Polymathic Pizza: Renaissance Imaginings

Event
  • Add to Calendar 2024-01-17 17:00:00 2024-01-17 18:30:00 Polymathic Pizza: Renaissance Imaginings 05:00 pm 06:30 pm America/Los_Angeles public
January 17, 2024 - January 17, 2024
5pm
Harman Academy

RSVP Required

Traveling to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond.  Medical advancements.  Censorship. Human/machine interfacing. Robotics and AI. These are things we think about today, which give us hope, and concern, about our future.  Renaissance Era thinkers and tinkerers thought about these things too.  

But the genius works of Leonardo and other polymaths of his era cannot be separated from the historical moment from which they emerged. So many of the social, cultural, and political issues we face today can be traced back to Leonardo’s time: processes of exploitation and genocide; environmental disregard and degradation; capitalistic greed and imperialist ambitions. These too are legacies from the Renaissance Era, legacies still very much among us. 

While we celebrate the science, art, and technology produced and imagined in our present moment, it would be prudent of us to reflect on the implications of such productions and imaginings.  We invite all polymaths to join in conversation with UCLA Professor Charlene Villasenor Black and Dr. Maite Alvarez, co-editors of Renaissance Futurities, to help us reframe our interpretation of the Renaissance to more critically understand and interpret the historical moment from which we are emerging.

  • Charlene Villasenor Black

    Charlene Villaseñor Black

    Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies, UCLA

    Charlene Villaseñor Black is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (UC Press). Her research focuses on the art of the early modern Ibero-American world as well as contemporary Chicanx visual culture. Her upbringing as a working class, Catholic Chicana/o from Arizona forged her identity as a border-crossing early modernist and inspirational teacher.

  • Maite Álvarez

    Associate Director at the USC International Museum Institute

    Maite Álvarez, Ph.D., is Associate Director at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letter, Arts & Sciences International Museum Institute, and project specialist in the Department of Education at the J. Paul Getty Museum.