the official kilns of the Yongle and Xuande kilns in the Ming Dynasty, including their shapes or patterns. However, so far no Islamic artwork (Islamic material evidence) has been found; no archaeological evidence or documents show that Islamic art has ever been introduced to China. How did the craftsmen learn the appearance and characteristics of these works in the first place? This is the subject of my paper.
Yu-wen Weng is currently an assistant curator at the South Branch of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, specializing in Asian ceramics, Islamic jades, and Islamic culture and art. The exhibitions she has organized include special exhibitions of Vietnamese porcelain, Islamic jades, Japanese Imari porcelain, Ming porcelain and Asian ceramics in the NPM. Recently, she is studying Islamic artifacts in the Qing Palace collection.
Xu Xiaodong
Title:Canton Enamels for the Islamic Market
Abstract: This lecture focuses on a small group of Canton enamels on copper, with reference to historical documents. It tries to investigate the patrons and traders behind these enamels, how they were commissioned and found their way to their clients, how they circulated, and their possible parallels in the destination community.
Dr. Xu Xiaodong is Associate Director of the Art Museum at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Honorary Researcher Fellow of the Palace Museum, Beijing (2020-2023). Her research interests include Ancient Chinese jade, amber, gold and silver. Her current focus is on maritime trade and the export art of Canton during the Qing dynasty, and Canton enamel on copper in particular.
Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture Series
Fields of Vision 