The Material Collective

A collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture

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As a collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture, Material Collective seeks to foster a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects.

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From the Manifesto

We are the Material Collective, a group of medievalists interrogating visual materials. We seek to cooperate, encourage, share, promote transparency, touch, desire, destabilize, amuse, and blunder.

Our specific interests vary, but we are all committed to prioritizing the materiality of things, the relationships between those things and the human beings who experience them, and the intimacy of past and present moments in time.

We strive for transparency in our practice, and we encourage the same in our institutional surroundings.

“As we celebrate, dwell in, and embrace the basic materiality of our objects, we work to find ways to foreground the material of the objects themselves into larger historical analysis.

VOTE!

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We interrupt our regularly-scheduled art-history pedagogy posts* for this brief and urgent plea: VOTE AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT! This is no longer about the American two-party system as it once existed. People over 40 like me can remember a time when we disagreed with Republican policies, but were able to have a […]

Calling All Art History Teachers!

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Well, it’s already October, and the fall semester is in full swing! If you’re like me, you wrote your syllabi a while back and you felt more-or-less prepared on Day 1. Then, when you met the actual humans in your class, you immediately began to see all the flaws in the document—and the course—that you […]