Art Council Lecture Series – Abbey Stockstill

Abbey Stockstill, Associate Professor and Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair, in the Department of Architectural History, at the University of Virginia will be presenting a UCLA Art Council Lecture Series presentation entitled “None Like It in Islam”: Material Aesthetics Between Andalusi Production and Maghrib Patronage

Description:
To look at the art of medieval North Africa is to enter a scene in which familiar motifs, transformed by material and arrangement, compose a new visual world.

An artistic explosion occurred in the twelfth-century Mediterranean, as emergent dynasties from the western extremes of the region brought together new avenues of material exchange, craftsmanship, and ideologies. Despite this wave of production, modern scholarship has struggled to articulate the impact of this period, falling back on outmoded tropes of artistic “influence” and equating ornamental expense with quality. This talk explores how this dynamic has obscured the real innovation of the period, and argues for a more subtle, intermedial aesthetic vision.