Timely

• This semester’s application deadline to receive matching funds for DUG activities is Friday, Feb. 19 @ 5 pm. Apply via the UFunds portal and email questions to dugs@brown.edu.
• Applications for several Brown Arts Initiative  grants, including the David Dornstein ‘85 Artist Grant and the Research and Development Grant, will close between Monday, Feb. 15 and Friday, Feb. 19. These grants offer funding to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members.

• Don’t miss the workshop that Professor Jeff Moser will lead on Wednesday, Feb. 24 @ noon at the Sheridan Center, entitled “The Awkward Object”. Using a series of case studies from the RISD Museum, the workshop will explore ways of helping students apprehend and articulate the awkwardness of objects for themselves.
• Brown students, staff, and faculty, as well as RISD students, are invited to submit work of all mediums through March 1, to Questions: Exhibiting Creative Hypotheses, a new collaboration merging creative practices with the fundamental scientific process of asking questions, the hypothesis.

Happenings

• Feb. 18 @ 6:30 pm: Join the first event for the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Arts & Performance Series. They will host a virtual performance and Q&A with the Egyptian rapper Felukah. Registration required.
• Feb. 23 @ 3:30 pm: The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice hosts, “This is America: Monuments,” a conversation with Rhode Island scholars, artists, and students about statues and memorials that address the state’s legacy of slavery.
• Feb. 24 @ 5 pm: The Department of Visual Arts will present a talk by Jamaican visual artist Ebony G. Patterson. Read her biography and register online.
• Feb. 25 @ 6 pm: White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor will present the 2021 Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, entitled “A Legacy of Purpose, Truth, and Justice.” Learn more and register online.
• Feb. 26 @ 1:45 pm: University of London Professor Sussan Babaie will reclaim the Muslim origins of the architectural term maidan - an urban space, and a site of collective action - in a talk entitled “Performative Public Space: Maidan/Midan” sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies. Register to receive your access link. 
• Jan. 25 - Apr. 8: Undoing: The Thirteenth Annual Brown|RISD Dual Degree Exhibition is on display in the Granoff Center's Cohen Gallery. Viewers are welcome at all times but evenings, and overcast days, allow for the clearest viewing.
• Winter 2020-2021: Constellations: Reimagining Celestial Histories in the Early Americas is a history of astronomy and astronomers, and is on view now at the John Carter Brown Library’s website.
• March 26 is the deadline for graduate and undergraduate students to apply to The Dallas Museum of Art's 2021-2022 McDermott Internship, a full-time, paid internship that provides those with undergraduate or graduate degrees the opportunity to explore a museum career. For more details go to DMA’s Internship page.

Opportunities for Undergraduates  

• The Multimedia Labs at Brown are currently hiring for both remote and onsite student positions. Remote positions are in podcasting and video, and onsite positions are in 2D and 3D printing.
• On Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 9 am, attend an info session about internships at community arts and civic organizations such as the iProv Summer Fellowship or the Brown in Washington Fellowship. Applications are due by Wednesday, Feb. 24, and are funded through  SPRINT Awards.
• The English Department welcomes students from all concentrations to apply for its Spring 2021 undergraduate writing contests. Reward amounts range from $500 to $1,000 per prize. Submissions are due Thursday, Mar. 4 at 3:00 pm. 
• VISIONS Magazine is accepting submissions until Friday, Mar. 12 . VISIONS is a Brown and RISD publication that centers the Asian/Asian-American/Pacific Islander-American experience, and accepts all forms of digital, visual, and literary art. Submit via a brief Google Form, and contact visions@brown.edu with questions.

Opportunities for Graduate Students 

• CUNY’s Doctoral Theatre Students Association (DTSA) extended their deadline to Feb. 15 for their graduate student conference, Negotiating the Quotidian: Performing the Everyday. Email dtsaconference2021@gmail.com to submit.
• The spring deadline to apply for graduate student affiliation with the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) is Thursday, Feb. 18. Affiliation includes opportunities for networking, professional development, and funding. Apply to become an affiliate or renew your existing affiliation by completing a Google Form, and contact the Institute with questions. 
• Professor Jessica Stair will lead a graduate roundtable entitled “Inscribing the Hand: Mapping and Memory in Colonial Era Nahuatl Manuscripts” on Thursday, Feb. 18 at noon. 
• The Simmons Graduate Internship Program at The Henry Ford is accepting applications until Friday, Mar. 5. Two remote internship opportunities, the Automotive Design Oral History Access Project and the Carver-Carson Society Project Development Internship, are available for 2021. Interns are paid, and program dates are negotiable.

PhD candidate, Dominic Bate: Recent Discoveries

Until recently the study on the bottom had been on the market with a London dealer who described it as "Anon. circa 1780".

PhD candidate Dominic Bate discovered that it is in fact a study by Giovanni Battista Cipriani for one of six painted friezes that he executed in 1770–71 for the library of Audley End, an English stately home that was then in the process of being remodelled by the famous Scottish architect Robert Adam.

Dominic recognized it because he found another of these preparatory studies in the RISD Museum's department of prints, drawings and photographs in 2019. These drawings give us important information about the gestation of the commission when compared with the finished paintings.  The most striking difference between them is in the background color. In the paintings, the plum purple of the drawings was changed to a bluish violet. Other differences are the result of small iconographic alterations, such as the removal of the boar on the far right of the drawing from the final version of the composition.