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DESCRIPTION:Sarah M. Guérin will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Mon
 day\, March 21 at noon. Her talk is entitled “Climate and Commodities: Mat
 erial Exchanges between West Africa and Europe\, 1000–1300.”At Bard Gradua
 te Center\, Guérin will speak about a new aspect of her research\, focusin
 g on provisioning of ivory for the trans-Saharan trade and the networks th
 at existed within sub-Saharan West Africa that responded to both local and
  interregional concerns. The trade in raw materials has recently become on
 e of the chief interests in medieval art history. Whether it is the source
  of lapis lazuli in Afghanistan\, of Merovingian garnets in Sri Lanka\, or
  of peridots for the Cologne Three Kings shrine from the Red Sea Island of
  St. John’s (Zabargad)\, these materials stand as witnesses to extensive n
 etworks of trade and interaction in the Middle Ages. Elephant ivory is key
  among these materials in testifying to the important role sub-Saharan Afr
 ica played in the global exchange systems of the Middle Ages. While Guérin
 ’s previous work has mapped the routes taken by elephant ivory to reach th
 e workbenches of Western European artisans\, in this talk she will also ex
 plore the materials imported in return\, and the uses to which these mater
 ials were put in contemporaneous West African cultural production. Emblema
 tic of this exchange is the juxtaposition between the statuette of the Vir
 gin and Child carved of African elephant ivory in the years around 1270 an
 d the seated figure of Tsoede\, from the Village of Tada in Nigeria\, cast
 e from nearly pure copper likely mined in Spain or Southern France.Sarah M
 . Guérin is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Montr
 eal. Before arriving in Montreal\, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Co
 lumbia University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Guérin is a speciali
 st in medieval ivory carving\, and her approach marries an interest in the
  function and meaning of carved ivories in their European contexts with a 
 deep interest in the global economic structures that allowed the raw mater
 ial\, African elephant tusks\, to arrive on European shores. Her work has 
 appeared in such journals as the Art Bulletin\, Burlington Magazine\, the 
 Journal of Medieval History\, and West 86th. A catalogue of the Gothic ivo
 ries at the Gulbenkian Museum\, Lisbon\, for which she wrote the text\, wa
 s recently published\, and she is currently working on a monograph on Goth
 ic ivories called Ivory Palaces: Material\, Belief\, and Desire in Gothic 
 Sculpture. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Toro
 nto.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160321T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20160321T133000
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: Climate and Commodities
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