Online Salon: Made of Metal
Please join us on Friday, November 7 at 12pm Eastern Time for an Online Salon co-hosted with the Barnes Foundation, Made of Metal. The event brings together five distinguished scholars to discuss metal in the decorative arts, urban embellishment, and design around the world during the 19th century. This online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required: https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/online-salon-made-of-metal
We are fortunate to host five distinguished speakers for this Salon: Robyn d’Avignon, Amy F. Ogata, Angus Patterson, Allison Stielau, and Yijun Wang.
Bios:
Robyn d’Avignon is an associate professor of history at New York University working in the fields of West African history, environmental anthropology, and the history of science. She is the author of A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022) and at work on a new project on salvage archaeology in Senegal.
Amy F. Ogata is Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. Her research is devoted to architecture and design (understanding these in relationship to each other) in Europe and the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently completing a book on metal and the metallic in the French Second Empire. She is the author of Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minnesota 2013), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She was the co-curator of the Bard Graduate Center’s international exhibition Swedish Wooden Toys (2014) and co-editor of the accompanying catalog. She has also written a book on Art Nouveau in Belgium (Cambridge 2001).
Angus Patterson is Senior Curator of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is responsible for the British national collections of silver, ironwork, brass and pewter as well as collections of European armour and weapons, cutlery, Sheffield plate, electroplate and electrotypes. Angus is a Trustee of Sheffield Museums, editor of The Journal of the Antique Metalware Society and co-curator of the current exhibition, Makers of Modern Gothic, A.W.N. Pugin and John Hardman Jr at the V&A until 26th October 2025. Angus’s nineteenth-century publications include The Museum and The Factory: The V&A, Elkington and the Electrical Revolution (with Alistair Grant, V&A/Lund Humphries, 2018) and The Cast Courts (ed. with Marjorie Trusted, V&A, 2018). In 2024, Angus worked with the Barnes Foundation on a Pew Grant funded scholarship to research and present more information about the gallery’s extraordinary metalwork collections.
Allison Stielau is Lecturer in Early Modern Art at University College London. She has published on several aspects of early modern European silver and currency, including weight, purity, and the symbolic significance of metallic provenance. Recent interests have turned toward the nineteenth-century reception of historical German silver, including the photography and physical copying of early modern vessels. This year, as a NOMIS Fellow at eikones, Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, she will be completing a manuscript on the fate of silver in the Thirty Years’ War.
Yijun Wang is assistant professor of history at New York University. Her research interest includes material culture, history of technology, craft, and gender in early modern China. Her forthcoming book The Tin Centuries examines the history of tin mining and its governance in Qing China. It investigates the transmission of tin mining technology between China and Southeast Asia, and emerging technocratic statecraft in Qing China in the context of global trade. Following the flows of materials, technology, and labor, the book presents how a mundane metal played a prominent role in a pivotal era of early modern history.