Sermons from Stones: Looking with Edward Mitchell Bannister

Edward Mitchell Bannister was one of the few African American painters of the nineteenth century to win significant recognition. Born in colonial New Brunswick, he spent his adult life in New England. He was a prominent member of the Providence art community, founder of the Providence Art Club and a significant figure in the history of American landscape painting.

Join scholar Anna Arabindan-Kesson for our annual Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Lecture as she explores Edward Mitchell Bannister work and legacy through the lens of artistic networks and aesthetic imaginaries among African-diasporic artists and makers in the Americas during the nineteenth century.

On View: Edward Mitchell Bannister, American, "Cove at Sunset," 1880-1900. Oil on board. Harvard Art Museums, 2022.1. https://hvrd.art/o/374721

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Speaker:

Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson (she/her) is an immigrant writer, scholar, and curator. Her work generally engages with the intersections of race, labor, migration, and medicine in the visual and material culture of communities across the Black diaspora and the former British Empire. She serves as the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project and object database that addresses the intersections of art, race, and medicine in the British Empire. Her first book, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021), looks to the commodity of cotton, central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the 19th-century Atlantic World.

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Welcome by Horace D. Ballard, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums;
00:09:30 Talk by Anna Arabindan-Kesson;
01:03:52 Q&A with Audience.

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Support for this lecture is provided by the Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Fund for American Art. The biannual Coolidge Lecture honors a distinguished womxn-femme artist or scholar whose work is transforming the definition of American art.
Calendar Listing: https://harvardartmuseums.org/calenda...

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All images and graphics used in the video belong to their respective owners and this channel does not claim any right over them. Copyright Disclaimer: Any use of copyrighted content on this channel constitutes “fair use” pursuant to 17 U.S. Code § 107 as it is utilized for the purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

Video Thumbnail: Edward Mitchell Bannister, American, "Cove at Sunset," 1880-1900. Painting: Oil on board. Harvard Art Museums, 2022.1. https://hvrd.art/o/374721; Gustine L. Hurd, American, “Portrait of Edward Mitchell Bannister,” c. 1880. Photograph: Albumen silver print. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.76.66. https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.76.66

Video: Recording October 9, 2024. Videography: Casey Preston. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. For questions related to permission for commercial use of this video, please contact the Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources at [email protected].