Mellon Archives Innovation Program #3: The Glass Lantern Slide Collection

How do the presences and absences of this collection tell us something about Black American and diasporic art and art history? How can we examine these omissions for what they tell us about how histories get institutionalized? This Mellon Archives Innovation Program will focus on two key works by prominent Black American artists nestled in the Glass Lantern Slides, a collection of more than 60,000 glass lantern slides acquired from the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. They cover art and architectural history from the Paleolithic period to the Modern era. We will examine Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1859 painting Moonlight-Tangiers and Richmond Barthé’s 1942 sculpture Workman as these objects color the way western art history functions as an educational discipline while they simultaneously tell us particular stories about Black aesthetic practices.

Join us on October 23rd at 3 pm for this Mellon Archives Innovation Program as we…