“To See the Effects of Sound”: Niall Atkinson on Acoustic Topographies of the Early Modern

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Niall Atkinson, an associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago. Niall's research concerns the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of pre-modern urban societies. They discuss his research methods for working on historical soundscapes, and ways of reconstructing sonic relationships in the past even if the sounds and sonic experiences themselves are now lost to us. 

Transcript

Caro Fowler 

Welcome to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. I am Caro Fowler, your host and Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this series of conversations, I talk with art historians and artists about what it means to write history and make art, and the ways in which making informs how we create not only our world, but also ourselves. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

I am Caitlin Woolsey, Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program. Today as part of our mini-series focused on sound and visual art, I speak with Niall Atkinson, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. His research concerns the relationship between sound, space, and architecture, and their role in the construction of premodern urban societies. We discuss his research methods for working on historical soundscapes and ways of reconstructing sonic relationships in the past, even if the sounds and experiences themselves are now lost to us. 

Niall Atkinson 

How do you deal with the ephemerality of sound through a medium like architecture and urban space, which have traditionally been sort of assumed to be much more permanent and much more material? I think it was not about historically reconstructing what things sounded like but looking at the record to see how people understood what they were listening to, to understand the soundscape through the ways in which they reacted to it, participated in it, and built upon it. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

It's a pleasure to have the chance to speak with you a little bit about your work and your experiences. Usually, we start these interviews by just asking if you could speak a little bit about how you came to art history or what formative experiences oriented you in this direction early on? 

Niall Atkinson 

Sure, and thank you, Caitlin, for this invitation. This is really a pleasure to speak. It's a format to reflect on this, which is something I don't always do on my own terms. In terms of how I found art history, I guess it goes back to high school. I had an excellent art teacher in high school. He taught me a great deal. I admired him as a person. He also embedded art history into each year of the five years of high school that I took art classes with him. So, I came out of high school wanting to go to art school thinking that art history would naturally be part of it--and that's not necessarily the case. Art history and art have their distinct relationships, and there are different kinds, so depending on how one understands one's goals, art history may or may not be a formative part a fine art education. So, I was a little bit ill-prepared in that sense. I found that I was really much more taken and compelled by the academic discipline of art history and, specifically, it was then that I was beginning to be interested in architecture, in cities. So, I was then navigating that other divide that sometimes occurs between architectural history and art history, more traditionally conceived, and then thinking about the ways in which the discipline itself has, in some ways, suffered from this kind of paradigm of images, sculptures, buildings that has grown to include more 20th century media, but still has trickier relationships between the different kinds of media that it studies. I ended up leaving a fine arts degree to concentrate specifically on art history and it was then that I began to think about, 'okay, where can I take this, and what should I do with this, and what does a career look like as an art historian?' But it wasn't all clear to me then. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Were there certain media that you were particularly invested in or interested in? Or was it sort of experimenting in different forms? 

Niall Atkinson 

Right. I mean my education was before the times when ‘new media’ were more integrated. So, I did a relatively traditional kind of education in painting and printmaking and photography, for example. I have to say naturally my interests went towards what I guess what you would call collage. I was constantly trying to build things on surfaces with other things and integrate various types of media, different kinds of images, collecting things, and organizing things seemed to be the kind of M.O. that I had in most of the projects that I attended to. I can see now relationships in the way in which I approach my own academic work in terms of collecting material, disparate things that were never necessarily meant to be together or are not usually conceived of together and juxtaposing them into a larger, more diverse kind of structure to investigate a particular theme, for example. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Once you realized that the questions that art history [or architectural history] might allow you to ask, that those questions were more the direction you wanted to go, were there formative teachers or exhibitions or texts or thinkers that shaped your early thinking at that time? 

Niall Atkinson 

Yeah, I was really stimulated by a group of very early scholars I was studying in Montreal. It wasn't clear to me as an undergraduate then, but I think I understand a bit better now [that] these were mostly advanced graduate students, postdoctoral students, and adjunct professors who were just starting out their careers. They were teaching part time, they were finishing dissertations, they were also working on their first books and as an undergraduate, I really got the impression that art history was one of the most fascinating disciplines in the humanities and social sciences because the ways in which it penetrated deep into various cultural forms. So, this was a whole generation of scholars who were teaching me to understand how to read texts, for example. I had a whole course on Immanuel Kant taught by a professor who was both a philosopher and an art historian. That has sort of been a lasting foundation in terms of me understanding the legacy and the heritage of especially the Western canon since the enlightenment, and the relationship between understanding Kant's philosophy as it pertains to art history. As well, I had a course that I was allowed into as an undergraduate, which was mainly masters and PhD students from all universities around Montreal, both French and English. The course was called The Wounds of Representation. It took this concept--this idea of the wound of something damaged, whether that be bodily, whether that be materially or whatnot--as a way to explore art history, across time and space. I remember coming home from that class and [I] remember literally running from the campus to my apartment because I was so blown away by the stuff that had been discussed in that class. I thought that anything would be possible in this discipline. I ended up doing a project on a Montreal artist--whose name escapes me for the moment—[who] was looking back at the Tuesday lectures of a French psychologist who was treating women for hysteria--this invented disease--and the ways in which he became a manipulator of bodies. Her work was really trying to deconstruct this patriarchal discourse that was both animating, but also wounding the female body through real surgical procedures based on this fictitious idea about what a certain disease was, that was constructed literally in the medical theater. The work [itself] was really fascinating to me, but then applying this concept of the wounded body was a way in art history in which I thought the taking these kinds of themes can really allow you to bring disparate discourses and objects and people together and allow you to assemble a project which is so much more than the sum of its parts. These [projects] are art historical because you're beginning with art historical principles, but it involves so many things that come from outside the discipline. So, that course was really formative in transforming my thinking about what it was possible to do, historically, with art history and I think I took that with me because it was a long time dormant. As I went through my master's degree and then finally to my PhD, I think I finally was able to put that education into practice. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Do you feel like that sort of emphasis on textual analysis or textual evidence is a part of the process as much as maps or visual representation or residual objects? Is that something that you feel like has really informed the way that you approach art historical evidence or objects or pictures? 

Niall Atkinson 

You mean this literary basis? Yeah, I think it has. I did double major originally in literature and art history, I was very much interested in literature throughout my academic career. But I also think that it was trying to understand text always as a literary phenomenon. In other words, my idea was to get rid of the distinction between what is a documentary text and what's a literary text, or to at least blur that distinction, so that one could see the ways in which both were dealing with similar kinds of issues, were often written within the same kind of idiom or understanding of the world around them, for example, and that they all needed to be interpreted. One was not simply giving information and one was not simply creating an aesthetic object, but they were often using the rhetoric of language to both facilitate and to obfuscate information as well. It became really important for me to be able to develop a way to take literary texts and use that historically, not to prove things necessarily, but to show through the way in which they construct a world and the way in which they relate to their world that they can become objects. You could juxtapose two spaces, two people, two buildings, two images, and that kind of thing, in an art historical project. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

You mentioned before [a] growing interest in cities, was [it at] this sort of juncture in which a more in depth focus on architectural history and urban space and environments took root? Or how would you trace that kind of aspect of your formation? 

Niall Atkinson 

Yeah, I think that interest came--I'm sure like for many other people--with studies in architecture and urbanism at the undergraduate level that continued at the masters level where I became really fascinated at first with the way in which architects and [inaudible] and engineers and planners were constructing worlds and the excitement about developing new worlds and the kind of utopian thinking of late 19th, early 20th century works and, ultimately, the critique of the massive failure of this kind of top down planning modes of social engineering new worlds had always fascinated me. I think that what led me to thinking about these, both antagonistic but productive, relationships between efforts from the top to reform, replan and redevelop urban spaces and cities, and urban culture, versus the kinds of resistances and sort of local autonomies and design efforts at the local scale was [that I] always have been interested in the local street level community as their own urban planner[s] and urban designers and constructors, the way in which they organize their world according to their needs. Those two forces coming together, I have always thought are the place where the most humane urban environments could be constructed. So, in other words, I was trying to find a way to think about not just the production or design of cities from an architectural point of view, but also to think about the how the production and meaning of those spaces is a constant performative dialogue amongst various stakeholders, with various positions of power or powerlessness, for example, that are constantly generating meaning in the urban world. I think that that's where cities are at their most dynamic in terms of functioning as social and spatial phenomena. I wanted to bring that back to the early modern period because--especially in the period that I was originally studying, which is the late Middle Ages or Renaissance in Italy--a great deal of the scholarship really had been about understanding the production through design of what a city should look like, how society should be organized. [I wanted] to see if I c[ould] get at the debates or what was happening on the street to see the ways in which that was inflected, resisted, and accommodated by the performative dialogues and stories that [were] happening in those spaces out of which urban literature came from in the early modern period. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Would you be willing to share a little bit about what that research or methodological process looks like for you, working on the early modern period and trying to draw up from the record that's available those performative or dynamic dimensions? 

