Date: April 16, 2020
Location: NYU – Abu Dhabi
Ellyn Toscano
New York University
A Reflection: Hortense Acton in Florence
I came to understand the consequences of migration and the powerful self-fashioning of transitive identities through the life of Hortense Acton. As the former director of Villa La Pietra, in Florence, the house museum containing 6,000 objects including art, furniture, tapestry and textiles, sculptures, books and photographs, on a thirty-eight acre estate now owned by New York University, I was curious about the life of the owner of the villa. The Villa and estate were previously owned by the Acton family. It was Hortense Mitchell a wealthy socialite from Chicago, who purchased the fifteenth-century estate with the extraordinary fortune amassed by her father, one of the founders in 1874 of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago. In 1903, Hortense married Arthur Acton, the rather less distinguished but socially ambitious adventurer with questionable lineage traced to the nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton. The marriage was unannounced, unexpected and without the fuss of the many society weddings in Chicago in which Hortense served as bridesmaid. Hortense and Arthur settled in Florence and began a life collecting art and entertaining. In July 1904 they started a family. Hortense never returned to live in Chicago. Pictures kept in an archive in Villa La Pietra reveal that Hortense had travelled extensively and adventurously before she married, apparently seeking a different life from that expected of young, rich debutantes of her day. We can cobble together a sketchy understanding of her biography from newspaper accounts of her social life in Chicago and Florence, the treasure trove of photographs in the family archive, and the objects in her home attributable to her alone, such as a carefully selected group of fancy dresses with matching shoes, and her books, all readily identifiable as hers through the beautiful bookplates that depicted a boat traveling at sea. We know nothing about her motivation for uprooting her comfortable existence and emigrating to Florence. What was she leaving when she quit Chicago? What was she seeking? In her fetishized presence in, and, at the same time pervasive absence from her home, Hortense is an alluring character. Aside from her wealth, was she extraordinary? Was it away from the ordinary that she was traveling? Fascinated by the lives of the large expat community in Florence during the early part of the twentieth century, this presentation will weave a story about the Villa, Hortense, and myself as an ‘expat’, the rather more genteel word for immigrant, the question of why people choose to disrupt their lives, leave behind a regular, knowable and predictable life for an uncertain and precarious existence in an unknown place was increasingly on my mind.
Sarah Khan
Independent Scholar and artist – New York
Cookbook of Gestures: No Fruits for Her Labor
I make visible the often unacknowledged informal labor of women as culinary creators, healers, and culture sustainers. To continue my efforts, I have been researching diverse Fassi (Fez, Morocco) women* cooks and farmers, the seasonal foods they employ, the ways they work to sustain their families and communities, and enhance biocultural diversity. The Cookbook of Gestures is one expression of this body of work. A recipe is not just a written document. It is the result of a series of past and present innovative and improvised sensory gestures. Women conjure dishes, nimbly incorporating old and new ingredients. Combined, gestures and ingredients create what we call taste. In The Cookbook of Gestures series, I isolate agile motions, create delicate multisensory video, and reveal the dance of timeless embodied gestures.
Kalia Brooks Nelson
New York University
Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s Embodiment of race and gender in clay
This presentation will focus on Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s embodiment of race and gender in her recent bodies of work from 2014 – 2018. She uses porcelain to contemplate themes related to identity, otherness and belonging rooted in her mixed Chinese and white American heritage. As such, she has created a lexicon that visualizes the intersection between cultural appropriation, global economy and the
commodification of the human body. Datchuk reorganizes the notion of race and gender within the framework of international manufacturing and consumption of goods. Her artwork challenges the authenticity of identity narratives that are distributed through
commodities, and the impact that has on the reception and appearance of the human body. In so doing, she brings to the foreground the manufactured elements of identity that mediate the arbitrary, yet reified, cultural distinctions between white, black and other.
Arlene Davila
New York University
The LatinX Project
The Latinization of U.S. cities has been accompanied by the rapid displacement of Latinx from their historically stronghold communities. Art and culture have been central to these processes, both to expediting gentrification and to strategies of resistance and Latinx place making. This is evident in the role art galleries and culture-based developments have played in the gentrification of urban cities as well as in the rise of Latinx artistic interventions that place culture and place-making at the forefront of their practice.
Pamela Newkirk
New York University
A LOVE NO LESS: The Material Culture of Love Letters by Women
African American love letters written are rarely discussed by scholars, Newkirk will share letters by well-known figures and ordinary women that explore travel, the joy and tenderness of romance, and offers glimpses into the social, literary, and political lives of black American women throughout the last two centuries. A LOVE NO LESS will focus on the letters of African American lovers of all walks of life. Newkirk poses A LOVE NO LESS is a testament to black love and to the bonds that endure in the face of physical separation, harsh times, and personal misfortunes. It also provides a peek into the more public arena, as writers tell their lovers about their everyday activities and encounters. Letters from the Harlem Renaissance capture the excitement and vibrancy of that extraordinary period with stories about dinners, theater parties, shows and social outings. In a letter to her new husband written in the 1930s, stage and screen star Fredi Washington describes seeing a stereo for the first time and recounts her negotiations for a role in a Paramount film.
