Fellowships | Lewis Walpole Library, 2017–18
The Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, invites applications to its 2017–18 fellowship program:
Visiting Fellowships and Travel Grants
The Lewis Walpole Library, 2017–18
Applications due by 9 January 2017
Located in Farmington, Connecticut, the library offers short-term residential fellowships and travel grants to support research in the library’s rich collections of eighteenth century materials (mainly British), including important holdings of prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, and paintings. In addition, the library offers a joint fellowship award with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to support up to eight weeks of research in both collections. Scholars pursuing postdoctoral or advanced research, as well as doctoral candidates at work on a dissertation, are encouraged to apply.
Recipients are expected to be in residence at the library, to be free of other significant professional obligations during their stay, and to focus their research on the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. Fellows also have access to additional resources at Yale, including those in the Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Residential fellowships include the cost of travel to and from Farmington, accommodation for four weeks in an eighteenth-century house on the library’s campus, and a per diem living allowance. Travel grants cover transportation costs to and from Farmington for research trips of shorter duration and include on-site accommodation.
Application details and requirements are available here. The application deadline is January 9, 2017. Awards will be announced in March.
Exhibition | Bitter Sweet: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
Overlapping, at least partially, with The Edible Monument, this DIA exhibition explores luxury drinks:
Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
Detroit Institute of Arts, 20 November 2016 — 5 March 2017
Curated by Yao-Fen You
The Detroit Institute of Arts presents Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate, on view from November 20, 2016 to March 5, 2017. The introduction of coffee, tea, and chocolate to Europe, beginning in the late 16th century, profoundly changed drinking habits, tastes, and social customs, and spurred an insatiable demand for specialized vessels such as tea canisters, coffee cups, sugar bowls, and chocolate pots. The exhibition is organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pineapple Coffeepot, ca. 1750, creamware with colored glazes, Staffordshire, England (Detroit Institute of Arts).
The 68 works of art in Bitter|Sweet are mostly from the museum’s comprehensive holdings in pre-1850 European silver and ceramics. Highlights include three exquisitely decorated beverage services: a rare 24-piece set made by Germany’s Fürstenberg Porcelain Manufactory; a set once owned by Prince Louis, Duke of Nemours that illustrates the refinement of early 19th-century French Sèvres porcelain; and a Vienna Porcelain ensemble for two associated with Archduke Joseph of Austria. DIA paintings, prints, and sculpture related to the arrival and impact of the beverages in Europe help create new contexts and connections for objects from the permanent collection.
Other key works include Madame de Pompadour’s coffee grinder from the Musée du Louvre; a 1684 handwritten Spanish manuscript satirizing the vogue for chocolate from the Hispanic Society, New York; and an 18th-century German breakfast set containing chocolate beakers from the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Diego Velázquez’s painting Infanta Maria Theresa from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston helps tell the story of the cocoa bean’s migration from the New World to the French royal court of Louis XIV via Spain.
Bitter|Sweet will be the first DIA exhibition to engage all five senses. In addition to the artworks, there will be videos about the preparation of coffee, tea, and chocolate as well as opportunities to touch, to hear, to smell, and even to taste. Such interactive components demonstrate the DIA’s commitment to engaging visitors in meaningful experiences with art.
“The exhibition is a very exciting venture for the DIA, with regards to the rich, complex story we’re telling and the innovative visitor-centered ways in which we are presenting it,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA director. “While European art will be at center stage, the exhibition examines global interconnections from centuries ago that we hope will resonate with all visitors today. Just about everyone—regardless of culture or background—has a personal relationship with one or more of these beverages. I’m also excited about the ways the exhibition engages the permanent collection. Of course, I love that several of the loans in Bittersweet comment on Spain’s relationship to chocolate.”
Bitter|Sweet also touches on the human cost of procuring the raw materials to produce coffee, tea, and chocolate as well as the sugar used to alter the beverages’ bitter taste. Coffee was imported from Africa through the Middle East, tea from Asia, chocolate from the Americas, and sugar harvested by slaves on colonial plantations. To meet demand and keep prices down for the European market, merchants—such as the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company—eventually found ways to cultivate tea and coffee bushes on foreign lands colonized under their rule.
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From Yale UP:
Yao-Fen You, with essays by Mimi Hellman and Hope Saska, Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate: Consuming the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 142 pages, ISBN: 978-0300222500, $25.
Coffee, tea, and chocolate were all the rage in Enlightenment Europe. These fashionable beverages profoundly shaped modes of sociability and patterns of consumption, yet none of the plants required for their preparation was native to the continent: coffee was imported from the Levant, tea from Asia, and chocolate from Mesoamerica. Their introduction to 17th-century Europe revolutionized drinking habits and social customs. It also spurred an insatiable demand for specialized vessels such as hot beverage services and tea canisters, coffee cups, and chocolate pots.
This beautiful book demonstrates how the paraphernalia associated with coffee, tea, and chocolate can eloquently evoke the culture of these new beverages and the material pleasures that surrounded them. Contributors address such topics as the politics of coffee consumption in 18th-century Germany; 18th-century visual satires on the European consumption of tea, coffee, and chocolate; and the design history of coffee pots in the United States between the colonial period and the present.
Yao-Fen You is associate curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Call for Papers | Poor Taste
From H-ArtHist:
Poor Taste and the Exclusionary Mechanisms of Cultural Consumption
University of California Santa Barbara 42nd Annual Graduate Student Symposium
University of California Santa Barbara, 28 April 2017
Proposals due by 31 December 2016
“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
–Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
Cultural consumers are defined and classified by their taste. Through an evaluation of their choices and preferences, whether biologically or socially informed, taste functions as a mechanism of distinction and exclusion. Art and Architectural History has arguably been a cornerstone of this very tradition, disciplining bodies and senses in the formation of canons and cultural hierarchies. While taste is now widely accepted to be subjective and localized rather than universal, ideals of good taste and quality endure in both our disciplinary frameworks and institutional practices.
This symposium therefore aims to address the judgment of taste, and the agents and spaces involved in its creation and enforcement. We consider such questions as: Can terms like consumption, digestion, and indigestion provide useful metaphors or models for the processes by which cultural traditions and products are validated and/or dismissed? How has cultural consumption been designated as legitimate or alternatively illegitimate in various historical and cultural contexts? In the history of cultural consumption, how have poor taste and good taste proven to have both opposed and informed one another? We welcome proposals from emerging scholars of all disciplinary backgrounds whose work engages with the themes of the conference.
Topics of interest
• The performance of distinction
• Decolonization of taste
• The spaces and institutionalization of judgment
• The historical construction of (poor) taste
• Craft, camp, kitsch, and the popular aesthetic
• Cultural appropriation
• Studies of foods and foodways
We invite abstracts of 300 words or less and a 1-page CV to be sent to ucsb.haa.symposium@gmail.com by December 31, 2016. (Inclusion of working title and images encouraged). Conference presentations will be 20 minutes. All participants will be notified by early February.
Please feel free to contact conference organizers J.V. Decemvirale and Maggie Mansfield at ucsb.haa.symposium@gmail.com with any questions.
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