Lecture | Adrienne Childs on Pearls and Blackamoors
Presented by the Lewis Walpole Library and the Wadsworth Atheneum:
Adrienne Childs | Pearl Drops and Blackamoors: The Black Body and Pearlescent Adornment in European Art
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 10 October 2024, 6pm
Nicolaes Berchem, A Moor Offering a Parrot to a Lady (detail), ca. 1660–70, oil on canvas (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1961.29).
European artists of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries often depicted Black figures wearing pearl ornaments. The contrast evoked notions of luxury, distant lands, and exoticism. Art historian and curator Adrienne L. Childs, PhD explores the complexities of subjugating and enslaving Black bodies in one context and using their images to showcase luxuries in another. Before the lecture, meet at 5pm in the galleries to view works from the museum’s European art collection. Free and open to the public with registration encouraged.
The lecture is offered in connection with the exhibition The Paradox of Pearls: Accessorizing Identities in the Eighteenth Century, curated by Laura Engel, Professor, Duquesne University, on view at the Lewis Walpole Library until 31 January 2025.
Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Her current book project is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, forthcoming from Yale University Press (2025). She is co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection (on view until September 2025). She recently co-curated The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in 2020. Childs was awarded the 2022 Driskell Prize from The High Museum of Art in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MBA from Howard University, and a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Maryland. Currently, Childs serves as the Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Center at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Colloquium | American Art, Empire, and Material Histories
This fall at Historic Deerfield:
Reawakening Materials: American Art, Empire, and Material Histories in Historic Deerfield’s Collection
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 7–8 November 2024
Historic Deerfield announces Reawakening Materials: American Art, Empire, and Material Histories in Historic Deerfield’s Collection, a public colloquium focused on the institutions’ collection of paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts from Thursday, 7 November to Friday, 8 November 2024. Questions of ’empire’ emerged from an interest in scholars rethinking the American experience from the lens of global European empires (England, Spain, France, The Netherlands, etc.) and U.S. imperialism. Historic Deerfield’s collection focuses on 18th-and 19th-century American art and material culture, and it is based in a landscape tied to Indigenous communities, histories of enslaved people and free people of African descent, and settler colonialism.
The colloquium will explore relationships between empire, materials of objects, and settler colonialism in the collection, specifically asking how these art historical topics can be generative for recontextualizing Historic Deerfield’s place in the study of New England history, art, and culture. Speakers will investigate materials that reveal new ideas of empire, including: pastels, lacquer, birch, engravings on paper, and linen. The program will also workshop methods for telling these narratives through historic interiors, including objects tied to violence and absence, and opportunities to bring in stories of joy and survivance.
Keynote speaker
• Charmaine Nelson, Provost Professor, Black Diasporic Art & Visual Culture, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Additional speakers
• Megan Baker, PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware and 2024–25 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery
• Mary Amanda McNeil, Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, Tufts University
• Lan Morgan, Associate Curator, Peabody Essex Museum
• Joseph Litts, PhD Candidate in Art History, Princeton University
• Jonathan Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design
• Morgan Freeman, PhD Candidate in American Studies, Yale University
• Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art and PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware
• Anthony Trujillo, PhD Candidate in American Studies, Harvard University
Online registration will be posted shortly. Please send questions to Ian Hamilton, ihamilton@historic-deerfield.org.
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