In 2014, Prince William suggested that all ivory objects from Buckingham Palace be destroyed. His intent was to send a clear message against elephant poaching in Africa. Purposeful destruction of raw and worked ivory as a way to deter poachers has become a common tactic amongst nations; one of the…
Liberté, Égalité, Festivité: The Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics – by Matthew Gin
On July 26, the 2024 Olympic Games opened in Paris with a pageant staged on the Seine. For the Parade of Nations, tour boats ferried athletes from the Pont d’Austerlitz to a temporary rostrum in front of the Eiffel Tower where they were greeted by President Emmanuel Macron and VIPs…
Smell of the Sea: A Review of the Musée National de la Marine – by Kelly Presutti
Paris’s Musée National de la Marine, reopened in November 2023 after a multi-million-euro, six-year renovation, originated in 1748 with a donation of model ships from the naval engineer and renowned naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. The initial collections were intended for study, open only to students and officers of the…
Curators’ Notes: Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-Making – by Clara Drummond and Sarah K. Rich
Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-MakingSeptember 2023—January 2024Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State This exhibition grew out of a book. Two years ago, the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CV/MS), housed in the Department of Art History at Penn State, approached the university’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library…
Curators’ Notes: Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories – by Joe Baker and Laura Turner Igoe
Our exhibition, Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, was held at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Pennsylvania from September 9, 2023 to January 14, 2024. The first room featured a salon-style hang of prints, paintings, and textiles incorporating images of Penn’s Treaty, also known as the Treaty…
Portraits of Resistance: An Interview with Jennifer Van Horn – by Elizabeth Bacon Eager
The cover to Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art under Slavery (Yale University Press 2022) features a striking portrait of an aging Black woman, shoulders draped in shining stripes and head wrapped in a madras tignon (Fig. 1). While it is virtually impossible not to be captivated by…
When Blue and White Obscure Black and Red: Conditions of Wedgwood’s 1787 Antislavery Medallion
Andrea Feeser First issued in 1787, Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion appears in several versions: black figure on a white or cream ground, white figure on a blue ground, and copper red figure on a black ground, the second color combination now synonymous with Wedgwood (Figs. 1, 2, and 3). In…
Embalming in Color: John Singleton Copley’s Vital Portraits at the Edge of Empire
Caroline Culp In 1767, the Boston-born portraitist John Singleton Copley debuted Young Lady with a Bird and a Dog in London at the Society of Artists of Great Britain annual exhibition (Fig. 1).[1] As a self-taught artist working in New England, Copley (1738–1815) was eager for feedback from the distant…