Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet's Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond

During the 1860s in Paris, Edouard Manet and his circle transformed the style and content of art to reflect an emerging modernity in the social, political and economic life of the city. Manet's Olympia (1863) was foundational to the new manner of painting that captured the changing realities of modern life in Paris. One readily observable development of the period was the emergence of a small but highly visible population of free blacks in the city, just fifteen years after the second and final French abolition of territorial slavery in 1848. The discourse around Olympia has centered almost exclusively on one of the two figures depicted: the eponymous prostitute whose portrayal constitutes a radical revision of conventional images of the courtesan. This dissertation will attempt to provide a sustained art-historical treatment of the second figure, the prostitute's black maid, posed by a model whose name, as recorded by Manet, was Laure. It will first seek to establish that the maid figure of Olympia, in the context of precedent and Manet's other images of Laure, can be seen as a focal point of interest, and as a representation of the complex racial dimension of modern life in post-abolition Paris. It will then examine the continuing resonance and influence of Manet's Laure across successive generations of artists from Manet's own time to the present moment. The dissertation thereby suggests a continuing iconographic lineage for Manet's Laure, as manifested in iteratively modernizing depictions of the black female figure from 1870 to the present. Artworks discussed include a clarifying homage to Manet by his acolyte Frédéric Bazille; the countertypical portrayal by early modernist Henri Matisse of two principal black models as personifications of cosmopolitan modernity; the presentation by collagist Romare Bearden of a black odalisque defined by cultural, rather than sexual, attributes metaphoric of the cultural hybridity of African American culture; and direct engagement with Manet's depiction of Laure by selected contemporary artists, including Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas, often with imagery, materials and processes also influenced by Matisse or Bearden. In each case, the fitfully evolving modernity of the black female figure will be seen to emerge from each artist's fidelity to his or her transformative creative vision regardless of the representational norms of the day. The question of what, if anything, is represented by Manet's idiosyncratic depiction of the prostitute's black maid has seldom been comprehensively addressed by the histories of modern art. The small body of published commentary about Manet's Laure, with a few notable exceptions, generally dismisses the figure as meaning, essentially, nothing -- except as an ancillary intensifier of the connotations of immorality attributed to the prostitute. Manet's earlier portrait of Laure, rich in significations relevant to her portrayal in Olympia, is even more rarely discussed, and typically seen as a study for Olympia, rather than as a stand-alone portrait as this analysis suggests. The image of Laure as Olympia's maid is frequently oversimplified as a racist stereotype, a perspective that belies the metonymic implications of a figure that is simultaneously centered and obscured. It is in the extensive body of response to Laure's Olympia pose by artists, more than by historians, that the full complexity and enduring influence of the figure's problematic nuance can be seen. This dissertation, like the artists, takes its cues from the formal qualities of Manet's images of Laure, in the context of precedent images and the fraught racial interface within Manet's social and artistic milieu, to suggest new and revisionary narratives. It suggests that Manet's Laure can be seen as an early depiction of an evolving cultural hybridity among black Parisians- visible in Laure's placement, affect and attire--that took shape during the early years of the newly built northern areas of Paris that are today home to some of the largest black populations in central Paris. Within this context, an iconographic legacy of ambivalent yet innovative modernity can be asserted for the Laure figure -extending from Delacroix to Matisse, Bearden and beyond. This lineage can be seen as parallel to the long-established pictorial lineage for Manet's figuring of the prostitute Olympia. What is at stake is an art-historical discourse posed as an intervention with the prevailing historical silence about the representation and legacy of Manet's Laure, and by derivation about the significance of the black female muse to the formation of modernism. This analysis suggests that the black female figure is foundational to the evolving aesthetics of modern art. It suggests that Olympia's standing as a progenitor of modern painting can only be enhanced by breaking through the marginalization of Laure's representational legacy. It asserts that it is only when the bi-figural significance of Manet's Olympia is recognized that the extent and influence of Manet's radical modernity can be most fully understood

Summit County conservation inventory: volume I, a natural heritage assessment, 1997 final report

Prepared for: Summit County Open Space and Trails Dept., Summit County Planning Dept.December 1997.Includes bibliographical references

