On February 12, at the annual College Art Association Conference in New York, Paul Stirton chaired a panel on “The Global History of Design” that attracted a large audience. Among the speakers was Pat Kirkham, who talked about editing History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400-2000. Stirton is pictured left next to Kirkham. The other panelists (l-r) included Grace Lees-Maffei, David Raizman, Kjetil Fallan, Daniel Huppatz, and Victor Margolin.
Also on February 12, at Hunter College, Pat Kirkham presented a paper, “Re-thinking Latin American Modernism through National and International Perspectives” at the conference, “The Invention of the Modern Domestic Space in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela: Design, Art, Architecture, 1940-1978.” The companion exhibition (curated by Bard Graduate Center doctoral candidate Jorge Rivas Perez, Ana Elena Mallet, and Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos), “Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940-1978,” is currently at the Americas Society until May 16.
Michele Majer spoke on “La Mode à la girafe: Fashion, Culture, and Politics in Bourbon Restoration France,” at the Providence Atheneum, Providence, Rhode Island, on February 20. Originally scheduled in 2014, the talk was part three of ‘What Use is the Giraffe?’—The Evolution of Science, Society, and Spectacle in the Cosmopolitan 19th Century—a series on the giraffe that went to Paris in 1827.
Jeffrey Collins joined an international team of scholars at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City on February 25-26 to consult on the proposed reorganization of the museum’s renowned collection of art and material culture from the Viceroyalty of New Spain. During the two-day conference Collins presented a paper entitled “Decorative Arts or Design: What’s in a Name?”
Shawn Rowlands presented a paper, “An Artefact of Colonial Violence?,” at the conference on “Weapons and the Anthropology Museum” held at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London on February 27. An article he co-authored with Peter McAllister and Michael Westaway, entitled “The Blood and the Bone: The Collection of Human Remains and Frontier Violence in Colonial-Era Queensland,” will appear in the Journal of Australian Colonial History.
Ittai Weinryb will present a paper, “Cultures of Alloy: Technology and Community in Early Medieval Europe,” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin on March 9. This is part of the Max Planck Research Group “Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe” Colloquia.
Aaron Glass will lecture on and screen Edward Curtis’s 1914 film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, at Concordia University, Montreal, on March 13. On March 15, he will introduce it at a screening at Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal. The film, which he worked on restoring, was recently cited in the New York Times, and he is quoted in Indian Country Today.
Susan Weber will talk on “John Lockwood Kipling: Exploring Art and Design from Bombay to the Punjab,” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on March 19. Her presentation begins the St Cross College (Oxford) 50th Anniversary Lecture Series.
Andrew Morrall will present a paper on “The Art of Geometry and the Imagery of the Ruin in the Sixteenth-Century Kunstkabinett” at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, on March 10. On March 27, at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference in Berlin, he is co-organizing (with Evelin Wetter) and chairing a triple session entitled “The Extended Narrative of the Object.”
François Louis will chair and be the discussant of the panel, “Crafting China: Materiality, Decoration, and Global Exchange,” at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago on March 29.