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-
“From which it was carved”: Medieval Ivories and the Residue of Violence
by Kerr Houston Perhaps you find yourself standing before the handsome Coptic ivory carving of the Virgin and Child at the Walters Art Museum. After considering the work at length, you turn to the adjacent placard, which, you find, remarks on the subject matter and the emotional intimacy of the carving and then adds that […]
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College
Recently, I mentioned to a friend that I had been appointed Director of my university’s undergraduate core curriculum. “The WHOLE THING?” she asked. Yup. The whole enchilada. Little ol’ me.
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Post-Mortem on an Undead Exhibition: “Art That Kills”
Once, while we were both in college, I went to visit my best friend from high school at Princeton University. As we were looking at a Calder, Scott told me he had heard that two workers had died during the installation of the sculpture.
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.
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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.
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We are also working to increase the legitimacy of these approaches in the academic world, primarily by practicing them, loudly and often.
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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.
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We value: experimental processes; risk-taking; transparency, revelation; a blank space; joy in faltering, together. So say we all. So say we all.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We strive for transparency in our practice, and we encourage the same in our institutional surroundings.
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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.
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We are as much a support group as a scholarly group. We share the joys and sorrows of career, life and our academic work.
