BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//ical@bgc.bard.edu//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.16.12// METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Bard Graduate Center X-WR-CALDESC: X-WR-RELCALID:f X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:event_1313@www.bgc.bard.edu DTSTAMP:20260415T142801Z DESCRIPTION:Mia L. Bagneris will present at The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Hor owitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture on Wedn esday\, March 2 at 12:15 pm. Her talk is entitled ''It is\, Indeed\, a Sis ter’s Form': Black Feminist Pictorial/Poetic Imperatives in an Abolitionis t Friendship Album.”Around 1837\, Sarah Mapps Douglass\, a prominent membe r of Philadelphia’s free Black elite\, painted a lovely watercolor of a fl oral bouquet in the friendship album of Elizabeth Smith\, a white abolitio nist teenager with whom she taught Sunday school. Featuring a large pink rose blossom accented with a dainty sprig of blue forget-me-nots and two s pecimens of the wild pansy popularly known as heart’s ease\, the seemingly innocuous composition initially strikes the viewer as little more than a conventional display of feminine accomplishment. However\, beneath the im age Douglass penned a powerful inscription whose clever puns dramatically transform the work: “Lady\, while you are young and beautiful ‘Forget Not ’ the slave\, so shall ‘Heart’s Ease’ ever attend you.” The paintings and drawings made by Black women in nineteenth-century friendship albums repre sent the earliest signed artworks by African American women\, and Elizabet h Smith’s album offers two of the most compelling examples: this work by D ouglass and a stunning “remix” of abolitionist emblem and verse by Sarah F orten. This talk examines how both artists created sophisticated pictorial -poetic texts that wed word and image to extraordinary effect\, radically transforming popular discourses of genteel femininity and hackneyed antisl avery tropes. Challenging the popular abolitionist slogan\, “Am I Not a Wo man and a Sister?”\, both Douglass and Forten refuse to deal in interrogat ives that question their status as equals. Instead\, they issue bold imper atives to their white friend\, implicitly claiming the titles of “woman” a nd “sister” for themselves\, and in so doing\, creating a Black feminist s pace for the other free Black women who engaged with Smith’s album to do t he same.Mia L. Bagneris teaches African diaspora art history and studies o f race in Western Art at Tulane University. Concentrating primarily on eig hteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American art and visual cultur e\, much of her scholarship explores the representation of race in the Ang lo-American world and the place of images in the histories of slavery\, co lonialism\, empire\, and the construction of national identities. Her rece ntly published monograph\, Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Ag ostino Brunias\, offers the first comprehensive study of the Brunias’s pic tures\, made for British plantocrats and colonial elites\, which feature C aribbeans of color—so called ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Carib Indians\, dark-skinne d Africans and Afro-Creoles\, and people of mixed race. Dr. Bagneris’s cur rent book project\, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art and Culture\, c. 1865-1880\, works to understand Bri tons’ pronounced and continued fascination with the enslaved\, mixed-race beauty in art and literature. Dr. Bagneris’s research has also been suppor ted by grants and fellowships from a number of other institutions includin g the Yale Center for British Art\, Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Ins titute (now the Hutchins Center)\, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf Sou th\, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 10 am on th e day of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220302T121500 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220302T131500 SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: 'It is\, Indeed\, a Sister’s Form': Black Fem inist Pictorial/Poetic Imperatives in an Abolitionist Friendship Album END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR