"Latent Value: Spratling Silver and the Aesthetics of Mineral Development"
- Monday April 6, 2026 | 4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m. | Boger 112
Grace Kuipers '14, Postdoctoral fellow, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
What can the U.S. pursuit of foreign minerals tell us about modernist design practices? This talk examines the U.S. designer William Spratling’s silver jewelry workshop in Taxco, Mexico, to explore the ways developmentalist approaches to mineral extraction shaped the aesthetic and cultural expressions of modernist primitivism in the 1930s. Crafted from high-grade Mexican silver and adapted from Pre-Columbian motifs, Spratling’s jewelry was celebrated as a modernist revival of Indigenous design traditions. Yet the workshop was also framed as an economic revival, credited with resurrecting Taxco’s colonial-era mines and reactivating the region’s dormant mineral resources. As an early project of cultural diplomacy, Spratling’s enterprise enacted a politics of mineral developmentalism, in which U.S. standards of technological modernity promised to more efficiently measure, manage, and extract Mexico’s subterranean natural resources. Ultimately, this talk considers how mineral developmentalism shaped the visual dimensions of Spratling Silver: from the spectacles of Indigenous labor that produced it, to the silver materiality of the jewelry itself, and finally the aesthetic vocabulary of Spratling’s primitivist design process, which staged the conversion of “latent” formal values into abstract stores of value that could be possessed or exchanged.
This event is co-sponsored by the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund of the Department of Art and Art History, the Bailey College of the Environment, and the Latin American Studies Program.
Past Events
Building the Future: Towards a Climate Ready Architecture
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Monday December 8, 4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m., Boger 112
Richard C. Yancey '85, Founding CEO, Building Energy Exchange
We are at an inflection point in the climate crisis. Innovative solutions are becoming built examples and ambitious policies are becoming laws, but of all the sectors that contribute to climate change, buildings are the most resistant to change, contributing over 40% of the world’s carbon emissions, and nearly 70% of most cities.
We must rapidly evolve the way we design, construct, and operate our homes, offices, schools, and factories, creating a new, climate ready architecture. Richard Yancey, FAIA, LEED AP (Wesleyan ’85), will speak to his own journey —from passionate architect to creating a nonprofit organization on the frontier of ideas and action— and share insights into the leading climate solutions for our built environment.
Starting with a Mathematics-Economics degree from Wesleyan, Richard went on to become an award-winning architect, only to pivot mid-career to create the Building Energy Exchange, a pioneering international center of excellence dedicated to building decarbonization, addressing the biggest challenge of our time.
This event is co-sponsored by the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund of the Department of Art and Art History, the College of Design and Engineering Studies, and the Bailey College of the Environment.
Shifting Shelves — Libraries of the 19th-Century Islamic World
- Friday October 24, 1:30 p.m., Boger 115
Panelists and paper titles:
- Yael Rice (Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College) - "Scattered Leaves: The Fates of South Asian Albums (Muraqqa’s) and their Libraries, 18th-19th c."
- Deniz Türker (Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Rutgers-New Brunswick) - "Tanzimat’s Antiquarians, Their Coins, and Books"
- Selin Ünlüönen (Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art History, Wesleyan University) - "The Treasury, the Museum, the Library: How to Keep Books in Qajar Iran"
Extracting the Past: How the 'AI' Industry Exploits Art History and What We Can Do to Stop It
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Tuesday September 16, 4:30p.m., Boger 112
Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst