In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “Where the Impossible is Possible”: Saundra Weddle and Lisa Pon on Collaboration and Renaissance Studies

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

04/27/21 • 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 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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"One's Own Bifurcations": Lorraine O'Grady on Both/And Thinking in Art

In this episode, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Lorraine O’Grady, an artist and cultural critic whose work on Black female subjectivity and modernism has made significant contributions to numerous disciplines. Lorraine discusses her early research on the relationship between Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval and grapples with her relationship to Black abstract art. She critiques the elision of scholars of color within art history and reflects on the move among Black feminist scholars to acknowledge the specificities of difference. Throughout the conversation, Lorraine offers a perspective that integrates personal histories with broader, cultural ones

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

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.

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “Where the Impossible is Possible”: Saundra Weddle and Lisa Pon on Collaboration and Renaissance Studies

Transcript

Caro Fowler

Welcome to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. I am Caro Fowler, your host and Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this series of conversations, I talk with art historians and artists, about what it means to write history and make art and the ways in which making informs how we create not only our world, but also ourselves.

In this episode, I speak wit