• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

The Material Collective

A collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture

  • Home
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Manifesto
    • Organizational Structure
    • Links
    • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • Activism
  • Tiny Collections
  • Store
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Main Content

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 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.

Burn Something

By The Material Collective

Emerging curator Gabby Coll urges us to take a chance as she reflects on her work on the exhibit Burn Something.

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Mountain

By Rachel Dressler

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. I grew up in its shadow.

Ways to Help: In Honor of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor

By The Material Collective

Kholood Mo’allim, a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN (academic home to Material Collective Core Member Nancy Thompson), has compiled this guide for people who wish to support communities in the Twin Cities in this time of pain and crisis. She shared it with her campus at St. Olaf, and now we share […]

HIStory not MYstory

By The Material Collective

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, […]

Copyright © 2021 · The Material Collective · Log in