Alicia
Boswell
presented a paper on her Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” postdoctoral project at the
Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting held in Vancouver, British
Columbia, March 29–April 2. Entitled “Crescent Ornaments in the Piura Region” and
coauthored with Metropolitan Museum of Art staff, Frederico Carò, Ellen Howe, Deborah
Schorsch, and Joanne Pillsbury, the paper was part of the invited symposium, “Archaeometallurgy
of the New World: Current Research, Approaches, and Methods,” chaired by Blanca
Maldonado and Elizabeth Paris.
Ivan
Gaskell served
once again on the Vetting Committee, Old Master Paintings (Northern Europe), of
The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), Maastricht. He has also been appointed to
the Visiting Committee of the American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. His review of Béla
Tarr—Till the End of the World (EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam) appeared in West 86th online, on March
16.
Deborah L. Krohn, chaired two sessions, “Drawn to Print”
and “Practice and Object-Based Research on Early Modern Material Culture III,”
and presented a paper entitled “Linen, Steel, and Starch in Early Modern Table
Decoration,” in the session, “The Shape of Knowledge: The Form and Function of
Printed Professional Manuals” at the Renaissance Society of America annual
conference in Chicago March 30-April 1.
François Louis gave a
talk, on April 22, entitled “Networks of Wealth: Tang Gold and Silverware in
the Ninth Century,” at the symposium “Secrets
of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia,”
co-organized by the Asia Society and the Tang Center for Early China, Columbia
University.
Michele Majer presented the keynote
address at the Theatre Symposium, sponsored under the aegis of the Southeastern
Theatre Conference, at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, on April 7. The conference theme was “In Other Habits:
Theatrical Costume” and her talk was entitled “Plus que Reine: The Napoleonic Revival in Belle Epoque Theatre and
Fashion.”
Urmila Mohan’s chapter, “When Krishna Wore a Kimono: Deity Clothing as Rupture and Inefficacy,” an analysis of devotional textiles as disjuncture is appearing in the edited volume When Things Do Wrong: Anthropologies of Material Failure (Bloomsbury, May 2017). On April 5, she gave a talk at the Fashion Institute of Technology entitled “Indian Textiles” as part of a master’s course on world textiles. Mohan and students from the In Focus course on Balinese textiles visited the American Museum of Natural History earlier this year to study Southeast Asian looms. The results of this will be shared with Bard Graduate Center’s study collection as well as with the AMNH.
Andrew Morrall participated
in a roundtable on “Biblical Paratexts and Renaissance Culture” at the
Renaissance Society of America annual conference in Chicago on March 31. Morrall’s essay, “The Family at Table:
Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the Limits of the Visual in
Seventeenth-Century Zurich” appeared in Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, a
special issue of Art History, vol.
40, issue 2, edited by Bridget Heal and Joseph L. Koerner. His post, “The Case for Domestic Imagery,” can be found on the After Iconophobia Online Symposium.
Susan Weber, with Sunny Neff, hosted An
Evening with Micky Wolfson at the Fisher Island Club on March 27. Mitchell
Wolfson, Jr., who is dedicated to the preservation, research, and
interpretation of material culture of the period 1850–1950, is the founder of
the Wolfsonian-FIU, in Miami Beach, Florida, and its sister institution, the Wolfsonian, in Genoa,
Italy.
Ittai Weinryb delivered the 2017
Harvard Medieval Material Culture Lecture and Workshop. His talk, entitled
“Breaking the Mold: Metal as Material, Medium, and Message in the Middle Ages”
was held on March 28. On March 30, the first workshop was convened at
the Adolphus-Busch Hall, where Harvard University holds a collection
of plaster casts of key German monuments bequeathed by Kaiser Wilhelm II
in 1903. The afternoon workshop, held at Harvard Art
Museums Art Study Center, was led by Weinryb; Francesca Bewer, research
curator for conservation and technical studies programs at the Harvard Art
Museums; and Katherine Emerin, Patricia Cornwell Senior Conservation
Scientist at the Harvard Art Museums.
In addition, Weinryb has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. It will aid his summer research for his new book projects.
