In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, the university art gallery hosts Indonesian music ensembles, a celebrated photographer meets the subject of a photo from the 1970s, an architecture exhibition looks behind the facades of modernist masterpieces, and Yale faculty reap awards in anthropology, criminology, and English.
For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.
A musical backdrop for Indonesian art
Yale’s two gamelan ensembles will bring their gongs, drums, and metallophones to the Yale University Art Gallery on Thursday, Nov. 20 for a free concert meant to complement the gallery’s current exhibition of six centuries of Indonesian textiles.
The traditional Indonesian music ensembles consist primarily of bronze percussion instruments — the word gamel means to hammer something — but also include stringed instruments, flutes, drums, and vocalists. The musicians play while seated on the ground, their instruments before them. The music is the traditional accompaniment to dances, feasts, and ceremonies in Indonesia, as well as to wayang shows, a Javanese shadow play tradition.
Yale’s Council on Southeast Asian Studies purchased a collection of gamelan instruments in 2006, said Phil Acimovic, a lecturer in the Department of Music in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and director of the ensembles. Acimovic teaches two gamelan courses per semester, which include sections of the performing ensemble.
The Nov. 20 concert will be “in the spirit of a klenèngan, a semi-formal musical event with a relaxed atmosphere, at which the audience may come and go as they please,” he said. “The music will progress from slow and stately, to lively and joyful over the course of the show.”
The New Haven Community Gamelan Ensemble will also perform. The program begins at 5:30 in the gallery lobby and is open to all.
An intensely personal encounter with photography
The young woman wears a “Save the Whales” tank top and bikini bottoms. Her head is tilted to one side, her gaze focused downward toward the beach on which she stands. The corner of a volleyball net is visible behind her, and young men in bathing trunks stand around her in conversation.
This black-and-white photograph capturing Los Angeles beach culture in 1978 was taken by Tod Papageorge, the celebrated photographer and Yale School of Art (YSOA) professor emeritus. It was included in an exhibition of Papageorge’s L.A. beach photos that was on display from June through October at the Museum of Contemporary Art\CT in Westport, CT. (The exhibition, organized by Lisa Kereszi, a senior critic and the assistant director of graduate studies in photography at YSOA, was featured in an earlier Humanitas.)
A New Yorker review of the show included the image among a selection of photos, and a reader, Kelley Haley, a California native who now lives in Boise, Idaho, immediately recognized the young woman at the photograph’s center as her teenage self. She contacted the museum staff, and subsequently traveled to Connecticut to meet Papageorge and participate in a panel discussion.
Kelley Haley
“When she introduced herself, I said, ‘I want you to sit down for a second,’” Papageorge told a News 12 Connecticut reporter about their meeting. “And when she did, I said, ‘You should know that this photograph is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.’ And that, of course, overwhelmed her.”
The exhibition is now closed, but the News 12 story is available here.
Black literary culture in the context of “the deep”
Jonathan Howard’s new book, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness” (Duke University Press), was published this month.
The title is taken from “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vass, the African, Written by Himself,” a 1789 first-hand account of captivity on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic. Referring to the many fellow Africans who jumped or were thrown into the sea during the voyage, Equiano wrote, “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself.”
Howard, an assistant professor of English and Black studies in FAS, defines “the deep” as “a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth itself,” and describes his book as “a black ecocritical study of the deep as the diffuse subtext of black literary and expressive culture.”
The romances and rivalries behind modernist architecture
“Paparazza Moderna: Lovers and Frenemies,” an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture, contemplates the complicated human relationships behind the polished facades of modernist architecture.
The show, by the artist duo Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea Hernández, both from Mexico City), offers a series of intimate photographic encounters with single-family houses. Its first section, “Frenemies,” focuses on houses in the United States designed by iconic modernist architects and tells the stories of the sometimes-rocky relationships between those architects, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer; Rudolf M. Schindler and Richard J. Neutra; and Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The second section, “Lovers,” moves through 11 countries in Europe to consider the achievements of female architects, designers, and artists whose contributions were overshadowed by partnerships with male architects, often their romantic partners. The photos highlight the work of more than a dozen practitioners, including Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nelly van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Truus Schröder.
The exhibition is on view through Nov. 29 in the second-floor gallery at Paul Rudolph Hall, 190 York St., in New Haven.
Blackhawk on the American Revolution
The November edition of The Atlantic features an article by Ned Blackhawk as part of the magazine’s “The Unfinished Revolution” series, exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
Blackhawk is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History in FAS; his last book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2023.
In the Atlantic essay, “How Native Nations Shaped the Revolution,” Blackhawk argues that the Revolution was both inspired by the self-governance of nations like the Iroquois Confederacy and driven by colonists’ need “to erase the legitimacy of Native governance.”
“Understanding this history is not a matter of diminishing the Revolution’s accomplishments, but of recognizing the contested ground from which they arose — and the Native lives, lands, and liberties they attempted to foreclose,” Blackhawk writes.
Blackhawk also contributed to the new PBS documentary, “The American Revolution,” directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, which explores the nation’s founding and War of Independence.
Notable recognition
Faculty from across FAS received notable awards this fall — including citations for exceptional first books, excellence in academic writing, and influential scholarship.
Several members of FAS were recognized for their lifetime contributions to their fields, including Matthew Frye Jacobson, Sterling Professor of American Studies and History and professor of Black Studies, who was awarded the 2025 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize. The award, from the American Studies Association, recognizes “an individual who has dedicated a lifetime of work to the mission and values of American studies.”
Marcia Inhorn, the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, received the 2025 Association for Feminist Anthropology Career Award for her lifetime accomplishment in the field of feminist anthropology.
And Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, was awarded the American Society of Criminology’s 2025 Edwin H. Sutherland Award for his impactful ethnographic research on urban crime in the United States.
Other FAS members received awards for their exemplary scholarly books, including two first book prizes.
“The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History” (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Naomi Levine, assistant professor of English, received the 2024 North American Victorian Studies Association Book Prize for Best First Book in the Field.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor of English, was awarded the Journal of the History of Ideas’ 2024 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for Best First Book in Intellectual History for “Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire” (Princeton University Press, 2024).
“The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe” (Knopf, 2025) by Marlene Daut, professor of French and African Diaspora Studies, was shortlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, which “recognizes and rewards the best history writing in English.”
Lisa Prevost, Mike Cummings, and Jessica Liu contributed to this column.
