3/3/20
Center for Spain in America Fellow Julie A. Harris presents, “The Elusive Line between Ornament and Meaning in the Ornamental Carpet Pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles (c. 1260–1320).” Full-page “carpet pages” in the Hebrew Bibles of Iberia, like their counterparts …
2/18/20
Manton Post-doctoral Fellow Caitlin R. Woolsey presents “New Old Media: Tape, Type, and the Undiscovered Collages of Henri Chopin.” Henri Chopin (1922–2008) is known for mining expression beyond language in layered “audiopoems,” created by manipulating his voice and body noises …
12/3/19
Manton Fellow Jiat-Hwee Chang presents “The (Trans)formation of Air-conditioning Complexes: Architectural Histories and Futures from Asia.” How did cities and urban populations around the world become dependent on air-conditioning? How did air-conditioning dependency transform built environment, material culture, and social …
11/12/19
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Kirsten Scheid presents “Curating Jerusalem Actual and Possible: Political Lessons from a non-Euclidean City.” Treating an exhibition not as a representation but a “system of action,” reveals how it provides participants with a “critical space,” i.e., a …
11/1/19
Curatorial Fellow Adrienne Childs presents “Material Matters: Race and Materiality in the Decorative Arts.” A seventeenth-century ebony “blackamoor” cabinet, an eighteenth-century sterling silver slave candlestick, and a twenty-first-century black Murano glass chandelier are examples of decorative arts that figure into …
10/29/19
Clark Fellow Jessica Horton presents “Earth Diplomacy: Diné Arts of Reciprocity, 1966–1968.” From 1966 to 1968, the United States government commissioned Diné (Navajo) artists Bertha and Fred Stevens to demonstrate weaving and sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, ostensibly as …
10/24/19
Kelema Lee Moses is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Occidental College whose work focuses on critical contemporary issues in the architectural and urban landscape of Pacific island cities. Her current book project, Island Modernism/Island Urbanism: Encountering Statehood in …
10/8/19
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of imagination. She draws from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction to make things that offer a phenomenological experience. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019 @ 6:00 pm …
10/5/19
Kenturah Davis is the featured speaker in this fall’s Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art. Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles, New Haven, Conn., and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. …
10/1/19
Clark Fellow Susan Gagliardi presents “Mapping Senufo: Rethinking the Scholarly Monograph in the Era of Digital Publication.” What might research and the publication of results look like if scholars producing them integrated decades of theories about the construction of identities …
9/28/19
Darby English, the exhibition scholar for the American Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, will discuss Swallowed Sun, the featured sculpture in Liberty/Libertà, the exhibition by contemporary artist Martin Puryear, the 2019 United States representative to this year’s Biennale. SATURDAY …
9/26/19
Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, is one of the foremost historians of early modern Europe and has authored ten books on aspects of this subject, including New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition …
9/25/19
Anthony Grafton considers the meaning and relevance of margin notes found in Renaissance texts. In this period, educated readers went through their texts pen in hand. They underlining passages, adding references to names and short summaries in the margins, and …
9/17/19
Beinecke Fellow Jared Sexton presents “Basic Black.” What would happen, what would be enabled theoretically and practically if we re-imagined and re-envisioned all color and all colors as blackness in the most expansive sense? Thinking about the universe (of color) …
9/13/19
This public symposium will undertake a collective and comparative study of the art academy outside Europe and the United States as a way of defamiliarizing art and its associated practices in a global context. Speakers will examine case studies of …
5/31/19
The Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art Class of 2019 presents scholarly papers in its annual symposium. This keystone academic event is free and open to the public. FRIDAY MAY 31, 2019 9:00 am-5:00 pm Clark Art Institute …
5/14/19
Nora Rosengarten, the Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellow, Williams College MA Class of 2019, discusses the subject of her yearlong conservation fellowship at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center: two early-nineteenth century globes produced by Josiah Loring in Boston, Massachusetts from …
5/3/19
Alternative Art Histories is a two-day symposium focused on U.S. Latinx art and art history. The symposium will bring together leading museum curators, museum directors, and art historians to discuss the aesthetic contribution of U.S. Latinx arts and how we …
4/30/19
Clark Fellow Celeste Olalquiaga presents “In Quest of the Gorgon’s Head.” The terrifying Medusa of mythical fame is a reinterpretation of an archaic apotropaion, or protective emblem, the Gorgoneion. Greek classic culture transformed this protective figure into a destructive one, …
