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. Read more about us.
From the Blog
Posts and contributions View all posts and articles-
Working Practice
Earlier this year, we presented a collaborative paper at a conference at the University of Notre Dame, Medieval Art History After the Interdisciplinary Turn (March 28-29, 2014); Marian Bleeke blogged about the conference in April. The paper was on physicians’ almanacs: small, folded manuscripts containing medical texts and images, produced primarily in fifteenth-century England. We […]
-
Keep Things Strange
Joy Partridge describes how the film “Flash in the Metropolitan” prompted her to become hypersensitive to the otherness of objects.
-
Kalamazoo 2014
Kalamazoo 49. The whirlwind, the inspiration, the dance. My face still hurts from smiling.
From the Manifesto
May 10, 2012 Read More-
As a collaborative of students of visual culture, Material Collective seeks to foster a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects.
-
We value: experimental processes; risk-taking; transparency, revelation; a blank space; joy in faltering, together. So say we all. So say we all.
-
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.
-
We are as much a support group as a scholarly group. We share the joys and sorrows of career, life and our academic work.
-
We encourage spontaneity in writing art history, including an acknowledgement of our subject positions; therefore we embrace the incorporation of personal narrative and reflection in our historical interpretations.
-
For us, this is not a mere exercise—we stand by our manifesto. And we revel in this opportunity to raise a glass with all y’all, right here and now.
-
We are also working to increase the legitimacy of these approaches in the academic world, primarily by practicing them, loudly and often.
-
Our project touches upon both form and content, as we pursue a lyrical and experimental style of writing along with a more humane, collaborative, and supportive process of scholarship.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Central to this effort is a desire to support each other as we attempt to create experimental approaches, and to embrace both the successes and potential failures of our ventures into new ways of thinking.
-
We strive for transparency in our practice, and we encourage the same in our institutional surroundings.
