Enfilade

A selection of J18 Notes & Queries essays responding to the 2023 conference:

Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn, eds., “Provocations from HECAA@30,” Journal18 (October 2024).

Responses
• Jennifer Van Horn — Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead from HECAA@30
• Karen Lipsedge — The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30
• Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin — Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30
• Deepthi Murali —The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects
• Dawn Odell — Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art?
• Kathryn Desplanque —Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies

From the introduction by Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn:

In October 1725, a Jiwere (Otoe) leader named Aguiguida found himself at Versailles watching the fountains play. Invited by French men eager to secure allies amongst those who lived on the Central Plains of North America, this visit had been designed to impress. Along with a tour of Parisian sites and a meeting with the king, Aguiguida and his fellow travelers received gifts aplenty: dress coats with silver ornaments, plumed hats, royal medallions; also rifles and swords, and a painting depicting their audience with the monarch. The visitors had meant to offer their own gifts, but most of these were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of America.[1] Today, no material creations from their trip exist, neither those meant for Louis XV nor those offered the delegates.

By the 1720s, people had been traveling from the Americas to European courts for centuries. Itineraries varied, but when Aguiguida met Louis, it was as much trope as history. So why does this story still surprise? Indeed, who does it still surprise? These kinds of questions surfaced at the recent 30th-anniversary convening of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) in October 2023, Environments, Materials, and Futures. This particular eighteenth-century narrative circles around colonial and imperial histories and how creations of earthen and animal materials, of voyages across (and art lost to) land and sea, and of material cultures of global exchange and of war are implicated in such enterprises. But Aguiguida’s trans-Atlantic voyage and visit also pose other questions for historians of art and architecture: about archival absences, affective relationships, and presumed and real (im)balances of power embedded in materials, in pedagogical relationships, and in the Academy. It is these themes the following essays address. . .

Elizabeth Saari Browne is Assistant Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Dana Leibsohn is the Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The full introduction and all essays are available here»