4/27/19
The Research and Academic Program presents, “Grand Challenges: Social History of Art and Digital Humanities Methods,” a public discussion among leaders in the field of art history about the state of the field in relationship to the digital humanities and …
4/23/19
Mel Y. Chen presents “Arts of Agitation” This talk considers “agitation” as an interaction between bodily and political being. My attention to agitation has emerged as the last aspect of a study of chemical intimacies, wherein intoxication has operated as …
4/18/19
University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Art Seth Estrin is a historian of the art, archaeology, and visual cultures of ancient Greece. His research explores the making and viewing of art as a form of social practice in the ancient …
4/18/19
A talk at WCMA on James Van Der Zee’s Photography by Emilie Boone, Assistant Professor of Art History in the African American Studies Department at CUNY New York City College of Technology. The talk will look at some of Van Der …
4/16/19
Mellon Decade Fellow Philippe Cordez presents “The Art of Commodities: Medieval Venice.” Since the twelfth century, Europe has seen a steady increase of highly specialized objects produced in large quantities, involving a variety of materials, techniques, ornaments, images, and functions, …
4/15/19
Kyla Schuller (Rutgers, author, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century), will be speaking on the 1950s invention of gender, as well as a new way of conceptualizing sex/gender that differentiates on the basis of …
4/13/19
Adam Lerner is the Mark G. Falcone “MaFa” Director and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. His talk will explore the role of authenticity in his unique approach to museum programming that combines curatorial, education, and artistic …
4/11/19
Vincent Valdez is most recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure. His drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various sociopolitical arenas and eras. “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted …
4/9/19
Professor Bergdoll’s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and …
4/8/19
Dave McKenzie is a visual artist who uses video, performance, and text to explore how and why subjects engage-with and become-with one another. Through simple gestures and an exploration of popular culture, language, and politics, McKenzie’s work reveals complex layers …
4/4/19
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the …
4/2/19
Robert Sterling Clark Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson presents “Louise Nevelson: Modernist Drag.” This talk investigates the work of sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), in particular her all-black wood-based reliefs—a formal idiom she pursued for decades—to argue for a politics of queer commitment, …
3/12/19
Clark Fellow Jennifer Bajorek presents “Strategic Invisibilities: Migration and Post-Representation.” This lecture explores work about migrants and migration in contemporary France. Bajorek thinks with artistic strategies that decenter the migrant as an anchor of truth and rights claims, and that …
3/7/19
Artist Daniel Kukla discusses his practice and the intersections of photography, landscape, and environmentalism. Conversation moderated by students Elyse Mack MA ’20, Nanase Shirokawa ’19, Perry Weber ’19, and Maggie Wu MA ’19. Thursday March 7 6PM Williams College Museum of Art
3/5/19
Mellon Network Fellow Kris Cohen presents “Alma Thomas and the Graphical Picture Plane.” This talk describes how Alma Thomas’s Earth Paintings address, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction, nascent configurations of the computer screen …
3/5/19
“Indigeneity” and the Cultural Production of Mexico’s Pueblos Originarios: A Panel Discussion with Citlali Fabián, Ana Daisy Alonso Ortiz, Isaura de los Santos Mendoza and Amal Eqeiq; moderated by Roxana Blancas-Curiel. This panel discussion, organized in conjunction with the exhibition …
3/4/19
Citlali Fabián, an Oaxacan photographer, will give an artist’s talk on her Mestiza Portrait Series displayed on the 1st and 2nd floor lobbies of Hollander Hall. The opening reception is on Monday, March 4 at 4pm and a second walk …
2/25/19
Jonathan D. Katz—founder of the Harvey Milk Institute and director of the visual culture studies doctoral program at the State University of New York at Buffalo—frames the Andy Warhol’s pop art through the lens of queer studies. While Andy Warhol’s …
2/21/19
Raise a glass to our spring exhibitions: “possible selves: queer foto vernaculars,” “James Van Der Zee: Collecting History,” “Uncovering Williams,” “New Painting,” and “Object Lab.” Remarks 5:30 PM, followed by a series of student performances responding to exhibitions. Featuring dance …
2/19/19
Clark Fellow Susan Sidlauskas presents “John Singer Sargent and the Matter of Paint.” The cosmopolitan son of a physician, John Singer Sargent dissolved the distinctions among fabric, flesh, and paint with the pictorial equivalent of dissection and its counter-activities: masking, …
2/18/19
Meets Monday February 18th with artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden in WCMA’s Rose Study Gallery 4-6pm. All current grad students invited to attend.
