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Recent PaPast Events t Events:

 

Spring Quarter 2009

“Urban Plans and Their Agendas - Admitted, Unadmitted and Unnoticed ”

May 28, 2009

Kresge 2-370

Organized by David van Zanten

Featuring Christian Topalov and Isabelle Backouche, Professors in the Urban History seminar of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

In conjunction with a symposium on the Burnham Plan at the Chicago Architecture Foundation

                                                                                   

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“The Role of Photography in the Development of China, 1860-1937”

April 24-25, 2009

Kresge Hall 3-430

Organized by Sarah Fraser, Department of Art History

 

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Winter Quarter 2009

“Renaissance Drawing: A Roundtable Discussion”

March 13, 2009

Pick-Laudati Auditorium

Block Museum of Art

Organized by Claudia Swan, Department of Art History

In conjunction with the Block Museum exhibition, “From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings from the Prado” (January 23-April 5, 2009)

Co-sponsored by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

 

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Fall Quarter 2008

“Towards a History of Design in the Global Economy”

   Friday December 5

Forum Room, Mitcehll Multimedia Center

Northwestern Library

Workshop organized by Sarah Teasley, Department of Art History          

                                                                                                        

co-sponsored by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

 

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Spring Quarter 2008

 

A symposium:
"1968/2008: The Aesthetics of Engagement"

June 6, 2008
Harris Hall 108

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the mass uprisings, strikes, manifestations, and incidents of cultural opposition that marked 1968 around the globe, Assistant Professor Hannah Feldman has invited eight scholars from a range of disciplines to campus for a one-day symposium that will consider the implications of 1968 for understanding the intersections of politics and culture today.



Participants include...

Charity Scribner, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, City University of New York
Rachel Haidu, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
Judith Rodenbeck, Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History, Sarah Lawrence College
Tim Brown, Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University
Christopher Dunn, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane
Steven Nelson, Associate Professor of African and African American Art History, UCLA
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, UC Irvine
Phil Ford, Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Indiana

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A conference:
"(World) Art: Art History and Global Practice"

May 23 - 24, 2008
McCormick Tribune Center

This conference, organized by Visiting Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History Christopher Pinney, explores the strangely limited scope of Art History's 'map.' Its cartography is in the course of being democratized. But this conference poses the following: what if instead of attending to territorial ‘gaps’, or demanding that ‘other’ art be admitted into the halls of modernism, we were to ask different kinds of conceptual questions about Art History’s epistemology?


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Click to download the conference schedule


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A conference presented by the Department of Philosophy:
"Violence --- Political and Sacred"

April 2-3, 2008

Featuring three participating Art History professors: Hollis Clayson, Stephen Eisenman and Hannah Feldman. Click here for details.

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A lecture by Claire Bishop:
"How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?
Pedagogy and/as Contemporary Art"

April 4, 2008
Kresge 3-365

Claire Bishop is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Warwick University, and Visiting Professor in the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art, London.

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A lecture by Marc Gotlieb:
"Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Beholder's Share"

April 10, 2008

In the second week of the spring term, Marc Gotlieb, Director of the Graduate Program at Williams College, will present a lecture on his current research and also offer a colloquium on publishing for graduate students. Building upon his experience as outgoing Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the flagship journal of Art History, this colloquium will offer professional mentoring to graduate students in an increasingly competitive field.

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A lecture by Karen Strassler,
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY:
"The Face of Money: Crisis, Currency, and Remediation in
Post-Suharto Indonesia"

April 14, 2008
Kresge 2-130

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A lecture by Anne Helmreich,
Associate Professor of Art History at Case Western University
"London and the International Art Market:
the Goupil Case Study"


April 21, 2008
Hagstrum, University Hall 201

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A lecture by Page Dubois:
"Ancient Greeks in the 21st century"

May 7, 2008
Hardin Hall, Rebecca Crown Center

633 Clark Street

Page Dubois, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, is the author of works including Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women; Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives; and Slaves and Other Objects. Presented by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

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An exhibition:
"Design in the Age of Darwin: English and American Decorative Arts from William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright"

May 8-August 24, 2008
with a symposium on Saturday, May 17
Block Museum of Art


This exhibition, curated by Professor Stephen Eisenman, will explore how Darwin’s evolutionary theories influenced American and British designers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The exhibition will display household items like furniture, metalwork, jewelry, and wallpaper as well as publications and drawings by six pivotal designers.