Niall Atkinson 

In concrete terms how one actually tries to figure that out? 

Caitlin Woolsey 

For a little bit more context, this is something I think about in terms of writing art history and writing about sound, and the challenges or the possibilities of writing about something that can't be as readily illustrated on the page or on the screen as a painting or a print. How do you make that experience of a sound poem, a soundscape, a sonic environment, or a kind of performative experience present to a reader? 

Niall Atkinson 

That's sort of central to the problem, which of course, I don't think I've completely solved. I'm still trying to experiment in ways in which one can do that. I got to sound because I was very interested in the typology of the medieval and Renaissance tower and the medieval and Renaissance bell tower in particular. I was very interested in the vertical profile of cities and their descriptions and the kind of visual orientation that they provided. It became very quickly apparent that this was very much becoming an acoustic project that people were less talking about what towers looked like and more about how they sounded and more about how their city sound. That led me very, very quickly into that whole project on bell towers and the relationship between official and unofficial soundscapes. It became very clear that here was a moment in which my visual discipline had been seen missing out on a great deal of what architecture of space were, how they were communicating meaning through which societies were deriving their identities through the acoustic dimensions of this architecture. So, we normally study that as a side assignment object. So yeah, of course, as you put out the premise, how do you how do you then deal with the ephemerality of sound through a medium like architecture and urban space, which have traditionally been assumed to be much more permanent and much more material? I think it was not about historically reconstructing what things sounded like but looking at the record to see how people understood what they were listening to understand the soundscape [and] the ways in which they reacted to it, participated in it, and built upon it. By looking at--and this is where literature comes in--legislative and diaristic and accounting sources versus the literary canon, I was continuing to [look] at the ways in which people talked about cities and urban spaces, navigating and negotiating, and constantly coming up with the ways in which they were listening to how their spaces spoke to them. By drawing all of these threads together, so that the literary creative space of literature, the more disciplinary and political spaces of government legislation, and the records of moments of crises when suddenly you had to listen very carefully to what was going on or things could go incredibly wrong--so that people's ears were much more tuned or they were more explicit about how their ears were to that particular moments--it was a matter of, how do you give this a certain kind of form? So, it was trying to think about the ways in which sound defined space so that you could see the effects of sound spatially and visually and I guess as an art historian this was relatively important to visualize the effect of sound so that you could look at the multiple constituencies that sound created and the overlapping dependencies. In one project, I was really trying--still not being successful--but trying to figure out or trying to map the movement of sounds or ritual sounds when people are singing, when people are making music, when they are singing the masses, when they are praying, when people are listening to these kinds of processions during feast days and whatnot and trying to understand the interaction of space and sound visually as a phenomenon across time. So, I've been experimenting--and mostly in still images--to represent that and then to evoke that by understanding how people how people might have experienced these kinds of sounds. It's really difficult thing to do. In a current project, I'm trying, ultimately, to get back to a more digitally sophisticated way of mapping and modeling sound. I can talk about that a little bit, but that's a long-term project. I don't know how far off it'll be. I'm not even sure if it's going to be successful. But it's definitely worth a try. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Do you spend a lot of time in archives or is it more a matter of figuring out how to surface the information and these kind of digital or still image visualizations? 