11/27/18
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Jill Casid presents “Necrolandscaping on the Border.” In recent calls for an ecological aesthetics capable of reckoning with global Anthropocene crisis, landscape’s colonial and neo-colonial dreamwork, master-of-all-I-survey perspectives, and distanced way of seeing that reduces nature to …
11/15/18
Jeffrey Kapali Lyon, Associate Professor of Religion, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa This program series, presented in conjunction with “The Field is the World: Williams, Hawai’i, and Material Histories in the Making,” explores how methods of collecting and displaying material …
11/13/18
Beinecke Fellow Mark Wigley presents, “John McHale and the Dissolving Architecture of Pop.” The British artist John McHale made some of the most radical and prophetic propositions about art, information, media, ecology, education, social life, prosthetics, the body, buildings, and …
11/11/18
Nature’s limitless possibilities inspired nineteenth-century artists who transformed hazardous weather, natural disasters, and the Earth’s darkest caverns into awe-inspiring portrayals of natural phenomena. Curator Michael Hartman, Williams MA ’18 and current PhD student at the University of Delaware, examines how …
11/1/18
A conversation for students, faculty, and staff of Williams College to reckon with the histories surfaced in ““The Field is the World:” Williams, Hawaiʻi, and Material Histories in the Making.” WCMA Nov. 1 7-8pm
10/30/18
Center for Spain in America Fellow Doron Bauer presents, “The Aesthetic Colonization of Conquered Islamic Cities: From Palma de Mallorca to Tel Aviv.” A detailed examination of the transformation of Islamic Madina Mayurqa into Christian Palma de Mallorca after the …
10/24/18
Herbert Kessler, Visiting Professor of Art at Williams College and Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, will give two lectures on medieval stained glass windows in October: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 5:30 pm “Consider the glass, …
10/20/18
An afternoon of music and conversation on cultural and artistic production in and out of Cuba. Featuring multimedia artist Nestor Siré, scholar Paloma Duong, and musicians Neil Leonard and Miguel Núñez. The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established …
10/18/18
WCMA’s Season Celebration Meet our new Class of 1956 Director Pamela Franks and celebrate our fall exhibitions: The Field is the World, Kay Sage: Serene Surrealist, Anicka Yi: Our Love Is Bigger Than an AIDS Quilt, Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter, …
10/17/18
Healoha Johnston, Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs, Curator of the Arts of Hawaiʻi, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas, Honolulu Museum of Art This program series, presented in conjunction with “The Field is the World: Williams, Hawai’i, and Material Histories in …
10/16/18
Florence Gould Foundation Fellow Gülru Çakmak presents “Painting, Photography and the Long Duration of History in Osman Hamdi’s Paintings.” In this talk, Çakmak will discuss a series of paintings made in the 1880s and 1890s by the Ottoman painter Osman …
9/25/18
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art before the Age of Art History Frédéric Ogée presents “Truth and Nature in British Art.” This lecture will survey British artists’ writings from c. 1700–1920, bringing out the priorities and values shared by …
9/20/18
This week’s conversation around “Dance We Must,” which has been shaped jointly by WCMA staff and students, will explore the following: What do we make of the phrases cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation? How do we negotiate the categories of …
8/18/18
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris attracted women artists from around the world, drawn to the city’s academies, museums, studios, and salons. Guest lecturer Nicole Myers, Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, discusses …
7/14/18
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris attracted women artists from around the world, drawn to the city’s academies, museums, studios, and salons. Guest lecturer Jane R. Becker, collections management associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discusses …
6/30/18
Join Senior Curator Esther Bell as she welcomes Jennifer Steinkamp for a one-on-one conversation in conjunction with the exhibition Jennifer Steinkamp: Blind Eye, the groundbreaking video installation on view in the Lunder Center at Stone Hill from June 30–October 8. …
6/24/18
Before the advent of modern building materials, iron was used for everything from architectural gates and grills to household implements. Exhibition curator Kathleen Morris discusses some of the extraordinary objects included in the exhibition and what they tell us about …
6/10/18
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris attracted international women artists, drawn to the city’s academies, museums, studios, and salons. Curator Esther Bell considers the influential, often-overlooked work of these artists, as well as the barriers they encountered …
5/18/18
Nearly twenty years after the landmark Clark Conference “The Two Art Histories,” graduates from the Williams-Clark program will gather to honor its former director, and to consider the intellectual, vocational, and pedagogical challenges posed by the art object with new …
