FALL 2024
October 24, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Deanna Bowen: “They Tried to Destroy Us: Disproving Myths About Black Absence in Canada”
Bowen will talk about her decades-long research-creation practice, an anti-Black petition from 1911, and recent projects that make critical/historical links between Bowen’s family history of enslavement in the US and migration to Canada, Creek Negroes & the Trail of Tears, British Imperialism under Queen Victoria and the white supremacist ambitions of the National Gallery of Canada’s collection circa 1888-1943.
About the Speaker: Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history guides her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary work. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. The artistic products of her research were presented most recently at Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Gallery, OBORO, and the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. Deanna has also received numerous awards in support of her practice including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, 2020 Governor General Awards in Media and Visual Arts, 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.
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November 21, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Abigail E. Celis: “In the Manchineel Tree’s Shadow: Thinking with Toxicity in Julien Creuzet’s Toute la distance… (2018) and La pluie a rendu cela possible… (2018)”
The toxic endurance of colonialism, as a burden borne by bodies and by lands, has been deftly theorized by scholars such as Vanessa Agard-Jones and Malcolm Ferdinand. Julien Creuzet’s two-part installation, Toute la distance de la mer … ( 2018) and La pluie a rendu cela possible… (2018) similarly speaks to a multi-species French Caribbean landscape marred by colonial toxicity. This lecture investigates the references to the fruit-bearing manchineel tree in Creuzet’s installation, arguing that the fruit tree expands and complicates what toxicity can do in the afterlives of colonization. A trickster fruit, the poisonous manchineel activates a set of stories that brings together colonial history and decolonial possibilities, thinking through entangled, porous relationships between bodies and environments.
About the Speaker: Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal, and received her PhD in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary visual culture, artistic practice and museum norms in the French-speaking world, with a focus on France, Francophone Africa, and the work of Afro-diasporic artists. Her most recent articles appear in African Arts and Contemporary French Civilization, and she has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Quebec Research Funds for a collaborative digital humanities project titled Cartographier l’art noir. Dr. Celis has received several awards and fellowships for her research, including a Camargo Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and a FRQSC Louise-Dandurand Prix de publication for outstanding French-language publication. This winter, the next installment of The Catalogue of Speculative Translations, her research-creation project with artist Cosmo Whyte, will be exhibited at la Galerie de l’Université de Montréal.
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November 28, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts 230
AHCS Faculty Work in Progress
Bobby Benedicto: “The Form of Non-Meaning: Race, Suicide, and the Art of Ren Hang”
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ĚýWINTER 2025
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January 16, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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Steven Sawbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay: “Negative Life”
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About the Speakers: Steven Sawbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton. Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics.
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ĚýJanuary 30, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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Alexa Greist: “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800”
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Introducing new artistic heroines, Making Her Mark at the Art Gallery of Ontario brings together more than 230 objects from royal portraits to metal work, ceramics, textiles, and cabinetry, to demonstrate the many ways women contributed to the visual arts of Europe. Featuring the work of well-known artists Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, Rachel Ruysch, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun alongside female artisanal collectives, talented amateurs, and women working in factory settings and workshops, the exhibition invites us to reconsider what we think we know about European art history. Co-curated by Dr. Alexa Greist, AGO Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings and Dr. Andaleeb Banta, BMA Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs, the decision to exclusively display objects made by women makes this exhibition unique, and among the first to put women makers of various levels of society in conversation with each other, across centuries and a continent, through their artworks.
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About the Speaker: Alexa Greist is Curator & R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Prior to joining the AGO in 2016, Greist held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania focused on Italian printed drawing books, and a Master’s degree, also from the University of Pennsylvania, with a M.A. thesis on the early drawings of Joseph Stella. Greist’s area of specialty is Italian Renaissance and Baroque prints and drawings.
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February 21, 2025
Friday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Lisa Yin Han: “Deepwater Alchemy: Ocean Ultrasounds and Pacemakers”
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How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? We often take for granted the sensing and imaging processes that have made deep sea human activities such as offshore drilling, deep sea mining, and nautical archaeology possible today. Yet media technologies such as sonar-based surveys, underwater cameras, digital modeling, and more have played a key role in both representing the seafloor as a space of potential profits, even when they are also used for environmentalist aims. Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor makes the case that the historical development of deep sea media technologies has been complicit in perpetuating logics of extraction, exploitation, and militarism in our global oceans. From towed hydrophones to networked seafloor observation, the hunt for resources has driven the imaging of the ocean floor and vice versa, imperiling fragile deep ocean ecosystems in the process.
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Reflecting on how underwater imaging and sensing techniques impact nonhumans, this talk will delve further into the book’s exploration of the interspecies intimacies fostered through techniques such as petroleum seismology and marine mammal telemetry. From desires to take “ultrasounds of the earth” to the production of a “fitbit” for the oceans as a whole, emerging deep sea media techniques are indebted to terrestrial knowledge regimes, colonial notions of the frontier, and anthropocentric perspectives on environment. Han contests the narratives that cast depth as a problem that can be solved through the technologization of nature, arguing that a multispecies perspective on underwater mediation dismantles our existing hierarchies of knowledge and sense.
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About the Speaker: Lisa Yin Han is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in the Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Media Studies Field Group. She has previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Arizona State University and received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, critical ocean studies, and science and technology studies, Lisa’s work attends to social, environmental, and technological histories of media infrastructure. Her book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industries. Lisa is an affiliate of the Humanities for Environment North American Observatory, and works as a reviews editor for the Journal of Environmental Media.
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ĚýFebruary 27, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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AHCS Faculty Work in Progress
Sara Grimes
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March 2025
Date and Venue TBA
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Sex and Theory Lecture
(co-sponsored with the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies)
David Marriott
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About the Speaker: David Marriot was born and educated in England, where he taught at the Universities of London and Sussex. His most recent publications include Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, 2018) and Duppies (London Materials, 2017). He is also completing a new book, titled X: On the Matter of Black Life, a critical study of racial concepts of life.
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ĚýMarch 2025
Date and Venue TBA
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Reynolds Atelier Lecture
(co-sponsored with the English Department)
Meg Onli
About the Speaker: Meg Onli is curator-at-large at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Onli was previously codirector and curator of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She also served as associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. While there, Onli curated Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful (2021), and cocurated Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021).
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March 27, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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AHCS Faculty Work in Progress
Matthew Hunter
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April 24-26, 2025
Venue TBA
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Critical Perspectives on Machine Learning Symposium
(co-sponsored)
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