Harold E. Dickson Memorial Lectureship
The annual Dickson Memorial Lecture Series in Art History invites outside scholars to share their latest research. In March, we hosted a screening of the film “We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” followed by a Q&A with director Fred Kudjo Kuwornu. Kuwornu is a multi-hyphenate socially engaged artist, filmmaker, and scholar whose work is deeply influenced by his background as a person of African descent. Kuwornu’s works have been exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, George Eastman Museum, and numerous international film festivals. "We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe" (2024) is his latest documentary and sheds light on the presence and contributions of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe.
In October, Dr. Verity Platt, professor of classics and history of art at Cornell University, whose most recent book, Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, delivered “Pliny the Elder’s Ethics and Aesthetics of Loss.” The lecture explored how sensitivity to the forgotten, invisible, or abandoned is intrinsic to the ethics of the Natural History and to Pliny’s sense of ambition and urgency in compiling his ‘treasure-house’ of 20,000 facts. It also showed how loss is intrinsic to the archaeological value of Pliny’s text and it is central to the Natural History’s ecological value to our current environmental crisis and its fraught relationship to imperial predation and consumption, impulses that Pliny critiqued but in which he himself was hopelessly entangled.
In November, Dr. Michael Waters, assistant professor of art history at Columbia University, presented, “Architecture after Vignola: Classicism, Conformity, and Copying in the Era of Print.” The lecture confronted the paradigm of books fostering copying by focusing on the use of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s book on the five Orders—the most popular treatise of the early modern period. Through a bottom-up approach that drew on contemporary media theory and a range of primary source material, Dr. Waters revealed how print came to shape an established transmedial system of architectural design and production across Europe and beyond.