5/11/18
On Friday, May 11, the art department welcomes you to join the opening reception of It’s Not Nothing: The Senior Studio Art Exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The exhibition features the work of nine Williams College …
5/6/18
What role does the modern museum play in the landscape and community in which it resides? How does leadership navigate the delicate line between stewardship and evolution? Clark Director Olivier Meslay joins Clark Grounds Manager Matthew Noyes, Chief Apiary Inspector …
5/3/18
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, will deliver the lecture “Minds Over Matter.” Thursday, May 3 5:30pm Location: Lawrence 231
5/1/18
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art Shira Brisman presents, “The Provisionality of Sixteenth-Century Designs.” In the sixteenth century, as goldsmiths affiliated with families such as Jamnitzer and de Bry began to publish their engraved designs for objects that could …
4/17/18
Clark Visiting Professor Nina Dubin presents “Master of the World.” In the wake of the world’s first international financial crisis, Cupid claimed pride of place in French eighteenth-century art. The naked, winged infant deity personified not only the folly of …
4/15/18
Drawn to Greatness includes some of Eugene Thaw’s finest Romantic drawings, among them outstanding works of art by William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, and J.M.W. Turner. This lecture by Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of art collections and head of college …
4/12/18
Lumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. She co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series. Recently, she has worked …
4/10/18
Explore the philosophical connections to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations in Sam Gilliam’s work with Assistant Curator Horace Ballard. Tuesday, April 10 at 4:00pm Williams College Museum of Art
4/4/18
Yasmine Nachabe Taan, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Design at the Lebanese American University, will discuss the breadth and depth in Hilmi al-Tuni’s illustrations and Abdulkader Arnaout’s typographic work. She will first highlight Arnaout’s contribution to the …
4/3/18
Holly Fellow Daniel Savoy presents “Food for the Soul: Michelangelo, the Laurentian Library, and the Body’s Spiritual Nourishment.” In his celebrated book, The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), the late James Ackerman (1919–2016) interpreted the Library of S. Lorenzo in Florence …
4/3/18
Close Look: Mapping Stories Professor of Geoscience José Constantine and Artist Lordy Rodriguez discuss Rodriguez’s conceptual maps that visualize global relationships, history, and culture. Tuesday, April 3 at 4:00pm Williams College Museum of Art–Object Lab gallery
3/26/18
Curated by Lucas Matheson, Williams Graduate Program MA ’18, the fifth screening in EMPAC’s Other Uses film series features the work of Ulysses Jenkins, whose videos examine television’s power to shape current events and historical episodes.Ulysses Jenkins is an artist …
3/13/18
Mellon Decade Fellow Kevin Carr presents, “The Hagiography of Place: Illustrated Legends of the Zenkōji Triad and the Formation of Sacred Cartographies in Medieval Japan.” In medieval Japan, why did people make pilgrimages and donate to religious centers? What role …
3/4/18
Focusing on the Renaissance and Baroque drawings in the Thaw Collection, including examples by Pisanello, Mantegna, Fra Bartolommeo, Altdorfer, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and Rembrandt, this lecture given by John Marcieri, Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of …
2/27/18
Mellon Decade Fellow Renzo Baldasso presents, “Take Two: On the Origins of Graphic Design in Printed Books.” The lecture will focus on graphics revisions found in books from Gutenberg’s Bible to the Jenson’s early publications. Analysis of examples of page-design …
2/13/18
Lauren Cannady presents “Rococo Thought Patterns.” If eighteenth-century curiosity cabinets were repositories for the dead and ossified, the garden was a parallel cabinet that provided a space for the viable, for living curiosities. Given that the organizing principal of the …
2/11/18
In this talk in connection with Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, explores how French artists worked with models during the eighteenth …
2/3/18
In the opening lecture for Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, Jay A. Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, addresses the liberation of drawing between the 1880s to the 1950s as the medium’s function shifted …
2/1/18
Mixed media artist Titus Kaphar presents a free lecture, “Making Space for Black History: Amending the Landscape of American Art,” as part of Claiming Williams Day, a campus-wide program at Williams College that focuses on building and sustaining a more …
1/11/18
A new program series called Getting A Read On The Body will happen at WCMA, the first installment of which will take place Thursday, Jan 11 at 5:30 PM in WCMA’s Reading Room. Come for some tea and conversation around …
1/8/18
