Gold: Movement, Making, and Materiality

Stacy Lynn Waddell considers the authorship and idealism of art historical narratives and how they correspond to economic, political and social structures. Since earning her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Waddell has participated in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, Nasher Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Columbia College, Chicago; and Speed Art Museum among other venues. Her work is included in several public and private collections that include The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Nasher Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, and Princeton University Art Museum among others. She is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Artist-in-Residence at Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans), Queen Space (New York) and currently Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In Fall 2022, Waddell will end the year with an installation entitled A Moon For A Sun at Sala1 in Rome, Italy and as a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow in Umbria, Italy where she’ll spend six weeks producing works and conducting research in a 15th century castle.

Risham Majeed was born in Pakistan and raised between Lahore, Riyadh, and London. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago, her M.A from the Courtauld Institute and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research specializes in the connections between the European Middle Ages and historical African art. Majeed has curated several exhibitions and published extensively on exhibitions and current issues in museology. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Ithaca College.

Robyn d’Avignon is Assistant Professor of History at New York University, where she teaches courses on African history as well as the history of science, technology, and the environment. Her first book, A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa, tells the untold history of one of the one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology spans the medieval past to the postcolonial present and introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African history.

Nathaniel Silver is the William and Lia Poorvu Curator and Division Head at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He has curated a dozen exhibitions at the Gardner, most of which were accompanied by publications. His most recent exhibition was Titian: Women, Myth, and Power, reuniting Titian's celebrated cycle of mythological paintings for the first time in almost five hundred years.