Niall Atkinson 

Yeah, I did. The archival component is a bit tricky with this kind of a project, but I have found, and continue to find that, legislative sources--so, statutes is a big part of the book that I wrote--as well as personal writings tend to be really, really evocative and rich. When you're working in the archive--although you [may] imagine it as this sort of lone consultation with these impenetrable documents that you're trying to get through, not only, learning how to read the actual script, and then figuring out what the document is trying to say, and then learning about what the authors are trying to do, for example--beyond that, there's also a culture of the archive, which I think is important too. You are constantly talking to other people, but what they're finding. The archive is a collective project of tips and ways of approaching texts and the archive, in the way it's organized. In my experience in the Italian mode, you have an institutional organization, where documents for an institution will tend to then facilitate projects about a certain institution and we can do cross-institutional comparison or whatnot, as well. However, the project I had, which was this theme that I'm bringing up--sound--meant that I had to read documents and literally scan for key words that were in my head that became more and more important, so I would recognize them, and I'd be able to categorize them. So, it was about really the long term, often serendipitous way of looking at possible sources and then extracting from them the kinds of things that could be useful for a project, say, on sound, and what that would look like, and then assembling that at the end. I don't think this kind of a project can only be archival, although I think it needs that component to really to get at the level of detail and interconnected ways in which sound permeates both the familial, institutional professional, legal, or religious communities. But I think that's why I was also looking at literary sources like the [inaudible], which is really important for that early project because they help you to interpret the more personal writings of people who are ultimately the readers of this text, so that their concerns are similar to the concerns...and in fact they are at least readers or interlocutors with these literary texts and so they will have an understanding of what the agendas are. You also have, of course, the spatial record, the actual material record of certain buildings and spaces, that you can incorporate that into and so ultimately what I will be trying to do is-- this would be my dream--to really embed the literary, the documentary sources into the spaces themselves and that's where the digital project sort of comes in. That was ultimately the dream that one could see and one could read and think about the sources connected to a particular place that were part of building up this larger soundscape. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about that project. I know it's ongoing. 

Niall Atkinson 

It has several different trajectories at the moment and all of them are specifically about sound because I'm still very interested at the core about the bodily experience of urban space and architecture, and I think that sound is one of those that has a particular kind of imprint. But I think that there are also other really productive ways through the body that you can understand space historically. So, inevitably, when I was talking about sound and architecture in the past people would say, 'Well, how come there are no sounds except for the sound of my [your own] voice. This is a completely silent presentation of the material.' And yes, it was. That was partly because I was trained as an art and architectural historian, but also partly as a kind of resistance to what I felt was not what the project was about. That was this kind of historical, immersive reconstruction, which I thought was impossible, not particularly good. That would be a little bit disingenuous, even if it were spectacular. [Instead, I wanted] to really try make the case that this is a silent world to us. Now, we can only evoke it in fragmentary and indirect ways. When you introduce sound, for me at the time, that would sort of cause then one to imagine a direct relationship between the past and sound that I was not trying to get out. However, there was the idea in several of these conversations, and one in particular, I thought, 'well, maybe there's a way of at least, modeling [or] reconstructing the sonic relationships, if not the actual sounds.' In other words, if I'm here trying to talk about the ways in which a moving procession is singing to a city and the city is hearing it, what might that actually mean in practice if they're also talking to churches, and the churches are ringing their bells back at them? Would that have a meaningful, acoustic imprint, relationally? In other words, could you model a soundscape in which the possibility of the voices being heard in various parts of the city and the call and response issues as this cortege moved around the city? Would that be mappable, and then could you understand maybe the possibility of this being an interactive experience, or not so much? That was the impetus, to reconstruct, therefore have a 3D model of Renaissance Florence, in order to then be able to model the sound to see what was hearable, listenable, legible, audible, because there are other ways in which you can do that, digitally. That project has been working on reconstructing first the street network, the two dimensional city, through the tax records of 1427 that we're working on currently--and that is a major project in and of itself, we've already spent in excess of, I don't know, $125,000--and we're still in the process of--my excellent colleagues at University of Chicago--helping me clean and organize that data, so it becomes possible to re-engineer or reverse engineer that two dimensional map of the city at that particular moment. Then, of course, the problem would be how do you build up into three dimensions in ways that are authentic, or at least plausible in order to begin to model sound? So that's a long-term project, which may or may not have success, it depends on many factors, some of them being funding, but also whether or not we have enough data and the conceptual tools in order to construct it plausibly. But at the same time, I've also been very interested in at least digitally reconstructing or following the movement of people around cities. This comes in a project that I'm working on with a colleague at Duke University. He's going to make a video where we are looking at travel accounts and visitors to the city and the ways in which they describe moving around the city and mapping those experiences as ways to also generate these itineraries through which you can embed certain kinds of data with textual, sonic descriptions of what people see and hear and whatnot. So, there are a couple of ways in which I'm experimenting with how to advance, none of which are completely resolved yet. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

