Watch, Read, Listen

Hilary Mantel, whose literary archive is held at The Huntington, is one of the most critically acclaimed authors working today. Her unprecedented double Booker Prize wins for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies combined with sell-out West End and Broadway stage adaptations and award-winning television dramatizations brought her unquestionable public prominence. But Mantel’s Tudor novels constitute only one element of a writing career, which has spanned nearly 34 years, troubled myriad genres, and explored multiple forms. “Reading and Re-Reading Hilary Mantel” constitutes the first international conference on Mantel’s work and seeks to act as a “state of the field” event, bringing a diverse range of Mantel scholars together to consider the complex presences and resonances of Mantel’s work in the 21st century.

Jesse Alemán, professor of English at the University of New Mexico, discusses the lives and letters of the Jimeno brothers, whose coming of age in the years before the U.S. Civil War demonstrates that the process of becoming Latino in the United States is a story of uneven assimilation, embattled acculturation, and divided loyalties to family, nation, language, and place.

This is the 2021 Ray Allen Billington Lecture in the History of the American West.

Olga Tsapina, curator of American historical manuscripts at The Huntington, discusses the importance of a little-known photograph from renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s studio that reveals the forgotten pallbearers of Abraham Lincoln, now on display in the exhibition “What Now, Part 2.”

This symposium interrogates the issues raised by contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s new painting Portrait of a Young Gentleman, which responds to Thomas Gainsborough’s grand manner masterpiece The Blue Boy. Between these two paintings, separated by 250 years, lies a colonial history that has managed representation across a field of visuality, nominating certain figures for human status and others for something less or more. What does it take, in a Euro-American art tradition, to look like a person? And what might come after coloniality in art?

Huiwen Lu, professor of art history at National Taiwan University, takes the audience into the strange and enchanting world of wild cursive calligraphy when it first appeared in China in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Lu looks at the development of this script in history as it went from being perceived as a magical act unattainable by human power to a specialized skill manageable by learning. Retaining a great capacity for artistic expression, wild cursive calligraphy transformed over time as personal identity, intention, and choice of historical models varied in the hands of individual calligraphers.