To Search: Investigations of the Virtual and Material Lives of Objects
Friday, September 25, 2015, 1–8pm
Saturday, September 26, 2015, 10:30am–4pm
RISD Museum
224 Benefit Street
Providence, RI 02903
T 401 454 6500
Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
Manning Hall
21 Prospect Street
Providence, RI 02903
How do objects circulate across physical and digital landscapes and how does this movement affect their status? Do we search differently with objects in the humanities and social sciences? How do we discover, attend to, and channel the network of ideas they help generate?
This two-day conversation highlights the double lives of objects—their local, intimate, and concrete quality as they reside in museums and their global, ubiquitous, and permeable virtual representations in digital media. It investigates the structures of knowledge and emergent network systems whose architectures and formal characteristics facilitate our encounters with objects. Despite the growing interest in object-based ontology and the material turn in fields like art history, anthropology, and political science, objects continue to challenge—and even defy—our desire to tag, interpret, and systematize their form and content.
Investigate these issues through facilitated conversations, creative examinations, and other exploratory engagements. Critical Encounters offer opportunities to hear leading scholars and artists address key questions; Double Takes explore a single object from two disciplinary perspectives; Object Lessons offer a point of departure to examine the disciplinary treatment of objects; Drawing Perspectives invite you to practice observational and mark-making skills as used in the studio and the field; Teachers’ Lounge provides a forum to explore the pedagogy of primary sources; through Works in Process artists, designers, students and scholars share the object-based roots of their work from performance to experience design; and The Work of Art in the Age of Code examines how technology materializes and dematerializes the object.
Contributors include
David Joselit, Distinguished Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY; Ivan Gaskell, Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies, Bard Graduate Center; Rosemary Joyce, Alice S. Davis Endowed Chair in Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley; Steven Lubar, Professor of American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University;Julie Golia, Director of Public History at the Brooklyn Historical Society; Mikhael Mansion, Technical Lead at TellArt; David Kim, Studio Technology Coordinator at RISD’s Co-Works; Maralie Armstrong, Critic in Foundation Studies at RISD; Clement Valla, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at RISD; Kate Irvin, Curator of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum; Gina Borromeo, Curator of Ancient Art at the RISD Museum; Kevin Smith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University; Thierry Gentis, Curator and NAGPRA Coordinator at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology; Nicholas Carter, Postdoctoral Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University; Leslie Hirst, Associate Professor of Foundation Studies at RISD; Bethany Johns, Professor of Graphic Design at RISD; Holly Hughes, Professor of Painting at RISD; Jane South, Assistant Professor of Sculpture at RISD and a Haffenreffer/RISD Museum Mellon Teaching Fellow; Vazira Zamindar, Associate Professor of History at Brown University and a Haffenreffer/RISD Museum Mellon Teaching Fellow; Amy Leidtke, Senior Critic in Industrial Design at RISD and a Haffenreffer/RISD Museum Mellon Teaching Fellow; Graham Oliver, Professor of Classics at Brown University and a Haffenreffer/RISD Museum Mellon Teaching Fellow; Bryan Markovitz and Emily Avera, graduate students in Anthropology at Brown University
This program is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is part of a collaboration between the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University and the RISD Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design focusing on the new and evolving field of object-based teaching and research.
About the RISD Museum
Southeastern New England’s only comprehensive art museum, the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design—also known as the RISD Museum—was established in 1877. Its collection of nearly 100,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art and design from all over the world, from ancient times to the latest in contemporary art.
About the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology is Brown University’s teaching museum. The museum offers exhibits, public lectures, performances, symposia, festivals, and a broad range of programs and events for all ages. The Museum’s Collections and Research Center and offices are located in Bristol, Rhode Island. The Museum exhibitions are located at Manning Hall on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
