For Immediate Release
September 26, 2024
CLARK ART INSTITUTE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM PRESENTS LECTURE BY ADRIAN ANAGNOST
ON CROSS-CULTURAL VISUALIZATIONS OF TERRITORY
Williamstown, Massachusetts—On Tuesday, October 22, the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program presents “Here, Low, In This River Bend,” a lecture by Adrian Anagnost (Tulane University / Clark Fellow), who charts a cross-cultural history of visualizing territoriality in the lower Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. This free event takes place at 5 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.
Among Indigenous inhabitants, the area that would become New Orleans was known as Bvlbancha—the land of many tongues, or many waters. This region was located at the threshold of land and water and, by the eighteenth century, at the borders of empires—where multiple approaches to territorialization overlapped. For this lecture, Anagnost brings together Indigenous Plaquemine material culture with environmental history, European cartography and artistic practices, and embodied approaches to land management.
Adrian Anagnost is associate professor of art history and core faculty of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Anagnost's research and teaching is centered on the persistence of colonial spatiality for modern urbanism and contemporary art across the Americas. Author of Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art in the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022), which examines the politicized intersections of art, architecture, urbanism, and landscape in Brazil during the 1920s–1960s, Anagnost was also the co-leader of a 2021–22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on comparative commemorations, exploring art, memory work, and activism surrounding the continued spatial legacies of slavery and displacement in sites including Bvlbancha/New Orleans,Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, Mi'kma'ki/Nova Scotia, and Cibuquiera/St Croix. At the Clark, Anagnost will be completing a book on landscape, colonialism and ecology at the Gulf of Mexico and pursuing research on contemporary art’s preoccupation with Amazônia.
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A reception at 5 pm in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event. For more information, visit //clarkart.edu/events.
The next Research and Academic Program lecture is presented by Mari Rodriguez Binnie, who discusses her new book in which she examines how artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in the 1970s and 1980s in São Paulo, Brazil. The event takes place on Tuesday, October 29 at 5:30 pm in the Clark’s auditorium.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday from September through June, and daily in July and August. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from March through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
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