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Bayou Bend Docents playlist on YouTube

Do Objects Lie


In "Do Objects Lie?" Dr. Christopher Allison, Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Carla Cevasco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, interrogate the assumption that objects tell unmediated truths. They do so through five case studies: urn motifs in early American objects, collections of food-related ceramics, a seventeenth-century Tobacco-Pipe Makers Arms dish, Benjamin West's "The Death of General Wolfe" on an eighteenth-century Wedgwood jug, and portrayals of youth on eighteenth-century British ceramics. Video by Ted Brusubardis and Clayton Backes.