President’s Circle Virtual Happy Hour
“Rhetorics of Value: Exhibition, Design, Communication” with Corinne Kratz
As members of the President’s Circle and Legacy Circle, you are cordially invited to attend a Virtual Happy Hour with President Michael F. Brown and Corinne A. Kratz, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University.
How do museum exhibitions convey and help produce values, identities, and meanings? The book Dr. Kratz is working on, Rhetorics of Value: Exhibition, Design, Communication, argues that exhibit design is a key way to approach that question, looking at the multilayered, multimedia communication of designed space and persuasive form. Exhibit design combines and orchestrates objects, texts of various sorts, photographs, lighting, videos, space, and the narratives implied & created as people move through exhibits. Rhetorics of Value extends the communicative framework she developed for analyzing the efficacy of ceremonial performance to think about exhibitions. It comes out of her work on exhibitions and other forms of cultural display over 30+ years, including an award-winning book on the production and reception of a traveling photographic exhibition, a celebrated edited collection on museums and globalization, and many articles and key-note presentations. Exhibitions analyzed in the book range from the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s History Galleries, to the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum in South Africa, to the traveling Maharaja exhibit, to displays at the Kauai Lagoons resort hotel.
Case in the Magersfontein Battlefield Museum, circa 2000. Photograph by Paul Grendon.
This event is free and open to members of the President’s Circle and Legacy Circle. Please RSVP to Lindsay Archuleta at archuleta@sarsf.org and she will send you the instructions to join via Zoom. Space is limited, so reserve your spot today.
Corinne Kratz
Corinne A. Kratz is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University and Emory Director for the African Critical Inquiry Programme, as well as Research Affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Museum of International Folk Art. Her research and writing focus on culture and communication; performance and ritual; and the histories and politics of visual and verbal representation, particularly in museums, exhibitions, and photography. She began research in Kenya in the mid-1970s and has worked with colleagues in South Africa since 1999. Kratz’s books include Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation, and The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, which won both the Collier Prize and honorable mention for the Rubin Outstanding Publication Award. She co-edited Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations and special issues of Visual Anthropology and Anthropology Southern Africa and has published numerous articles and curated museum exhibitions. Kratz has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and others. She has served on the Board of the African Studies Association, the Council for Museum Anthropology Board, and the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She was a Resident Scholar and Senior Scholar at SAR in 2004-2005, mentor for several SAR Vera Campbell Fellows, and has served on various SAR selection review committees.
Top image: Section of the History Galleries in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2016. Photograph by Eric Long for the NMAAHC.