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A lecture by
Homai Vyarawalla and Sabeena Gadihoke
"The Lady in the Rough Crowd: Homai Vyarawalla
and her Chronicles of India"


May 12, 2008
McCormick Tribune Centre

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A lecture by
Maria Gough

Associate Professor of Modern Art,
Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University
"Drawing for World Revolution"

May 13, 2008

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A lecture by Takao Kawaguchi
Performer, Dumb Type
"Dumb Type: Adventure into the Frontiers of
Multimedia Performance"

May 16, 2008
Kresge 3-365

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A lecture by Josh Ellenbogen,
Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh
"Sense-Impression, Succession, Synthesis:
Photography at the fin-de-siècle"


May 19, 2008

This workshop, as part of the Program for the Study of Imagination Workshop, is made possible with the generous support of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation

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Winter Quarter 2008


(All events held in Kresge 3-430 unless otherwise noted)


An inaugural lecture by Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
Hollis Clayson

March 3, 2008
Harris 107

Please join us for a reception after the lecture in Harris 108.

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A lecture by T.J. Clark:
"Picasso in the Later 1920s"

March 12, 2008
Block Museum of Art

T.J. Clark is professor of Art History at UC Berkeley. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and the Block Museum of Art.

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Fall Quarter 2007


(All events held in Kresge 3-430 unless otherwise noted)

A lecture by Professor Haidy Geismar:
"The Photograph and the Malangann: Theorizing Images in Vanuatu"

October 30, 2007

Haidy Geismar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at New York University. Her most recent publication is Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914. Her areas of specialization include visual and economic anthropology; intellectual, cultural, and indigenous property rights; cross-cultural theories of valuation; materiality; and contemporary indigenous art.

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A presentation by
The Speculative Archive

October 31, 2007
Block Museum of Art


The Speculative Archive (Los Angeles-based artists David Thorne and Julia Meltzer) has created videos, photographs, installations, and published texts centered on war, state secrecy, and the production of the past. The artists will screen work that examines war, state secrecy, and the production of the past as a platform to assess the forms and possibilities of documentary production in contemporary society.

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A lecture by Professor Andrew Stewart:
"Designing Women: The Hetaira as Model from Phintias to Praxiteles"

November 5, 2007

Andrew Stewart is Professor of Greek art at UC Berkeley. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Classical Traditions Initiative.

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A lecture by Professor Bibiana Obler:
"Object, Sculpture, God: Recasting Sophie Taeuber's Marionettes"

November 19, 2007

Bibiana Obler is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

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A workshop:
"Art/Text/Imagination:
The Unrepresentable and Early Modern Culture"

November 29-30, 2007
Harris Hall, room 108
and the Block Museum of Art

"Art/Text/Imagination" is a two-day workshop designed to explore the socio-political, art historical, and literary context of early modern imagination by focusing on the production, function, and reception of visual and textual representations of imagined images. Featuring keynote speaker Leonard Barkin, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Organized by Claudia Swan (NU Department of Art History) and Marco Ruffini (NU Department of French & Italian).

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Spring Quarter 2007


(All events held in Kresge 3-430 unless noted)

A lecture by Professor Peter Sturman:
"Grids, Ground Planes, Fragments and Fractures: Modernism and the Chinese Landscape"

March 28, 2007

Peter Sturman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Chinese painting and calligraphy. His current research interests include Han dynasty clerical script and the evolution of calligraphy as a consciously practiced art leading to the 4th c. Professor Sturman is working on a book titled Painting and the Historical Mind in Song Dynasty China.

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A lecture by Professor Barry Flood:
"Lingas in Latin: Ethnography, Pornography and History in Colonial South Asia"

April 4, 2007

Barry Flood is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at New York University where he teaches art and architecture of the Islamic world. He is the author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Brill, 2000) and Objects of Translation: The Material Culture of Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter (Princeton, forthcoming).

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The Department of Art History at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago's Workshop on Late Antique and Byzantine Studies present:

A lecture by Professor Anthony Cutler:
"The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange between Byzantium, Islam, and Beyond"

April 26, 2007

Anthony Cutler is Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Penn State. He works in the fields of Late Antique, Early Christian, and Byzantine Art. He is currently working on a book titled The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange Between Byzantium, the Islamic World, and Beyond. Professor Cutler will speak on Byzantine and Arab gift economies in the first lecture that we have co-organized and sponsored with the University of Chicago's Workshop on Late Antique and Byzantine Art.

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A brown bag lunch talk by Zheng Bo
on Contemporary Chinese Video Art


May 11, 2007


Zheng Bo is a first year graduate student in Art History, focusing on Chinese contemporary art.

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Winter Quarter 2007

A lecture by Professor Lytle Shaw:
"Smithson's 'Judd': Androids in the Expanded Field"

January 4, 2007

Lytle Shaw is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (University of Iowa Press, 2006).

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A lecture by Dr. Fusae C. Kanda:
"Buddhist Catharsis: Images of Cadavers in Nine Stages of Decay"

January 5, 2007

Dr. Kanda received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University in 2002. She specializes in East Asian art, Buddhist art and architecture, pre-modern cultural interface between China and Japan, and Ukiyo-e.

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A lecture by Professor Matthew McKelway:
"Waves of Images: the Currency of Fans in Early Modern Japan"

January 17, 2007

Professor McKelway is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. He is author of the books Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto and Traditions Unbound: Groundbreaking Painters from Eighteenth-Century Kyoto.

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A colloquium by Professor Matthew McKelway:
On
"The Uesugi Screens,"
a chapter from Capitalscapes

January 18, 2007


Download the colloquium reading here.

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A lecture by Professor Maki Kaneko:
"Representing "Asia": Images of the Yungang Grottoes in Imperial Japan"

January 22, 2007

Maki Kaneko is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Art here at NU. She received her Ph.D. in World Art Studies and Museology in 2006 from the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures.  Her primary field of research is 20th century Japanese art practices in relation to the state.

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A lecture by Professor Lai Guolong:

"The Power of Hybrid Images: A Silk Diagram of a Road Ritual from Mawangdui"

January 26, 2007

Lai Guolong is Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at the University of Florida. His teaching and research interests include Chinese art and archaeology, the archaeology of writing, and early Chinese calligraphy.

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A lecture by Professor Joshua Shannon:

“A Loft Without Labor: Donald Judd”

February 8, 2007

Joshua Shannon is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Maryland. His recent research projects include a manuscript entitled “The Disappearance of Objects: The New York Avant-Garde and the Rise of the Postmodern City” and an essay on Robert Smithson's landscape photography.

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"Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination"

March 2-3, 2007

A conference at Northwestern University, "Out of Sight" will address the problem of the representation of slavery in the Americas and the African Diaspora.

Please click here for full conference details.

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A lecture by Professor Sarah Teasley:
"How to Craft a Discipline: Mokuzai Kogei and the Making of Modern Design in Japan, 1880-1925"

March 9, 2007

Sarah Teasley is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Programme in Culture and Representation at the University of Tokyo. Her areas of specialization include modern design and architectural history, contemporary Japanese art and visual culture, and East Asian art, architecture and documentary film.

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Fall Quarter 2006

 

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Spring Quarter 2006

 

Art History Faculty-Graduate Research Colloquium

"Abu Ghraib in the History of Art"

March 30, 2006


A series featuring work-in-progress by faculty and graduate students: Professor Stephen Eisenman will present his current research regarding art historical depictions of torture in relationship to the photographic documentation of abuse that emerged from the American-held Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Responses will be given by graduate students before turning the floor over to general discussion. 
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A lecture by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi:
"Franz Boas' grammar of native art: an art historical perspective"

April 19, 2006
Kresge Hall 2-380

Lecture in English. Refreshments to follow.
Co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department.
For more information, please visit:
www.frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu/upcoming_events/april06.html

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The Norman Spector Lecture Series presents
A lecture by Professor Georges Didi-Huberman:
The Image Burns

April 20, 2006
Harris Hall, room 108

Co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department.
For more information, please visit:
www.frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu/upcoming_events/april06.html

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The Department of Art History,
Department of Art Theory & Practice, and
the Pick-Laudati Digital Art Fund present:
A Multi-Media Presentation by
Joel Slayton

April 28, 2006
Kresge Hall 3-365


Joel Slayton is an artist, writer and media theoretician whose work addresses information systems and networks. He is Professor of Art and Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University. Professor Slayton is on the Board of Directors of Leonardo/ISAST, where he is chair of the Leonardo MIT/Press Book Series. He is also on the Board of Directors of GroundZero, a new silicon valley arts organization. Professor Slayton is the founder and president of C5 Corporation - an experiment in a hybrid form of authorship intersecting research, corporate culture and artistic enterprise. His media installations have been featured in museums and galleries internationally.

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17th Annual Graduate Student Symposium:
Mapping and Locative Practices

April 29, 2006
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

This year's symposium will explore themes of mapping and locative practices. Since what the school of critical geography coined as the “spatial turn,” mapping and its concomitant metaphors have proliferated in academic scholarship. In this vein, the conference hopes to takes an expansive view of mapping as a physical artifact produced under historical conditions, and also as a mode of analyzing representations.

The keynote speaker for this year's conference is Stephen Melville, Professor of Art History at Ohio State University , currently Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University .

Our other featured speaker is Joel Slayton, Professor of Digital Media at San Jose University , Director of CADRE Laboratory for New Media and chairperson of C5 Corporation.

 

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The Center for International and Comparative Studies presents:
A lecture by Stephen Eisenman:
"Parapraxis on Olympos: Abu Ghraib in the History of Art"

May 12 , 2006
1902 Sheridan Road


For more information, please visit www.cics.northwestern.edu

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The Department of Art History,
Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies,
and Department of History present
a lecture by Christopher Pinney:
The Political Economy of Gloss: “India Shining” and the “Common Man”

May 19, 2006
Harris Hall, room 108

The Bharatiya Janata Party* coalition government’s “India Shining” campaign appeared to presage success in the 2004 Indian national elections. In the event they were defeated, in part because, as one Congress candidate said “the exterior is shining but the interior is starving." This talk examines the images used in that election campaign and sets them against the background of transformations in film publicity images (with which they shared certain elements in common). In tracing the implosion of the BJP campaign a neo-Situationalist claim is elaborated that society organised as appearance is vulnerable at the level of appearance.

    *India's main Hindu nationalist party

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A lecture by Richard Meyer:
"Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s"

May 31, 2006

American feminist art of the early 1970s is typically remembered for its focus on female experience and embodiment.  A less familiar strand of feminist work from the same moment insisted on the right of women artists to express their desire for the male body—and for the penis in particular—in visual terms.  This paper looks in detail at work of one such artist, Anita Steckel, and at the activist mission of the "Fight Censorship" group she founded in 1973.

 

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Winter Quarter 2006

 


"Anime Otaku: Distributive Vision and Immaterial Labor"

Professor Thomas Lamarre


January 19, 2006


To understand transformations in relations between consumers and images associated with digital media and information technologies, it is crucial to think the work of fans as labor. On the one hand, there is a shift toward immaterial labor that effectively transforms fans into co-producers. On the other hand, there is a breakdown of hierarchies of center and periphery within images and image sequencing that results in a distributive field of vision and opens the image across media. In the world of anime otaku, these two problems are clearly entwined.

 

"Tanizaki and the Age of the World Image"

January 20, 2006

Tanizaki Jun'ichirô was among the earliest commentators to call attention to the geopolitical consequences of the cinematic experience, in the late 1910s. For Tanizaki, the cinematic real led inevitably to an imaging of the world that threatened to dissolve the very conditions for narrative and historical understanding. He thus turned from writing novels to making films in the early 1920s, in an attempt to rethink the possibilities for narrative in the age of the world image. The result was not unlike Benjamin's dialectical image but with an emphasis on questions of race and empire.

Copies of the reading for the colloquium are available in the Art History office, Kresge 3-400.

Thomas Lamarre is Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University.  He is interested in Japanese art with a focus on Heian (medieval) calligraphy and post-modern anime, and in Japanese Literature, with an emphasis on the novel and cinema of the Meiji/Taishô period (1868-1926), and poetry and monogatari of the Nara/Heian period (710-1180 ). His books include: Uncovering Heian Japan : An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000) and Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun'ichirô on Cinema and ‘Oriental' Aesthetics ( University of Michigan Press , 2005, forthcoming).
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In conjunction with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

"The Anatomy of Gender"

January 28, 2006
Pick Laudati Auditorium, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Prof. Thomas Lacquer will give the keynote address at this international conference in conjunction with the exhibition “The Gender of Anatomy,” addressing art, science and anatomy in Early Modern Europe. Art historians, cultural theorists and historians of science will be brought together to discuss the impact of anatomical images across disciplines, with the assumption that these papers will then form the basis for a much needed edited volume on this topic. The exhibit will be on view at the Block Museum January 3-March 15, 2006. Curated by Professor Lyle Massey.
The symposium will have morning and afternoon sessions––with one respondent for each session (from local institutions or NU).

http://anatomyofgender.northwestern.edu/

Speakers:
Rebecca Messbarger (Washington University, St. Louis)
Bette Talvacchia (University of Connecticut)
Katharine Park (Harvard University)
Thomas Lacquer (U.C. Berkeley)

Under the auspices of the Department of Art History, Myers Fund, Alice Berlin Kaplan Center for Humanities, and Science and Human Culture.
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A Lecture by Professor Laurinda Dixon:

"Perilous Chastity:  Women, Wandering Wombs, and Gendered Politics in Art"

February 8, 2006

Laurinda Dixon is Professor of Northern Renaissance Art and William P. Tolley Teaching Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University.

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“Caricature in the Modern World, 1700-1900”

February 18, 2006
Pick Laudati Auditorium, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

International conference open to the public organized by Professor Hollis Clayson in collaboration with James Cuno, Director, The Art Institute of Chicago and Adjunct Professor, Northwestern University . Day-long event held in conjunction with Comic Art: The Paris Salon in Caricature,” on display at the Block January 19-March 12, 2006.

Invited Speakers include:
Professors Ségolène Le Men (Université de Paris X , Nanterre)
Todd Porterfield (Université de Montréal)
Amelia Rauser (Franklin and Marshall College)
Michele Hannoosh (University of Michigan)
Shearer West (University of Birmingham)
Tom Gretton (University College London)
Mark Hallett (University of York, graphic satire)
David Bindman (University College London)

Symposium schedule with abstracts

Under the auspices of the Department of Art History and the Myers Fund.
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Art History Faculty-Graduate Research Colloquium
"Night Dreams: American Painters in la Ville Lumière (1870-1914)"


March 2, 2006


A series featuring work-in-progress by faculty and students: Professor Hollis Clayson will introduce her current research on American artists' utopic representations of the City of Light at night during the era of Thomas Edison. Discussion led by third-year graduate student, Hector Reyes. Please note that no text will be circulated in advance.

 

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Fall Quarter 2005

 

A Lecture by Professor Hamid Naficy:
"Accented films: Biographic and Textual Strategies"


October 5,
2005


This talk focuses on the films that displaced and diasporic filmmakers of the world make, who live and work in the cracks of society and film industry, with particular emphasis on their linguistic strategies, such as multiple languages, subtitling, dubbing, and text on the screen.


"Under Cover But On Screen: Women's Screen Representation and Women's Cinema in Iran "


October 6, 2005

This paper theorizes the poetics and politics of the Islamic veil and of modesty both as social practice and as cinematic practice, their impact on women's participation and representation in cinema, and the evolution of their codes since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Hamid Naficy is Nina J. Cullinan Professor of Art & Art History/Film and Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Art History at Rice University.  He holds a Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Film in TV (UCLA) and a M.F.A. in film production.  His research interests include Diaspora and exile cultures and cinema, Iranian and Third World cinemas, and ethnic television in the U.S. His books include: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), and The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
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"Did Guns Matter? The Manchu Conquest in World-Historical Perspective: Local, Regional, and Global Themes"

Professor Nicola Di Cosmo

October 10, 2005
11-12:30pm
Workshop


Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center, 2010 Sheridan Road


"The `Birth' of the Last Chinese Dynasty (1644-1911): The Rise of the Manchus in the Early Seventeenth Century"

5pm Lecture

Kresge 3-430

Nicola di Cosmo
is the Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies.

This event is held in conjunction with the Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center course, "What is Chinese About Chinese Art?" taught by Sarah E. Fraser, Lane Professor, fall 2005.
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"Leon Battista Alberti and the Early Modern Rise of Identical Reproduction"

Professor Mario Carpo

October 20, 2005

5pm Lecture
Leon Battista Alberti, the universal man of the early Renaissance, was keenly interested in inventions of all kinds. Among many other things, Alberti developed a platform of digital technologies that he adapted to various image-making, word-processing, and manufacturing devices. This lecture situates Alberti's odd and untimely digital inventions within the longue durée of the technologies and culture of copies, imitation, and reproduction.

"Non Standard. Contemporary Architecture and Digital Reproducibility"

October 21, 2005

9am Colloquium


The theory of non-standard architecture is the latest avatar of the digital revolution in architecture, now in its second decade. This seminar focuses on recent theories of computer-aided design and manufacturing, from the theory of "folding" in the nineties to the contemporary debate on non-standard seriality, and addresses some of the visual, epistemic, and cultural issues brought to the fore by digital reproducibility.

Mario Carpo is an architectural historian. He is currently the Consultant Head of the Study Centre at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal and an Associate Professor at the École d' Architecture de Paris-Villete. He has published extensively on the history of architectural theory and his recent works focus on the relation between architectural thought and information technology, including Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (MIT Press, 2001), Leon Battista Alberti : Descriptio Urbis Romae. é dition critique, traduction et commentaire (Geneva: Droz, 2000), and La maschera e il modello. Teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell'Extraordinario Libro di Se­bastiano Serlio (1551) (Jaca Book, 1993) .
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Professor Anthony Lee

October 26, 2005

5pm Lecture
"When the Cobbling Began: Immigrants, Shoemakers, and Photography in a 19c New England Factory Town"
This talk addresses the seventy-five Chinese men arrived in a small New England town to work in a factory in 1870 and the photography of the tensions that ensued.

October 27, 2005

9am Colloquium
Reading Available in Kresge 3-400 between 8:30am-1pm and 2pm-5pm, M-F.


"In the Opium Den"
A work in progress, "In the Opium Den" puzzles over the meanings of racial masquerade and racial melancholy among immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.  It looks closely at several key photographs, the most important a bizarre image of a Mexican immigrant posing as a Chinese immigrant in the dank, outlawed opium dens of a port city.

Anthony Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Chair of the American Studies program at Mount Holyoke College. His field is American art with a focus on Chinese-American visual culture, avant-garde photography, and the murals of Diego Rivera.  His books include studies of San Francisco Chinatown (Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco, University of California Press, 2001), Chinese American art (Yun Gee: Writing, Art, Memories, University of Washington Press, 2003), Diego Rivera (Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals, University of California Press, 1999), and Diane Arbus (Diane Arbus: Family Albums, Yale University Press, 2003).
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Dr. Lisa Wainright

October 27, 2005

5pm Reception, 6pm Lecture
"A Century of Counter-Culture"
Held at the Pick Laudati Auditorium, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Dr. Lisa Wainright, Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explores the demimonde of 1890s Paris and 1970s Chicago as seen through the eyes of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Ed Paschke. October is Chicago Artists' Month and this event is being held in remembrance of our colleague and former Northwestern Art Professor, Ed Paschke.

Co-sponsored by the Block Museum and the Departments of Art, Theory, and Practice and Art History
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In conjunction with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum
"Marion Mahony Griffin Reconsidered"


November 5, 2005

10am-5pm
Held at the Pick Laudati Auditorium, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

This symposium will explore the architectural drawings of Marion Griffin and her contribution to the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio. See Griffin's work at the Block Museum, September 23-December 4, 2005; exhibit curated by Professor David Van Zanten. ( A study morning for invited faculty and local scholars is also organized for Sunday, November 6, 10:30-12noon.)

Speakers:
Paul Kruty, University of Illinois at Champaign
Alice Friedman, Wellesley College
Christopher Vernon, University of Western Australia, Adelaide
Anna Rubbo, University of Sydney
James Weirick, University of New South Wales

Under the auspices of the Terra Foundation, the Myers Fund, Department of Art History, and a private donor.
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In conjunction with Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center
Professor Wang Ming-ke


November 7, 2005
11-12:30pm Workshop
"Heroes' Journey: Imagined Frontiers in Pre-modern and Modern China"

Held at the Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center, 2010 Sheridan Road

5pm Lecture
"Historical Mentalities, Genres and Schematic Plots in the Narratives of History in Pre-modern China"

Kresge 3-430

Wang Ming-ke: Academica Sincia, Institute of History and Philology, Ethnology Section

This event is held in conjunction with the Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center course, "What is Chinese About Chinese Art?" taught by Sarah E. Fraser, Lane Professor, fall 2005.
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Professor Christopher Pinney

November 10, 2005

5pm Lecture w/ assigned reading
"The Coming of Phototgraphy in India"
What models might best explain the arrival and impact of a technology such as photography in a locale such as India? Does photography as "technology" dissolve in the "culture" of India? Or does it have a "torque" and "tensility"? Is its "time" the same as that of the world in which errupts? Article will be available in advance of presentation: Pinney, "Things Happen: Or From Which Moment Does that Object Come?" in Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Duke University Press, 2005, forthcoming).

Please find an early draft of the text that will accompany Professor Pinney's lecture here.

Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at the University College London.  His general interests include popular visual culture in India, the role of the xeno-figure in the creolization of Europe from the 17th century, the continuing relevance of the work of Theodore W. Adorno, colonial photography and the history of anthropology. His books include: Camera Indica: the social life of Indian photographs (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (Reaktion Books, 2004).
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In conjunction with Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center Professor Jonathan Hay

November 14, 2005
11-12:30pm
Workshop
"Double Modernity, Para-Modernity"
Reading : J. Hay, "Double Modernity, Para-Modernity." Forthcoming

Held at the Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center, 2010 Sheridan Road

5pm Lecture
"China, Macrohistory, Art: The Parallax of Relational Modernities"


Jonathan Hay
is an Associate Professor of Chinese Painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Events held in conjunction with the Alice Berline Kaplan Humanities Center course, "What is Chinese About Chinese Art?" taught by Sarah E. Fraser, Lane Professor, fall 2005.
________________________

Professor Alicia Walker

November 21, 2005

5pm Lecture

"Middle Byzantine Aesthetics and the Incomparability of Islamic Art: The Architectural Ekphraseis of Nikolaos Mesarites"

An early thirteenth-century ekphrastic passage penned by the Byzantine author Nikolaos Mesarites describes an Islamic style hall, the Mouchroutas, in the imperial palace at Constantinople . The text provides a rare account of Byzantine emulation of medieval Islamic architecture and has been used to reconstruct the possible appearance of this now-lost monument. The importance of the passage as a record of Byzantine reception of Islamic art remains, however, sorely underappreciated. Reading Mesarites' ekphrasis through the lens of Byzantine aesthetic and rhetorical values, we can understand the deeper message that the Mouchroutas was intended to convey regarding the achievements and shortcomings of Islamic art in comparison to that of Byzantium.

Alicia Walker is Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.

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Professor Angela Volan

Wednesday, November 30

5pm Lecture

"The Terrain of Future Paradise:  Rethinking the Colonial Landscape in Late-Medieval Crete"

Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the island of Crete, once a Byzantine territory but now a colony of Venice, became a major site of dispute over the religious unification of the Latin and Orthodox Churches.  One issue taken up by Byzantine theologians campaigning against unification concerned the eschatological understanding of Paradise and the created world, which was construed as a polemic against Latin heresy.  This paper considers the ways in which this debate over Genesis was invoked through visual forms of rhetoric in the spaces of rural Orthodox churches in Crete, where colonized communities were free to declare their ecclesiastical and political independence from Rome as well as Venice.

Angela Volan is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.

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Professor Cecily Hilsdale

Friday, December 2, 5pm Lecture

"The Atoms of Epicurus: Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline"

In the mid-fourteenth century Byzantine historian Gregoras commented that the imperial treasury contained but air and dust.  the atoms of Epicurus. As Gregoras' lament would indicate, the late Byzantine or Palaiologan period was, even to contemporaries, often characterized economically and politically in terms of decline.  In response, this paper reconsiders cultural production in this era and ultimately questions concepts of decline and nostalgia.  I argue that in addition to atoms of Epicurus, the late Byzantine imperial treasury abounded in symbolic wealth, including art, classical learning, and orthodox spirituality.  These were the currencies of Palaiologan diplomacy and their demand was great.

