Scholarly lecture: MATERIAL MATTERS: RACE AND MATERIALITY IN THE DECORATIVE ARTS

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 Childs’s examination of what she calls “Ornamental Blackness.” Childs discusses the implications of luxury objects that reference the ornamental black body and the significance of the precious raw materials out of which they were often fashioned. The jarring combination of enslaved body and luxury materiality reveal complexities of race and representation in the Atlantic world.

FRIDAY
NOVEMBER 1, 2019
5:00 pm-6:00 pm

Clark Auditorium