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.

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Mountain

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Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial features three 76 ft tall equestrian figures of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson carved into the northern slope of a 1600-plus high hunk of quartz monzonite dome monadnock. Although today its website downplays its racist history, like most Confederate monuments and memorials, the Stone Mountain carving was […]

HIStory not MYstory

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For this post, the Material Collective welcomes Zaina Siraj, a senior at SUNY-Albany majoring in Human Biology and minoring in Public Health and History. Zaina is applying to medical school with the hopes of becoming a physician, and is an active digital artist. You can follow her on Instagram @zainaartistry. As a student of science, […]