Manual / Issue 13 / Storage

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Storage. Manual 13 opens with an introduction by Fred Wilson, who confides, “You can look at all the opulence on display in a museum and begin to understand that something nefarious might be behind it. Storage, for me, is where the action is.” Museums usually make choices for viewers, their curators presenting what they think most important within a category. They can be so good at doing this that visitors sometimes don’t realize there’s anything else to see: they don’t realize the nature of the decisions behind an exhibition, and they accept that the elites have made a judgment about which shoe is the shoe to see. Visitors can learn about what’s great, but they don’t necessarily consider the process of discernment. –– Fred Wilson The RISD Museum’s thirteenth issue of Manual unpacks the idea and reality of storage—objects museums don’t put on view, works made as containers of various sorts, and more metaphorical considerations about how meanings and narratives are stored. This issue serves as a companion to the Raid the Icebox Now series of exhibitions on view at the RISD Museum through November 2020, in which nine contemporary artists and design collectives use the museum and its collections as a site for critical creative production and presentation. Raid the Icebox Now marks the 50th anniversary of Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, held in 1970 at the RISD Museum. Softcover, 120 pages. Published Fall/Winter 2019 by the RISD Museum. Manual 13 (Storage) contributors include: Christina Alderman, Issac M. Alderman, A.H. Jerriod Avant, Hannah Carlson, Wai Yee Chiong, John Dunnigan, Maria Morris Hambourg, David Hartt, Elaine Tyler May, Claire McCardell, Denise Murrell, Ingrid Schaffner, Holly Shaffer, Tanya Sheehan, John W. Smith, Mimi Smith, Sassan Tabatabai, Allen Wexler, and Fred Wilson.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_journals/1039/thumbnail.jp

Generation of a genomic tiling array of the human Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and its application for DNA methylation analysis

Background: The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is essential for human immunity and is highly associated with common diseases, including cancer. While the genetics of the MHC has been studied intensively for many decades, very little is known about the epigenetics of this most polymorphic and disease-associated region of the genome.Methods: To facilitate comprehensive epigenetic analyses of this region, we have generated a genomic tiling array of 2 Kb resolution covering the entire 4 Mb MHC region. The array has been designed to be compatible with chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), methylated DNA immunoprecipitation (MeDIP), array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) and expression profiling, including of non-coding RNAs. The array comprises 7832 features, consisting of two replicates of both forward and reverse strands of MHC amplicons and appropriate controls.Results: Using MeDIP, we demonstrate the application of the MHC array for DNA methylation profiling and the identification of tissue-specific differentially methylated regions (tDMRs). Based on the analysis of two tissues and two cell types, we identified 90 tDMRs within the MHC and describe their characterisation.Conclusion: A tiling array covering the MHC region was developed and validated. Its successful application for DNA methylation profiling indicates that this array represents a useful tool for molecular analyses of the MHC in the context of medical genomics

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3, and TREM2 implicate microglial-mediated innate immunity in Alzheimer's disease

We identified rare coding variants associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in a 3-stage case-control study of 85,133 subjects. In stage 1, 34,174 samples were genotyped using a whole-exome microarray. In stage 2, we tested associated variants (P<1×10-4) in 35,962 independent samples using de novo genotyping and imputed genotypes. In stage 3, an additional 14,997 samples were used to test the most significant stage 2 associations (P<5×10-8) using imputed genotypes. We observed 3 novel genome-wide significant (GWS) AD associated non-synonymous variants; a protective variant in PLCG2 (rs72824905/p.P522R, P=5.38×10-10, OR=0.68, MAFcases=0.0059, MAFcontrols=0.0093), a risk variant in ABI3 (rs616338/p.S209F, P=4.56×10-10, OR=1.43, MAFcases=0.011, MAFcontrols=0.008), and a novel GWS variant in TREM2 (rs143332484/p.R62H, P=1.55×10-14, OR=1.67, MAFcases=0.0143, MAFcontrols=0.0089), a known AD susceptibility gene. These protein-coding changes are in genes highly expressed in microglia and highlight an immune-related protein-protein interaction network enriched for previously identified AD risk genes. These genetic findings provide additional evidence that the microglia-mediated innate immune response contributes directly to AD development

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Using directional OCT to analyze photoreceptor visibility over AMD-related drusen

Investigators have reported reduced visibility of the cone photoreceptors overlying drusen using adaptive optics (AO) imaging techniques. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. First, the disease-related deformation of the photoreceptor outer segment (OS) may reduce its ability to act as a wave guide, thus decreasing the cell's familiar reflectance pattern. Second, drusen could disorient the photoreceptors away from the eye's pupil, reducing the amount of light reflected back out the pupil. In this work, we use directional OCT (dOCT) images of drusen in AMD patients to measure the respective contributions of these deforming and disorienting factors

Ecosystem Services and Disservices Are Bundled in Simple and Diverse Cover Cropping Systems

Agroecosystems are increasingly expected to provide multiple ecosystem services. We tested whether and how cover crop selection (identity and number of species) affects provisioning of multiple services (multifunctionality). In a 3-yr study of 10 cover crop treatments and eight ecosystem services, certain services consistently co-occurred. One such service “bundle” included cover crop biomass production, weed suppression, and nitrogen retention. Another set of bundled services included cash crop production, nitrogen supply, and profitability. We also identified trade-offs: as some services increased, other disservices arose, limiting multifunctionality. However, functionally diverse mixtures ameliorated disservices associated with certain monocultures, thereby increasing cover crop multifunctionality