Remapping Paris in Haiti/Saint-Domingue
Meredith Martin, New York University
5:30p.m. ET | Thursday, October 17th, 2024
930 Schermerhorn Hall | Refreshments Provided
This talk explores deep, mostly unknown connections between the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the production and consumption of art and architecture in Paris in the years preceding the French and Haitian Revolutions. It focuses on Saint-Domingue plantation owners, most notably Charles de Wailly and Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who also played major roles in the Paris art world as patrons, collectors, artists, architects, and real estate speculators. Using relevant case studies, it considers the larger implications of these connections for scholarship, teaching, and museum display, while also discussing a collaborative project to map this colonial network and, in so doing, to profoundly shift prevailing views of eighteenth-century art and architecture.
Meredith Martin is a professor of art history at New York University and a founding editor of Journal18. A specialist in French art and architecture from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, she is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (2011), and co-author ofThe Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (2022), which will be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe Paris.