The Frontiers of Faith at The Met Cloisters
Friday, October 8th, 2019 12:00-2:00PM EST
Please join us for a virtual talk by Dr. Julia Perratore (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) on her curated exhibit at The Met Cloisters, Spain, 1000–1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith. Dr. Abigail Balbale (NYU) will be the respondent.
The talk will be accompanied by an in-person tour of the exhibit led by Dr. Perratore on Thursday, October 7th at 3:00PM EST. Note that all visitors to The Met Cloisters must show proof of full vaccination to enter, per NYC guidelines. The tour will be limited to 15 attendees on a first-come, first-served basis.
Julia Perratore (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Julia Perratore is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania (2012), and she is also a proud alumna of New York University, where she graduated from the College of Arts and Science with a major in art history in 2003. She credits her wonderful and caring professors in NYU’s art history department with preparing her for – and supporting her in – her subsequent career. Julia is a specialist in the arts of medieval Iberia and has presented and published on the art and architecture of Romanesque Aragon, focusing on monuments built in former frontier zones in the wake of the Christian conquest of the peninsula and exploring the intertwined topics of urbanism, community identity, and social transformation. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Kress Foundation, and The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. Julia has several years of teaching under her belt, most recently at Fordham University, Montclair State University, and CUNY. Between 2014-2016, Julia was a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Medieval Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She returned to The Met as an assistant curator in 2019, and is based at The Met Cloisters. Her recent curatorial work has focused on exploring the impact of interfaith interaction on the Iberian artworks of The Met’s collection. Her first exhibition, Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith, is on view at The Met Cloisters until January 30, 2022.
Abigail Balbale (NYU)
Dr. Balbale’s research focuses on the intersection of political power, religious ideology and visual and material culture in the medieval Islamic world. She is particularly interested in how rulers legitimated their power through cultural production, holy war and diplomacy. Her current book project, tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Affiliation, Accommodation and Resistance in Ibn Mardanīsh’s al-Andalus,” centers on an enigmatic twelfth-century ruler who fought the Marrakech-based Almohad dynasty through alliance with his Christian neighbors and asserted his authority with reference to the Abbasid caliphate in the east. Generally, the book explores how Muslim rulers in the Western Mediterranean adapted and transformed ideologies and material symbols of power from the broader Islamic world in order to assert their authority. Dr. Balbale uses sources including chronicles, poetry and chancery documents, as well as coins, architecture, and portable objects, that reveal both the interconnectedness of the Islamic world and the intimacy between the Christians and Muslims who competed for territory in the Western Mediterranean. Earlier work, including The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale University Press, 2008), which she co-authored with art historian Jerrilynn Dodds and literary historian María Rosa Menocal, used a similar range of sources to explore how Castilian rulers and religious leaders created a new imperial culture by adopting elements of Islamic civilization, even as they waged military and ideological battles against their Muslim subjects and neighbors.