I'm curious where you would see your architectural history background and the kind of the mapping or reconstruction side, the plan side, the art historical component, and then the digital humanities tools and the more collaborative approach? It seems like [for] these kinds of visualization projects, it's not really possible for one art historian or [one] architectural historian in a room to tackle this endeavor, that it requires this more collaborative model of making? 

Niall Atkinson 

Yes, it does, definitely. It began very much back when I was writing my dissertation and I was looking at texts that were describing spaces or describing certain routes. I would get out a pencil and just try to visualize what the text was telling me because as you know, text describing visual things [can] become very, very complicated. It's much easier to look at the visual thing. So, that was an early form of visualization. And then as discussions grew and I began to think more about how to represent sound and movement and sonic environments, and [the] more discussions I had with digital specialists and other art historians, it became clear that there was a natural sort of trajectory for this project to enter into, to embed itself in digital methods in order to explore really what the meaning of movement and sound could be. So, that led me to a couple of summer institutes run by Mellon and Kress, for example--in 2012 and 2014--to develop methods of, 'how does one then make visual arguments occur through this kind of digital mapping?' That has been the really big issue for me lately, that is developing the research questions which cannot be answered through more conventional means because certain research techniques are extremely viable for producing certain questions and certain answers to them historically, whereas I think it's a bit more difficult to think about the ways in which digital tools and technologies, both allow certain questions and not others, and to be aware of that, and then to see what kinds of things can be answered, that can be answered not in any other form. I think that certain aspects of sound could be part of that answer because a lot of the how I'm reconstructing indirectly with soundscapes is based on certain conjectures and speculations about what should or can be true. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

I mean, to take it back to something you said earlier, too, when you were talking about working in the archive, scanning for keywords, I was curious if there have been moments through your career process of working on these different projects where things arose in the archive--keywords, through lines, or elements--that you hadn't anticipated? And was that surprising or [did it ever] shift the research tools that a particular project might have demanded? 

Niall Atkinson 

Yeah, well, that's an excellent question. Let me think. I have assumed that all things being equal...I hope I explain this okay it's a bit tricky...but I think I had the assumption that that the soundscapes were fully knowable and understandable to the people that use them because it quickly became clear that people were audibly much more literate than we are in terms of understanding the meaning of the world around them through these ephemeral sounds, for example, in soundscapes that have a great deal of meaning in them. However, I think it became quite clear that it was often as confusing and or complicated as it is for us and that and that it's never quite clear and that one's position, literally and figuratively, matters a great deal as well. That's something that maybe I should have understood from the beginning, but [I didn’t]. In other words, the change of meaning of the soundscape depends on the position from where one hears it, and maybe the position in which one is able to access it as one who could speak through it, for example, because there are those that couldn't. So, that kind of complexity--which made me even more depressed about the possibility of reconstructing a plausible soundscape--meant that the soundscape could be as individual and as collective as any other sort of contingent system of meanings, so that there are a number of ways in which people obviously share an understanding, but getting at the soundscape in its nuances is ultimately lost to us and reconstructing them you have to be constantly aware of that the reconstructions are these generalizations which are meaningful and productive, but which are necessarily insufficient. One of the things that drew me to architecture and cities was trying to re-embed art and architectural history within a much wider public network, a much more integrated social phenomenon then looking at artworks in museums, for example. It's just a different dynamic that I felt I needed to go and maybe architecture was one way of doing that, of going there. I'm constantly trying then to reconstitute what the social implications are in the work that I'm doing because those are the people who are producing sounds, listening, producing the meaning of the space around them, and then living in them. That's what sort of fascinated me as a way of understanding design as a collective project that was not only the purview of trained professionals--especially at a time when trained professionals like the emerging professional architect, we have these great heroes of the Italian Renaissance that are constantly talked about--but it was sort of only at moments of rupture or disruption or something like that, where the soundscape sort of came into being as a historical phenomenon through documents. And this is partly why I'm interested now in foreigners visiting other cities and talking about them because they are unfamiliar and so they will betray a great deal of how they are trying to structure a new world or new phenomena that they're not familiar with and it gives us vital information about something that to many other people would just be not worth remarking upon. But if you want to get to that level of granularity, to that level of 

