The Institute of Fine Arts &
The Frick Collection
Symposium on the History of Art

Remarkable similarities between the facture of the Eucharist and medieval champlevé enamelling endowed the latter with a particular potency for holding the holy host. Wafer and vessel were both made by engraving a metal plaque, filling it with wet, ground material, and firing it. The transubstantiation of unleavened bread into sacred body at the height of the Mass was reflected in the pyx’s ritual consecration. Moreover, goldsmiths adapted the form and imagery of these vessels to further enhance the relationship between container and contained. Enamel pyxes thus offer an example of a medieval “iconology of technique,” where the process of making itself contributes to an object’s signification.oduction in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This paper explores the Flemish sculptor Lucas Faydherbe’s execution of the ivory relief Dance of Children Around Pan (c. 1639, Madrid) at the direction of Peter Paul Rubens. I consider Faydherbe’s ivory relief in conversation with Rubens’ art-theoretical writing, late artistic production, and lifelong interest in ancient and contemporary sculpture, and propose that the Dance should be read as a challenge in Rubens’ own theory of art set for Faydherbe by the painter. Just as Rubens had copied and transformed the artists who came before him, he challenged Faydherbe with the same task: to copy and transform his master, this time in three dimensions.

In their published memoirs, many sixteenth-century French elites decried guns as threats to the tradition of medieval knightly combat. On this evidence, scholars contend that technology profoundly changed cultural paradigms of chivalry. My research on sixteenth-century French combination weapons—objects functioning as guns and melee weapons—offers more nuance. The design of these weapons allowed their noble owners to embrace the technological potential of the future while perpetuating the aesthetic legacy of the past. These combination weapons thus signaled that the figure of the chivalric medieval knight remained fashionable in the evolving cultural and technological landscape of sixteenth-century France.

This paper analyzes the production of a silken garment that was embroidered by hand, possibly in China, for a Parsi customer in western India. Applying pressure to the art historical bias that privileges the intent of a single artist, it highlights the skilled efforts that worked in concert to make such layered textile creations. With fine fabrics woven on industrial-scale looms, designs drawn by workshop-employed pattern drafters, and embroideries stitched to order in households, the collaborative and commercialized processes for making these garments will be used to question distinctions between art and industry that have been central to the discipline.

Félix Bracquemond’s designs for the ‘Rousseau’ service (1867) entailed the translation of hundreds of motifs from Japanese woodcuts into etchings intended for transfer onto faïence. In this unexpected mobilization of expressive print mediums, Bracquemond answered ongoing calls to reform industrial production through art. Contextualizing the aesthetic innovations of the service within a broader “industrial print culture,” this paper examines how Bracquemond employed etching to adapt Japanese craft models to the economies and technologies of French industry. Highlighting the entanglement of aesthetics and technology in Bracquemond’s designs, this paper offers a provocation to understand Japonisme as a mode of production in intimate conversation with industrial modernity.

This paper traces the reworking of a motif from a 1927 illustration by Aaron Douglas to a set of quilts made by women living in segregated Tennessee Valley Authority workers’ villages in the 1930s. Rather than a singular act of appropriation, I argue that the quilters rerouted a relational ethos already at work in Douglas’s practice. Reuniting the quilts with their previously unidentified source transforms understanding of both: the quilts, long interpreted as celebrations of the TVA, accrue critical valences, while Douglas’s silhouetted mode comes into view as an authorially plural idiom that was never fully or exclusively “his own.”

This project centers a remarkable but little-studied corpus: three-dimensional metal hands, each assembled from individually shaped pieces of gold-alloy sheet, so carefully detailed that every finger terminates in an articulated nail. Made by artists from a culture today known as the Lambayeque or the Sicán (750-1375 C.E.), these hands are generally found in left-and-right pairs, like the example discovered within a one-thousand-year-old tomb on the northern coast of Peru. Such representations encapsulate a corporeal concern at the heart of Lambayeque artistic practices, namely the need to transform the human body into one capable of mediating and interacting with supernatural entities.

