History of Art and Architecture

Jinah Kim presents in conjunction with Pembroke Seminar on “Color”

On Tuesday, March 15, 2022, Harvard University Professor Jinah Kim presents, “Color Coding Knowledge: Five Colors of Indian Esoteric Buddhism.”

Nepal Cloth
Chakrasamvara Mandala, Nepal, ca. 1100, distemper on cloth, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Pembroke Seminar hosts this lecture in conjunction with its 2021-2022 Seminar on Color, co-led by History of Art and Architecture Department Chair, Professor Evelyn Lincoln.

Through an interdisciplinary lens, the Color seminar explores how global histories of race, gender, and class are connected to structures of knowledge and power that are ordered by color. Undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral, and faculty participants examine pictures, performances, and pigments to articulate how the experience of color itself has been central to cultural, social, and political orders across space and time. Guest speakers, such as Professor Kim — as well as Bevil R. Conway, the neuroscientist and artist who presented during the Fall 2021 semester — form an important part of this intellectual endeavor.

Jinah Kim is the George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard University. In her talk, she analyzes the ways in which Indian esoteric Buddhist communities used color to organize the extensive visual information generated in tantric vision practices. She explores how “pothi” manuscripts and other artistic developments shaped an experience of color that was internal and individual, and simultaneously shared across generations and regions. 

This in-person lecture takes place in Pembroke Hall, room 305. For more information, please visit Events@Brown.

The 2021-2022 Pembroke Seminar on Color is co-led by Professor Lincoln and Chair of the Visual Art Department, Leslie Bostrom.