FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2025 | 2:00 - 4:30 PM
Three Forsyth Talks will be presented by:
Megan R. Flattley: Decolonial Dialectics in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry
In 1932–33, Diego Rivera painted the Detroit Industry murals amid growing social conflict under Fordist capitalism. Rejecting allegorical unity, Rivera employed montage to visualize the fractured entanglement of Northern industrial power and Southern resource extraction. His frescoes offer visual collisions of raw materials, racialized bodies, and industrial labor to expose the asymmetrical dependencies underpinning capitalist modernity. This talk explores how Rivera’s compositional logic draws on Soviet montage debates to stage a dialectical critique of capitalist empire. By montaging contradictory temporalities and embedding Indigenous iconographies, Rivera’s murals disrupt dominant narratives of progress and harmony, exposing colonial legacies and labor exploitation. Rather than resolving tensions, the murals stage them dialectically, visualizing uneven global interdependence. By foregrounding the tensions between technological achievement and colonial extraction, Rivera’s work anticipates the disruptive spatialities of globalization and offers a politically urgent, visually complex meditation on labor, race, and neo-colonialism.
Alice Korkor Ebeheakey: Marked Histories: Ga-Dangme Body Modification as Language, Art, and Archive
Body modification in Ga-Dangme culture – including body painting, clothing, coiffure, scarification, and tattooing – has, for centuries, existed along the margins of history in discourses of subjective identity, heteronymous description, and ethnic orientation. The earliest recorded reference of facial scarification was in 1889, when C. C. Reindorf, mentions the “Akra face cuts” from a period in the 17th century. Scarification, known in Ga as gbɛ̃ gbamɔ and in Dangme as bɔ̃ pomi, is regarded as one of the oldest traditions with a background as convoluted as the migratory history of the people. This would further be complicated during the trans-Atlantic slave trade when tradition became tainted and new (mis)interpretations were formed. Despite these altering antecedental epochs, it is still seen as a quintessential component that accompanies milestone rituals, without which these rituals were – and are – not complete. This talk takes us on a brief journey from inception to present practice of body modification among the Ga-Dangme of Southern Ghana. It covers two main types of marking, intentional scarring and tattooing, and the individual, yet collective histories of the markings. The talk also highlights my contention that this expressive visual culture has been employed as an art form, a tool for communication, and a cultural archive.
Katherine Burge: Mastering the Miniature: How Mesopotamian Seal Carvers Learned Their Craft
Seal carving in ancient Mesopotamia demanded exceptional technical precision and cognitive skill. Professional seal carvers learned to work at a miniature scale, navigating the distinct material properties of different stones while envisioning and executing intricate iconography on convex surfaces. Mastery of the craft extended beyond the ability to incise a two-dimensional design: true intaglio carving involved a carefully sequenced series of cuts that produced a counter-relief image capable of rendering sculptural depth and fine detail when impressed in clay.
For this brief talk, I will present a case study centered on a group of objects from a craft quarter in the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur, interpreted as practice pieces produced by an apprentice seal carver sometime in the late third to early second millennium BCE. These pieces offer a valuable glimpse into how aspiring lapidaries navigated the steep learning curve inherent to their craft. Tool marks form a key source of evidence, and high-resolution 3D imaging makes the carving techniques and sequencing more clearly visible. By examining the tools, techniques, and procedural steps involved in cylinder seal production, I explore the intertwined material and cognitive processes through which novice seal carvers developed both their technical proficiency and their image-making abilities. This case study is part of a larger project that investigates the materiality of artistic training, both formal and informal, in Mesopotamia. The project examines the physical and cognitive dimensions of learning to make images and considers the contexts and mechanisms through which specialized (and social) knowledge were transmitted.
