- Monday April 6, 2026 | 4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m. | Boger 112
Grace Kuipers '14, Postdoctoral fellow, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
What can the U.S. pursuit of foreign minerals tell us about modernist design practices? This talk examines the U.S. designer William Spratling’s silver jewelry workshop in Taxco, Mexico, to explore the ways developmentalist approaches to mineral extraction shaped the aesthetic and cultural expressions of modernist primitivism in the 1930s. Crafted from high-grade Mexican silver and adapted from Pre-Columbian motifs, Spratling’s jewelry was celebrated as a modernist revival of Indigenous design traditions. Yet the workshop was also framed as an economic revival, credited with resurrecting Taxco’s colonial-era mines and reactivating the region’s dormant mineral resources. As an early project of cultural diplomacy, Spratling’s enterprise enacted a politics of mineral developmentalism, in which U.S. standards of technological modernity promised to more efficiently measure, manage, and extract Mexico’s subterranean natural resources. Ultimately, this talk considers how mineral developmentalism shaped the visual dimensions of Spratling Silver: from the spectacles of Indigenous labor that produced it, to the silver materiality of the jewelry itself, and finally the aesthetic vocabulary of Spratling’s primitivist design process, which staged the conversion of “latent” formal values into abstract stores of value that could be possessed or exchanged.
This event is co-sponsored by the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund of the Department of Art and Art History, the Bailey College of the Environment, and the Latin American Studies Program.
Photos, top to bottom: Tumbling Walls (Photography: Lena Yaremenko), Lumber Lane Barns (Photography: Carl Bellavia), and Lescaze Restoration (Photography: Arkadiusz Piegdon).
"The Delight of Practice"
- Wednesday, April 29, 2026 | 4:30 p.m. | Boger 112
Arkadiusz Piegdon '08, Architect, Lynne Breslin Architects
A talk from a Wesleyan graduate architect that explores the joys and challenges of small-scale architectural practice. This talk presents progress shots, construction drawings, models, and renderings to illustrate the reality of the building process.
- Lescaze Restoration: Ongoing restoration of a William Lescaze home in Tuxedo Park.
- Lumber Lane Barns: A complex reconstruction and reconfiguration of three historic barns into a single-family residence.
- Tumbling Walls: New residential construction utilizing a structural steel frame.
This lecture is sponsored by the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund of the Department of Art and Art History.
Past Events
- Thursday February 12, 2026
Hunter Shen '18, Harvard JD/MUP; Associate, Latham & Watkins
Building the Future: Towards a Climate Ready Architecture
-
Monday December 8, 2025
Richard C. Yancey '85, Founding CEO, Building Energy Exchange
Shifting Shelves — Libraries of the 19th-Century Islamic World
- Friday October 24, 2025
Yael Rice, Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College - "Scattered Leaves: The Fates of South Asian Albums (Muraqqa’s) and their Libraries, 18th-19th c."
Deniz Türker, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Rutgers-New Brunswick - "Tanzimat’s Antiquarians, Their Coins, and Books"
Selin Ünlüönen, Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art History, Wesleyan University - "The Treasury, the Museum, the Library: How to Keep Books in Qajar Iran"
Extracting the Past: How the 'AI' Industry Exploits Art History and What We Can Do to Stop It
-
Tuesday September 16, 2025
Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst