Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 5:30pm Lamar Dodd School of Art S150 Guest speaker Jennifer Stager specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. Her areas of focus include theories of color and materiality, feminisms, multilingualism and cultural exchange, disability studies, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, performance, and classical receptions. "Over the past few centuries, people have continuously (re)discovered the many colors of and on ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture and notions of the classical built from it. In contrast to modernity’s relentless rediscovery, colors—of materials, bodies, and nature—were once a quotidian part of antiquity. Ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand color’s ubiquity as a phenomenon indexing the visible world. At the same time, ancient artists built up all manner of objects from material colors sourced from the earth and manipulated in their workshops. Healers carefully observed the body’s changing colors to diagnose illness and worked with the earth’s material colors—with pharmaka—to restore health. Such engagement with material colors also engaged connected supply-chains and the laborers working to extract, move, and prepare them. In his analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida foregrounds the notion of the pharmakon as both medication and poison, but reducible to neither. Building from this multiplicity, this talk considers pharmaka as both pigments and drugs to analyze the intersections of polychromy, philosophy, and medicine."
