“‘Others’ of Various Kinds”: J. Vanessa Lyon on Intersectionality as an Early Modern Scholar

05/04/21 • 40 min

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with J. Vanessa Lyon, who is on the faculty at Bennington College, where she teaches the histories of art with an emphasis on gender, race, and post/colonial relationships in Spanish, Flemish, and Transatlantic visual representation. Vanessa speaks about the influence of her graduate studies in theology and how she views teaching as a politics of care. She also describes her experiences as a queer woman of color working on “Old Masters” like Rubens, and contemplates reverberations between early modern and contemporary art, particularly for artists of color.

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“Where the Impossible is Possible”: Saundra Weddle and Lisa Pon on Collaboration and Renaissance Studies

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with two scholars of Renaissance art and architecture: Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture at Drury University and a Clark Fellow in fall 2020, and Lisa Pon, professor of art history at the University of Southern California. They discuss how they met one another by chance in a hostel while studying in Italy as graduate students, and how their thirty-year-friendship has shaped their professional work. Saundra and Lisa reflect on their experiences conducting archival research and share their perspectives on where the field of early modern art history is headed.

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“It Looks like How Jazz Sounds”: Jordan Horton on Romare Bearden's “The Dove”

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Jordan Horton (Williams College) explores how Romare Bearden’s collage The Dove (1964) plays with fragmented forms to visually evoke the “broken time” of jazz while also embodying how Black people living in Harlem in the 1960s might have experienced the urban spaces they knew as home.