The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Coffee Hour presentation given by Jeffrey Abt (Professor Emeritus, Art & Art History) on the topic of "Objects and Migration: Dislocation, Memory, and the Accretion of Heritage".

Abstract: The stories of how artworks, now residing in museums, were confiscated or forcibly sold during the Nazi era, are increasingly studied and reported in popular media. Less familiar are the tales of not-so-notable objects that eluded such fates when they were lugged by their owners into exile. Of less monetary worth, but still valuable in the currencies of family history and ancestral lore, such things embody complex stories of the before-and-after times of migration. With each successive generation following that migration, however, the meanings of those objects change—some losing their associations, becoming “orphans” as they pass out of familial ambits and into the hands of unrelated owners; and others becoming “sacred” relics of ancestral times. This discussion will workshop the investigation of objects and migration and the most suitable disciplinary methods for doing so.

Please RSVP for the zoom link.