Symposium: Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence at Yale Center for British Art

Marking the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this program reconsiders American resistance not as a singular political rupture, but as a material and visual process shaped through objects, images, and everyday rituals. Rather than treating independence as an abstract ideal, it asks how freedom was experienced, negotiated, resisted, and contested through practices often far from the political stage yet deeply enmeshed in global systems of extraction and exploitation. From drinking tea and sweetening foodstuffs with sugar, to furnishing interiors with tropical woods, wearing imported or locally adapted textiles, or handling silver objects, these material acts encoded both refinement and refusal.

Across multiple sessions held over two days, the program brings objects to the center of inquiry, examining how global goods circulating through colonial households acquired new meanings. Turning to the present moment, the program questions how museums have inherited, framed, and sometimes obscured these histories. The conversations will invite reflection on the ethical responsibilities of collecting institutions as stewards of objects that bear the uneven legacies of revolution, extraction, and empire.

Lunder Institute @ Yale Center for British Art: Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence is made possible through the support and partnership of the Lunder Institute for American Art, the Colby College Museum of Art.

Join the livestream, beginning at 5:30 pm ET on Thursday, May 7, and at 10 am ET on Friday, May 8.