Global Art History

  On August 9, 2014 officer Darren Wilson brutally murdered unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The fatal altercation resulted in Brown’s body lying in the street for roughly four hours. In the   wake of the shooting, Ferguson residents flooded the streets and West Florissant Avenue became the central stage on which the social and political unrest began to unfold. For three seemingly endless months, protesters confronted local police enforcement and the National Guard in the streets of Ferguson as they demonstrated pleas for justice. The incident drew national and international attention garnering support all over the globe. Hands raised and voices bellowing from dawn until dusk, demonstrators faced military-style tactics of tear-gas, rubber bullets, and streets barricaded with armed bodies and massive tanks. A scene of civic demonstration resembled the ruinous landscape of war, ravenous appetite of state power, and the fungibility of Black bodies in th...

    Born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, Doris Salcedo is a contemporary sculpture artist working on themes of memory, violence, and hierarchies. Salcedo began her career in the late-1980s by thinking through abstract forms that could monumentalize violence, particularly that inflicted by the state. Collaborating with architects and engineers, Salcedo conceives of her structures as odes to the victims of senseless violence. Growing up in Bogotá, Salcedo had first-hand experience of the ways in which war cements itself in the mundane and consumes all aspects of citizens lives. War is often conceived of as a global phenomenon including one or more countries, but Salcedo conceives of war as multivalent and having both internal and external implications.    Salcedo’s practice is highly meditative and occupied with globality in a contemporary sense. While the war in Colombia was a civil war its reverberations can be felt all over the globe. The Colombia Civil War connects to...

  Ivory in the Transnational Context   Rectangular Box with Carved Figural Decoration Qing Dynasty second half of 19 th  century 1895.287.A-I   Seated Virgin Emilia/Italy, Europe 17 th  century 1922.79   The Virgin and Child c. 1325-1350 Ile-de-France, Europe 1931.33   Oliphant, Trumpet made from elephant’s tusk Elephant ivory trumpet with decorative knobs and engravings woodwind Loanda, Southwest Coast, Angola   Following Professor Suzanne Blier’s focus on ivory as a material emblematic of encounter, I decided to think through the international circulation and appropriation of ivory as indicative of nascent imperial trade networks that engendered contact. Ranging from domestic tools to liturgical and devotional objects, ivory was malleably in its conceptual and symbolic deployment, but also in its literal form. The oliphant or trumpet made from elephant’s tusk maintains the organic shape of the elephant tusks while adding minimal decorative bands...