experience, then again, indirectly, you go through these moments of rupture [or] disjunction, which again, I guess dictate in a bit of a different way. They're giving you a view of something that is under reconsideration or misrecognition or transformation. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

You mentioning these moments of rupture and shift leads me to ask you--kind of zooming out a little bit more broadly--both within your own research, your own approach, or perhaps in your teaching or other projects you're working on, what feels most urgent or most pressing to you right now, either within sort of art history or architectural history? 

Niall Atkinson 

I've been a little bit disengaged from a lot of teaching the last couple of years, for various reasons, and now I'm really beginning to experience this real generational divide in what scholars of my generation have been trained to do, what they are expected to do, versus a new generation of students who are much more involved in the larger structures of power, of politics and whatnot. They have a different sense of what constitutes knowledge about certain things and what constitutes the various ways in which you go about interacting with the world. One of the things that has become--this is not necessarily related--important to me through research that comes back to the project I described that I'm collaborating on travelers to Rome. In recent work that we've been doing, there was what's called a mini ice age in the late 16th, early 17th century, where there were massive crop failures, there was widespread hunger, especially in southern Europe, but around Europe in general, and so, at this particular moment, the Tiber River was flooding in ways that were really catastrophic and rates that were much greater than normal. And there are a certain kind of reactions, or non-reactions, to these phenomena. I think that for my period, especially, integrating an environmental history into the discipline is absolutely crucial. Now, we're trying to think of, 'okay, so it's not just about architecture in cities, but it's really about the relationship between cityscapes and landscapes, between countryside and city.' And this just was brought to my attention because I was woefully ignorant of it. But someone was looking at our work in this regard and they referred us to Felix Guattari's The Three Ecologies, the ecologies of the mind, of the psyche, as well as social ecologies, and environmental ecologies. We discovered through our work with Rome, that there are urban ecologies that are connected to rural and country, landscape ecologies that are connected to various social ecologies, be they individual or communal. I think there are really exciting ways in which architectural history could embed itself within a larger ecological history. That could be really informative about the ways in which we understand our relationship to the natural and manmade environments, which are not distinct, [but] which are always running up against each other, and there's no such thing--even back in the 16th or 17th century around Rome--as a natural environment that has not been integrated into and or neglected by, you know, 1000s of years of human presence. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Well, I can imagine, not just in terms of soundscapes, but also the kind of performative rituals that you spoke about, moving through urban environments, that other ecological factors like climate, extraction, or sort of materials that are used for the built environment, are all going to shape--in ways that may, at first glance, seem invisible, but are actually profoundly important--those experiences or those encounters or how they play out and change over time. 

Niall Atkinson 

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. The so-called material turn in art history really needs to follow that trajectory to the larger trades, to the larger systems--the trade and extraction that you're talking about. They've been part of these economies in the production of luxury goods like artworks for millennia. Because the people that I study 500 or 600 years ago are aware of these connections--not necessarily the way that we think that they ought to be aware, but they are aware of this question--I think it would produce a really exciting art history in knowing the economic and the larger geopolitical investment in a work of art as well as the kind of aesthetic and artistic investment, to see them as objects that are part of a larger global movement, even if they're very, very locally produced. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Well, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure to speak with you today. 

Niall Atkinson 

Likewise, thank you, Caitlin. 

Caro Fowler 

Thank you for listening to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. For more information about this episode and links to the books, articles, and artworks discussed, please consult clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from these homelands by colonial settlers. A federally recognized nation, they now reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we learn, speak, and gather here at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors, past and present, and to future generations by committing to build a more inclusive and equitable space for all. This program was produced by Caitlin Woolsey and myself, with music by lightchaser, editing by John Buteyn, and additional support provided by Jessie Sentivan.