Colloquia
Kent Bloomer
The Language of Ornament: Rhythm, Movement, and the Cosmos
Far from being a nebulous experience of pure affect, ornament across world cultures consistently utilizes a fundamental visual grammar to construct a system of meaning. In this lecture, Kent Bloomer, Yale’s ornament guru for the last half century, will share his latest research on the underlying linguistic structure of world ornament, defining basic visual tropes and how they are strung together to create a narrative and connection to a larger order, or cosmos. Kent will present the use of 19th century “grammars” of ornament as a tool for constructing ornament’s vocabulary.
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