“How Do We Know What We Know?”: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi on Fieldwork and Evidence
In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & WritingShow Notes
In this episode, Alice Matthews ('21 graduate of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art) speaks with Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, associate professor of the historical and present-day arts of West Africa at Emory University. They discuss the trajectory that ultimately brought Susan to her field, including undergraduate internships with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Susan reflects on her research methodology and the process of establishing relationships and conducting interviews in B...
More from In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing
In this final episode of the miniseries, Erica Moiah James speaks with her friend and colleague, Sora Han. Erica and Sora were fellows at the Clark Art Institute together in 2024. While Erica was working on this project about representation in the Caribbean, Sora was working on a project about Charles Gaines, and his work Manifestos 4, which is a visual engagement with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied Black people the right to citizenship, and therefore also the right to sue for ...
In this episode, Erica Moiah James talks with Roshini Kempadoo, media artist, photographer, and scholar, whose book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, has been critical to Erica's work in theorizing the Caribbean archive. Roshini discusses working in the archives at the University of the West Indies, and the particularity of archives in Trinidad and Guyana. They also discuss a common theoretical model in African diaspora scholarship, crit...
In the second episode of this miniseries, Portrait of a Young Woman, Erica Moiah James discusses the importance of fashion in understanding this portrait and the life of this woman. She speaks with historian of fashion, Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s was critical for Erica’s research. As Amelia has importantly argued in her text, the “objection ...
In this first episode of our new miniseries, Erica Moiah James introduces the 18th-century pastel Portrait of a Young Woman, shares her experience first encountering the work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and explains how she has tackled the process of unravelling this woman’s identity. She speaks with Judy Mann, the senior curator of European art to 1800 at SLAM, discussing the acquisition of the work, its provenance, its role within the collection, and the ways in which the museum t...