Finding Florence Day: Histories of the Fragment

Catalog description

Florence E. Day (born 1908) was a scholar, curator, and the first person to receive a PhD in Islamic art history in the US. Through a twist of fate, her small but significant personal collection of historical material from the Islamic world came to Providence and is now divided between Brown's Joukowsky Institute (ceramics/ other media) and the RISD Museum (textiles). Day had no permanent institutional affiliation and left no personal archive, although there are traces to be found of her life and the frictions she encountered within her field of study. This object-focused seminar will explore Day’s collection and the methodologies that art historians, archaeologists, and historians can use to make meaning from a range of materials in a personal collection, asking how we tell the histories of objects - and a life - that exist only in fragments.