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DESCRIPTION:Sanchita Balachandran will deliver The Iris Foundation Awards L
 ecture on Tuesday\, March 31\, at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “Marked in Cl
 ay: Interdisciplinary Methods to Re-imagine Ancient Greek Potters at Work.
 ”Disembodied hands haunt the study of the ancient black-figure and red-fig
 ure Greek ceramics made in ancient Athens between 625 and 325 BCE. Of the 
 extant figure-decorated vessels from this time period\, nearly a thousand 
 “hands” of the artisans responsible for their images have been identified 
 by scholars of Greek vase painting\, either through painted inscriptions o
 r characteristic painting styles. But what of the bodies attached to those
  hands? Who were these ancient craftspeople? Despite a scholarly acknowled
 gement that the potters and painters of Athens comprised a diverse group o
 f Athenian citizens as well as immigrants and migrant workers\, women and 
 children\, and freedpeople and slaves\, there is limited archaeological\, 
 epigraphic\, or literary evidence for their life experiences. The most end
 uring trace of the ancient potters’ and painters’ existence remains the ce
 ramics they made. While a primary interest of scholars has been in the pai
 nting of images on these ancient objects\, this talk argues that other mom
 ents in the ceramics production process\, specifically the drawing of prep
 aratory images on unfired vessels prior to painting\, and the firing of cl
 ay vessels into colorful ceramics offer us a more intimate understanding o
 f these makers’ lived experience. Interdisciplinary methods—in this case d
 igital imaging using reflectance transformation imaging as well as experim
 ental archaeological approaches—may allow us to identify specific moments 
 of interaction between the bodies of these ancient artisans and the clay t
 hey shaped and indelibly marked. Sanchita Balachandran is Associate Direct
 or of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum and Senior Lecturer in the d
 epartment of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University. Trained as 
 an objects conservator specializing in archaeological materials\, she unco
 vers traces of past peoples and cultural practices on objects. For a recen
 t exhibition\, Who Am I? Remembering the Dead through Facial Reconstructio
 n (2018)\, Balachandran collaborated with specialists to reconstruct the f
 aces of two ancient Egyptian women. She teaches courses on the technical s
 tudy of ancient objects and the history and ethics of museum conservation.
  Balachandran is a fellow of the American Institute for Conservation and f
 ounder and director of Untold Stories\, a non-profit organization that rep
 resents and preserves a fuller spectrum of human cultural heritage in art 
 conversation.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20200331T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20200331T193000
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: CANCELED—Marked in Clay: Interdisciplinary Me
 thods to Re-imagine Ancient Greek Potters at Work
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