Dr. Jennifer Stager releases new book
Dr. Jennifer Stager, assistant professor of History of Art, has published a new book “Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory and Practice and Reception, from Antiquity to Present.”
“Seeing Color in Classical Art” offers a new critical account of color as material in ancient Mediterranean art and architecture. This book explores the materiality of color from the ground up through analysis of the pigments, dyes, stones, soils and metals that artists crafted into polychrome forms. Stager examines the process by which this reception tradition has elevated whiteness and feminized and racialized color. In response, this book illuminates the construction of the category of the classical in modernity and challenges its claims to order and exceptionalism.
These concepts lead to the idea for Stager’s next project, which will focus on the intersection of art and medicine. “Many of the same materials used by artists are also used by healers and medical practitioners,” says Stager. “And that was a jumping-off point for me to think about a deep history of medicine and to ask questions about who has been marginalized in traditional text-based histories of medicine and how we can get at some of the practitioners who are less well archived.”
Read more at the Department of History of Art.