Scholars have long connected paintings such as Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes to the abstract idea of Eden rediscovered on Earth. This paper, however, draws from period botanical and medical texts to reassociate the religious conviction that God scattered divine cures across the globe with the actual extraction of miracle drugs like quinine, quassia, and sarsaparilla from Central and South America. By reintroducing pharmaceutical desire as a legible vocabulary for contemporary viewers, this paper draws from critical disability studies to illuminate an overlooked preoccupation with the pursuit of health across nineteenth-century landscape painting in the United States.

This presentation analyzes The Giverny Suite and its reclamation of Black female subjectivity within art history through two distinct acts of embodied testimony. By examining these testimonial acts in relation to one another—and how they are interwoven through images of Gary wandering in Monet’s garden—I argue that The Giverny Suite figures Black female subjectivity as a site of contradiction within Western art history. Gary’s artwork frames both the erasure of Black female subjectivity and the possibility of its reclamation as grounded in embodied witnessing and testimonial speech, thereby foregrounding the limits of representation imposed by the Western tradition.

Before an object enters a museum gallery, it is shaped by an infrastructural “machinery” of codes, categories, lights, and labels that determines what becomes visible. Focusing on UNESCO’s Museum Center in Jos, Nigeria, this paper shows how students were trained to transform objects into data and images at once. I argue that Jos forged a machinery in which back-of-house classification and front-of-house display co-produced what counted as “art” and “heritage” in postcolonial Africa. The stakes are present tense. As institutions digitize collections, experiment with AI search, and confront restitution, our art historical futures hinge on the infrastructures that Jos prototyped.

In 1977, Michael Asher invited the staff of three art museums—the Fort Worth Art Museum, the Amon Carter, and the Kimbell—to share a parking lot as an artwork he originally titled Sharing Common Ground. This paper reconstructs the artistic and curatorial process behind the artwork, arguing that it modeled new roles for the artist and the employee within the museum. Interpreting Asher’s claim that the work “tried to deal with the notion of collaboration,” I contextualize it in relation to the unionization campaigns that were then restructuring the conditions of museum labor in the United States.

“Emancipating Form: Black Interculturalism and ‘the Loft’ as Freedom- Ornette Coleman’s Artist House, Frederick J. Brown’s 120 Wooster Street, and Daniel LaRue Johnson and Virginia Jaramillo’s 109 Spring Street, 1968–1989” examines SoHo, Manhattan’s art movement through the lens of the Black intercultural creative communities. Focusing on the lofts of Coleman, Brown, Johnson, and Jaramillo, the presentation explores how these artists and the communities they fostered employed abstraction and space as sites of intercultural dialogue. Together, these artists and the communities they fostered transformed “the loft” into a canvas of possibility, pushing aesthetic and social-political boundaries, emancipating form and themselves.

Fazal A. Dossani — an Ismaili Muslim and one of India’s first film distributors — pursued a new opportunity and, in 1950, commissioned Gulistan Cinema Hall, a modern cinema and business complex in Dhaka, formerly East Pakistan. Gulistan Cinema Hall was designed by the Indian architect Yahya Merchant, a Dawoodi Bohra Muslim based in Bombay (now Mumbai). Gulistan provided a distinguished architectural setting for East Pakistan’s film and entertainment industries – sites of conflicting identity but also drivers of modernization and nation-building. Today its memory continues to raise questions regarding the importance of preservation and the complexities of history and identity.

This paper focuses on the communal visual and sound practices of contemporary American artists Christine Sun Kim and LaMont Hamilton. Working in drawing, performance, sound, and installation, Kim and Hamilton both draw from and complicate modernist art conventions of collectivity, improvisation, and abstraction. Their work crosses disciplines and media to reveal hidden voices and collaborations within American modernist art.

This paper examines how films advanced the Japanese colonial agenda and served as tools of total war mobilization in Indonesia (1942–1945), particularly in densely populated, resource-rich Java. During the occupation, film functioned as both entertainment and political indoctrination, fostering trust between nationalist leaders, the public, and Japanese authorities. Though their direct impact remains debated, these screenings contributed to shifts in mindset and lifestyle from the pre-war Dutch period. Relying on visual media to overcome widespread illiteracy, the Japanese projected imperial power, and positive self-images. These films framed collaboration and used repetitive rhetoric to instill behavioral shifts aligned with Japanese fascist ideology and its imagined “New Asia.”