The Meadows Museum, Dallas is hosting a series of online events this fall, open to all and accessible from around the world. NB the time zone for the events.
FURTHER AFIELD VIRTUAL TALK: Incarnating Black Sanctity: Fleshtones and “Lifelikeness” in Baroque Spanish Sculpture
Erin Rowe, associate professor of history, Johns Hopkins University
OCTOBER 5 | 12:00 pm CDT (6:00 pm BST)
Further Afield provides broader social, political, economic, and historical context for works of art at the museum. This fall, Further Afield focuses on early modern Spain, or the time period from roughly 1500 to 1800. These 45-minute talks take place exclusively online. This talk explores the contrast between representations of Black and White saints in Baroque Spanish polychromed sculpture. The process of painting fleshtones was key to Baroque artistic techniques of creating lifelike figural sculpture. Examining the distinct artistic choices made in painting fleshtones for Black and White saints reveals the spiritual meanings artists wished to convey about blackness and holiness.
$5; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
MOVIES WITH THE MEADOWS: The Disenchantment (El Desencanto) (1976), directed by Jaime Chavarri
Aaron Shulman, author
OCTOBER 7 | 12:00 pm CDT (6:00 pm BST)
Movies with the Meadows pairs scholar and screen. Registration includes a link to stream the film at your leisure October 6–8 and a link to a live Zoom talk on October 7 to explore the film in more depth with Aaron Shulman, author of The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War (2019). The cult documentary El Desencanto (The Disenchantment) is the collective story of the Paneros, a brilliant and tormented Spanish family whose eccentricities, incendiary declarations, and taboo-smashing exhibitionism turned them into a cultural phenomenon in Spain in 1976, when this film was released. A national classic, it is esteemed and remembered both for the role it played in the country’s transition to democracy and for the singular testimonies of the Panero family.
FREE
LUIS MARTÍN LECTURE SERIES IN THE HUMANITIES: Scratching the Surface: A History of Paintings Conservation
Claire Barry, Director of Paintings Conservation Emerita, Kimbell Art Museum
FRIDAYS, OCTOBER 15–NOVEMBER 12 | 10:30 am CT (NB Daylight savings in UK ends on 31/10/21)
This lecture series will use case studies to illuminate the evolution of conservation practices and theory over time. Five topics will be explored: painting materials; examination techniques; structural work; cleaning and varnishing; and compensation of losses. Throughout the series, the important role that collaboration between conservator, curator, and conservation scientist plays in decisions in the treatment of paintings will be discussed. The importance of conservation training, proper documentation, and the practice of reversibility in conservation treatment will be examined as individual case studies are explored. This program is made possible by gifts from the Fannie and Stephen Khan Charitable Foundation and the Eugene McDermott Foundation.
$60; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
LECTURE: Fashion and Fantasy in Eighteenth-Century France and Spain
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, fashion historian, curator, and journalist
OCTOBER 22 | 6:00 pm CDT (Midnight BST)
During Spain’s Golden Age, its fashions were admired and imitated across Europe. But the decline of Spanish power and the ascendancy of France under Louis XIV shifted the axis of fashion, art, and culture to Paris. Eighteenth-century travelers remarked that Spanish women dressed in “modern French fashion.” But their French counterparts increasingly looked to Spain’s past glories for inspiration. Neither antique nor modern, traditional Spanish costume was a picturesque and timeless alternative to the increasingly fickle fashions of the era, inspiring masquerade, theater, and court costumes as well as genre scenes and portraits à l’espagnole. Once easily distinguishable from French fashion, Spanish style began to permeate everyday dress and by the reign of Louis XVI, even the royal family embraced the new Spanish-accented rustic elegance. This lecture will explore the relationship between French and Spanish fashion during the eighteenth century. This program is sponsored by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain.
$10; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
FURTHER AFIELD VIRTUAL TALK: Captive Objects: Catholic Artifacts Across the Early Modern Mediterranean
Daniel Hershenzon, associate professor; Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; University of Connecticut
NOVEMBER 2 | 12:00 pm CDT (5:00 pm GMT)
Further Afield provides broader social, political, economic, and historical context for works of art at the museum. This fall, Further Afield focuses on early modern Spain, or the time period from roughly 1500 to 1800. These 45-minute talks take place exclusively online. Catholic artifacts—rosaries, relics, paintings, and more—circulated in the thousands in the early modern, western Mediterranean, crisscrossing religious boundaries. This mobility was largely a byproduct of piracy, to which 2–3 million Christians and Muslims fell fate between 1500 and 1800. This talk examines how objects trapped in the plunder economy became the center of the conflicting claims made by Catholic captives, renegades (captives who had converted to Islam), Moroccan sultans, and Algerian pashas. We will see how captivity transformed religious artifacts into religious boundary markers within and among religions.
$5; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
LECTURE: Making It: Creating Fashion in Early Modern Europe
Annette Becker, director and curator, UNT CVAD Texas Fashion Collection
NOVEMBER 18 | 6:00 pm CST (Midnight GMT)
Have you ever wondered how delicate, handmade lace was created, or how stiff ruffs stayed so crisp and white? And before department stores and boutiques, how did gentleman procure elaborately embroidered suits? In celebration of the exhibition Canvas & Silk: Historic Fashion from Madrid’s Museo del Traje, join Texas Fashion Collection director Annette Becker in an exploration of the lives of garments from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Together we’ll discover the surprisingly laborious and often creative processes of commissioning, creating, and caring for garments represented in portraiture and featured in the exhibition, allowing us a greater understanding of how people’s lives were intertwined with clothing. This program is sponsored by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain.
$10; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
FURTHER AFIELD VIRTUAL TALK: Dressing the Court of Philip IV
Amanda Wunder, associate professor of early modern European history, City University of New York (CUNY)-Lehman College
DECEMBER 7 | 12:00 pm CST (6:00 pm GMT)
Further Afield provides broader social, political, economic, and historical context for works of art at the museum. This fall, Further Afield focuses on early modern Spain, or the time period from roughly 1500 to 1800. These 45-minute talks take place exclusively online. The court of Philip IV (1621–1665) is best remembered today for the extreme fashions that were immortalized in the paintings of Diego Velázquez, most memorably in his iconic masterpiece Las Meninas. This talk goes behind the scenes in the Royal Palace to investigate the lives and works of the court artisans—tailors, embroiderers, shoemakers, and others—who dressed Philip IV and his family and played a crucial, if long-forgotten, role in shaping court culture in seventeenth-century Spain.
$5; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
FURTHER AFIELD VIRTUAL TALK: Mother, Daughter, Widow, and Wife: The Conundrum of Mary in Early Modern Hispanic Art
Charlene Villaseñor Black, professor of art history and Chicana/o studies, UCLA
JANUARY 11 | 12:00 pm CST (6:00 pm GMT)
Further Afield provides broader social, political, economic, and historical context for works of art at the museum. This fall, Further Afield focuses on early modern Spain, or the time period from roughly 1500 to 1800. These 45-minute talks take place exclusively online. Marian devotion is grounded in a conundrum: Mary is both exemplary and ordinary, superior to all other women and a conventional mother, daughter, widow, and wife. Focusing on this paradox in the seventeenth-century Hispanic world, this talk asks: How did sacred artworks serve as visual exemplars of gendered behaviors? How did artists, patrons, and devotees negotiate the contradictions at the heart of Marian veneration?
$5; free for members and SMU faculty/staff/students
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