In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this final episode of the miniseries, Erica Moiah James speaks with her friend and colleague, Sora Han. Erica and Sora were fellows at the Clark Art Institute together in 2024. While Erica was working on this project about representation in the Caribbean, Sora was working on a project about Charles Gaines, and his work Manifestos 4, which is a visual engagement with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied Black people the right to citizenship, and therefore also the right to sue for ...

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In this first episode of our new miniseries, Erica Moiah James introduces the 18th-century pastel Portrait of a Young Woman, shares her experience first encountering the work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and explains how she has tackled the process of unravelling this woman’s identity. She speaks with Judy Mann, the senior curator of European art to 1800 at SLAM, discussing the acquisition of the work, its provenance, its role within the collection, and the ways in which the museum t...

In this episode, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Jennifer Nelson, a poet and scholar of early modern art at the University of Delaware. Through the lens of their first book on Holbein, and a second, forthcoming, on Cranach, Nelson describes how comparative studies of elite cultural production can allow us to the see the category of art as capacious, and capable of dismantling our concept of mastery. They offer concrete advice on...

This is the first episode of a new season focused on the craft of writing in art history. Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator for the Research and Academic Program and a fiction writer) speaks with Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Stanford University, about his most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. He discusses his writing process, how his craft has changed over time, and this current book’s varied sources of inspiration—from painting and...

In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also ...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Donette Francis, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. A founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. They discuss the politics of making visible what Donette calls “minor histories.” Across her work on the novel as well as in the re...

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (The Getty Foundation) speaks with Koenraad Brosens, professor of art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and Blake Stimson, professor of art history at the University of Illinois Chicago, about the future of universities in a digital age. They discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching at public institutions, the concept of “the third generation university,” and potential pitfalls to the vogue for interdisciplinarity. Reflect...

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation) speaks with Niall Atkinson, associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago, and Min Kyung Lee, assistant professor of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College, to reflect on the canon of art history. They discuss how the canon as a narrative offers a shared framework for discussion, analysis, and exchange, but problems arise when the canon becomes fixed or an imposition. Niall and Min describe how...

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Profes...

A still life, like a poem, may be charged with private meaning, and yet it is offered like a gift that the viewer may open for themselves, not unlike the delicate unfurling of a flower. Charles Demuth’s watercolor Red Poppies of 1929 exemplifies this exchange in the way it pictures how vulnerability may still be resilient, as expressed in a contemporaneous poem by Williams Carlos Williams that meditates on loss.

Georges Seurat’s masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884, is the kind of painting that has become so ubiquitous it almost disappears into itself, but within this busy scene of curiously automata-like human interaction lie many clues to the transformations of the period. For one, this picture manifests a shift in thinking from imitation to civilization, mimesis to evolution, insofar as it encapsulates Darwin’s theories of natural selection and their ramifications for the understanding of ...

Nadine Robinson’s installation Coronation Theme: Organon of 2008 uses its monumental sculptural presence and an immersive soundscape to weave complex layers referencing aspects of Black life in America over the past century, from dance halls to sacred and secular oration, to the Civil Rights movement and police brutality.