Ancestral Intelligence and Material Knowledge

Graduate / Professional

This hybrid studio-seminar course examines the life of objects across time, institutions, and lived contexts through hands-on engagement, critical reading, and experimental making. Working with objects from the university’s collection and installations at the Yale University Art Gallery, students investigate how meaning is produced, transformed, and contested through display, interpretation, and use. The Nguni exhibition anchors the course, framing questions of cultural authorship, material knowledge, and representation through the lens of situated knowledge. Using lens-based and technological tools, such as 3D scanning, microscopy, and imaging techniques, students encounter objects anew and consider how mediation reshapes perception and knowledge. The course emphasizes multisensory approaches and diverse interpretive frameworks, with particular attention to “charged objects” and the ethics of access, display, and use. Foregrounding multiple methodologies of “listening to images”, including close looking, sensory analysis, studio production, discussion, and writing, the course bridges analysis and making. Guest speakers, including international practitioners, curators, conservators, and scholars, contribute to the course, alongside artist-led workshops that examine connections between making, labor, craft traditions, and embodied knowledge, foregrounding practitioners as keepers of technique and cultural memory. The course culminates in a final visual project that synthesizes research, experimentation, and critical reflection. 3 Course cr M 1:30pm-4:30pm