Internationally recognized documentary photographer, Joseph Rodriguez, will speak about his life-long passion for recording the stories of people whose lives are often ignored by mainstream narratives. A recipient of the “Pictures of the Year Award” by the National Press Photographers …
12/5/17
The first Greek temples appeared in the 8th century B.C., a century and a half before the creation of the classical orders. These early temples of wood and mud looked very different from the iconic temple we know. This talk …
12/3/17
Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator, Emerita at the Williams College Museum of Art, explores how Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt worked with preliminary states (stages in the development of a print), which the esteemed print scholar William …
11/28/17
Join Professor Nicolas Howe and students from his Environmental Humanities course as they discuss how culture shapes the representation and experience of landscape. Tuesday, November 28 at 4:00pm Williams College Museum of Art
11/28/17
The Equal Justice Initiative creates the country’s first national memorial to the victims of lynching. Deborah Rothschild is consulting curator to the Equal Justice Initiative and former senior curator at the Williams College Museum of Art. She will discuss the …
11/28/17
Lecture by Dr. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art, specialized in Latin American art. At present she is the co-curator of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, the Hammer Museum’s contribution to Pacific Standard …
11/17/17
Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, presents “Untimely Turner.” Friday, November 17 5:30-6:30pm Manton Auditorium
11/16/17
No Agenda is a misnomer, a swipe at embodying the improvisational nature of a rapidly assembled site-specific exhibition. There is a goal; it’s to show work by Williams College Visiting Studio Art Faculty in Town Hall along a six-week timeline, …
11/14/17
Mellon Decade Fellow Andrew K. Scherer presents “Baak: The Qualities and Craft of Ancient Maya Bone.” This illustrated lecture explores the materiality of human and animal bone among the Pre-Columbian Maya (ca. 400 BCE to 1502 CE). The importance of …
11/5/17
In the opening lecture for the special exhibition The Impressionist Line: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Jay A. Clarke considers the hallmarks of “the impressionist line” by exploring works from the exhibition, including luminous …
11/5/17
In this special artist demonstration, New York-based choreographer and dancer Jody Sperling presents a performance of solo dances in tribute to Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), a visionary artist whose performances drew on the light-play of Impressionism to create a new dance …
10/31/17
Contemplate the weird, the eerie, and all the ways objects haunt us with Kevin Murphy, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of American Art. Tuesday, October 31 at 4:00pm WCMA
10/31/17
Christopher Heuer presents “Arctic Ink.” When a mysterious cache of sixteenth-century Netherlandish engravings was found in the Arctic circle in 1870, many questions arose. What do such objects, for example, tell us about narratives of Renaissance globalization? About “cultural exchange” …
10/30/17
Spyros Papapetros, associate professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, presents “Ornament and Evolution.” Enmeshed with the life histories of flourishing or atrophying social, political, and cultural organisms, turn-of-the-century discussions of the controversial topic of ornamentation invited …
10/21/17
Clifford Owens presents “Your Head is Attached to Your Body” as this year’s Annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art. Clifford Owens is an artist, writer, and curator. Influenced by performance art practices of the 1960s, he is known for live …
10/19/17
What’s the difference between theatre and performance art? When do objects “act” better than actors? Why is Kendall Jenner imitating Yoko Ono? Join us for a new collaboration between the Theatre Department and Williams College Museum of Art that aims …
10/17/17
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Agnes Lugo-Ortiz presents, “Slave Portraiture at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation).” This talk will address the visualization of enslaved subjects in portraiture during the period of emancipation in the Caribbean. It will underscore the conflictive …
10/17/17
Artists Barbara Takenaga and Tom Burckhardt discuss abstraction, painting, and geometry. Tuesday, October 17th 4pm WCMA
10/5/17
Celebrate our fall exhibitions: “Barbara Takenaga,” “Pink Art,” “The Presence of Absence,” and “Object Lab.” Hear from artist Barbara Takenaga and guest curator Debra Bricker Balken followed by mini tours in the galleries. Thursday October 5th 5pm Williams College Museum …
10/3/17
What happens when you see the museum’s collection through the lens of one color? And what happens when that color is PINK, a hue rich in history, symbolism and cultural relevance? Utilizing a series of algorithms written by Williams students, Pink …
9/26/17
Clark Fellow Victoria Rovine presents “Cloth and Colonialism: France, French West Africa, and the Construction of Cultures.” Cloth’s soft, pliable nature makes it an improbable vehicle for the assertion of power, yet it played a singular role in the history …