2025 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Join Us on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 5:30pm in ARTS 333
Sarah Salisbury, 2024 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Monumental Meetings: Locating Indigenous Monumentality at the Four Corners
Since 1875, the Four Corners Monument sits isolated at the northeast corner of the sovereign Navajo Nation, where it marks the convergence of four U.S. states — Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Over the past hundred fifty years, the monument has increasingly become a popular tourist destination, though it appears solely to celebrate its colonial cartography. In 2010, however, something unique happened. The Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Tribe, with assistance from various federal agencies, completed a total redesign of the monument. Its newly enlarged complex now situates a medley of forms that inscribe Indigenous values to the cadastral landmark. Therefore, it now appears the monument convenes two systems of culture — Indigenous American and Western-US settler-colonial — altering the commemorative significance of the Four Corners Monument.
Elizabeth Carleton, 2024 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Perfecting Galileo: Collaborations Between Artist and Astronomer in 17th-Century Europe
My dissertation evaluates three responses to Galileo’s lunar representations: Claude Mellan’s 1637 lunar engravings; Johannes Hevelius’s 1647 lunar atlas, Selenographia: sive, lunae descriptio; and Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s 1651 Almagestum novum. Each of these projects represents a different type of collaboration between artist and scientist in the early modern period. In revisiting seventeenth-century selenography, I hope to enhance our understanding of the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. The Carrott Grant enabled me to travel to Paris to conduct primary source research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Paris Observatory.
Homer Arnold, 2024 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
Enabling the Enablers: Carp and the NEA
This talk examines how the Los Angeles arts production team Carp utilized loopholes and new grant categories created by the N.E.A. to fund their exhibitions during the long 1970s. While there is a canonized history of the “dematerialized” art object, there is a lesser-studied history of those who empowered artists in these pursuits, and an even lesser-known history of the funding that enabled this vaporization. Carp is a prime example of these understudied areas. To assist artists in the creation of public, ephemeral, and peripatetic artworks, Carp needed to stand at the complex intersection of art, the public, and money. As they succeeded in their fundraising, their projects became successful confrontations to pressing social issues while maintaining the DIY spirit of that decade. However, their success still depended on funding, showing that art in that era was tied to government and economic policies, even though artists often claimed otherwise.
The verdant Kashmir Valley, a place of unearthly beauty, has long been a subject of praise and description. The history and geography of Kashmir appeared in multiple literary genres, including Sanskrit sources which claimed the valley to be a sacred landscape and Persian courtly literature which characterised Kashmir as being jannat nazir (paradise like). Recent scholarship has highlighted the connections between Mughal literary imaginings, political discourse, and the construction of gardens in Kashmir, interpreting these landscaped spaces as a means to claim sovereignty over the land. In the nineteenth century, the region was again the subject of an imperial discourse, that of the British empire, a discourse shaped by a particular interest in the production of Kashmiri shawls, a highly sought after commodity in Victorian England. Among the shawls were a small set of embroidered ‘map’ shawls which depicted the city of Srinagar and its significant landmarks, both natural and manmade, one of which was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria. Large-scale painted cotton maps of the entire valley were also produced in the mid-nineteenth century, often employing the same visual conventions as the shawls. This paper explores the image-making practices which underlay the production of these textiles, departing from existing scholarship which has emphasized their imbrication within the colonial enterprise. I instead approach their resistance of the colonial gaze and highlight how the craftsmen creating them were informed by a distinctly South Asian, perhaps even Kashmiri, sense of place. 