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AGNES presents:  

 

In-person and online, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
15 November 2023
7:30–9 pm, with reception to follow 

“Encounter as Author in Early Modern Images from the Atlantic World”
Presented by Dr Cécile Fromont 
Early modern central Africa comes to life in the vivid full-page paintings Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of the Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. Their “practical guides” present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily visual catechization methods they devised for the region. 
Unfolding outside of a European colonial project, at the demand of local rulers, and among populations who had engaged with the visual and material culture of Europe and Christianity for more than one hundred and fifty years, the Capuchin central African apostolate is without parallel in the early modern world. Equally unique are the images that emerged in the friars’ sustained and fraught interactions with the men and women of Kongo and Angola.
In this presentation, I analyze this overlooked visual corpus to demonstrate how such visual creations, though European in form and craftsmanship, did not emerge from a single perspective but rather were and should be read as the products of cross-cultural interaction. With this intervention, I aim to model a way to think anew about images created across cultures, bringing to the fore the formative role that encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation.

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ASL interpretation and automated live captions. Watch via livestream at the . 

BIOGRAPHY
Dr Cécile Fromont is Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with special emphasis on the early modern period (around 1500–1800), on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World, and on the slave trade. 
This program is supported by the Bader Legacy Fund and in partnership with The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, in recognition of Bader Day on 15 November. 

Agnes Etherington Art Centre 
Situated within territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre is a curatorially-driven and research-intensive professional art centre that proudly serves a dual mandate as a leading, internationally recognized public art gallery and as an active pedagogical resource at Queen’s University in Kingston. By commissioning, researching, collecting and stewarding works of art, and by exhibiting and interpreting visual culture through an intersectional lens, Agnes creates opportunities for participation and exchange across communities, cultures, histories and geographies.
Agnes is committed to anti-racism. We work to eradicate institutional biases and develop accountable programs that centre the artistic expression and lived experience of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. Agnes promotes 2SLGBTQIAP+ positive spaces. 

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