Cecily Hilsdale is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Kansas.

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Spring Quarter 2005


Dr. Jordana Mendelson
(University of IL at Urbana-Champaign)

Lecture: "Propaganda Laboratories:
Artists, Magazines and War in Spain 1936-39"

Monday, April 4
5pm Kresge 3-430

Colloquium: "Of Politics, Postcards, and Pornography:
Salvador Dali's Le Mythe tragique de l'Angélus de Millet"
Please Click Here for Article

Tuesday, April 5
9:30am Kresge 3-430
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Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences together with the Departments of Art History, English, Comparative Literary Studies,
& the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for Humanities present:

Dr. Kaja Silverman
(University of California-Berkeley)

"How to Paint History I & II"
A two-part lecture on the paintings of Gerhard Richter.

Richter does not view the photographs with which he works as “cultural constructions, as we have become habituated to doing. They constitute, rather, solicitations from the past; blasted out of the continuum of time, they “drop” on his “doormat,” like “nature.” In her talk, Kaja Silverman will explore how Richter responded to two such solicitations: one embodied by a group of concentration camp photographs, and the other instantiated by a series of photographs documenting the arrest, imprisonment and deaths of three members of the German terrorist group, the RAF.
Click Here for More Info

Monday, April 11, 2005
2-3:30pm(part I) & 4:30-6pm(part II)
Harris 108

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Dr. Hannah Feldman
(Northwestern University)

"Art During War and the Aesthetics of Action: Paris, 1954-2004"

Thursday, April 14, 2005
5pm Kresge 3-430
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The Department of Art History together with
FIG and the Humanitites Center present a 3 lecture series with:

Dr. Georges Didi-Huberman

"Image, Fact, Fetish"
(a 3 part lecture)

Monday, April 18, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Thursday, April 21, 2005

5pm Kresge 3-430

________________________

The Department of Art History is pleased to announce this event as part of the Myers Foundation Lecture Series in 2004-2005 that addresses new perspectives, voices, and media in art. The lectures are co-sponsored and organized with the Department of
Art Theory and Practice and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum.

Dr. Joel Smith
(Vassar College)

"Transpacific Photography and the Modern"

Schooled in the Japoniste aesthetic effects that had informed modernist painting, American art photographers of the early 20th century adapted Japanese design principles to offset their medium's modern, mechanical identity.  In Japan, by contrast, camera clubs and "Pictorialist" methods alike expressed a cosmopolitan embrace of the new.  By the 1920s an ostensibly international mode of modernist photography pervaded art and design.  It was an idiom invented, in large part, through creative misreadings of style and content across cultural boundaries -- a history that reached a brutal end in Allied and Axis propaganda in the 1940s.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum
*Reception will follow*

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This event has been made possible by generous funding from The Graduate School, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the Block Musem, and the Art History Department.

16th Annual Graduate Student Symposium

Saturday, April 30

Click here for Schedule

*****
Symposium's Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Thomas Crow

"The Unknown Conversation:
The Last Works of Mark Rothko and Eva Hesse"

When a collective moment in the history of art comes to an end through iconoclasm or some other external disturbance, one can trace certain of the dispersed elements of a previous synthesis to their new uses and locations in a culture.  Others, by contrast, seem broken and suppressed.  Can a parallel analysis apply to the decline and/or death of an artist who may have held together the threads of something larger than an individual project?  The occasion for asking these questions arises from an uncanny parallelism that emerged in the final works of Rothko and Hesse: the first an artist of advanced age and long accomplishment, the second still young and just discovering her individual voice, both facing death at nearly the same moment.  The further question arises as to how much the anticipated conclusion of one's work and life can find a place in the final productions of an artist.

Dr. Thomas Crow is Director of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center, Los Angeles and Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California.

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Program of African Studies and Art History present:

Barbara Blackmun
  (UC San Diego)

"Regime Change in Benin [Nigeria], and the Creation/Destruction of Art"

 Monday, May 2, 2005
4:00pm
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James Cuno
(The Art Institute of Chicago)

"La Poire: Revisiting Louis Philippe(King of the French, 1830-1848) in Caricature"

James Cuno is the new director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago, and former director of the Courtland Institute(London), and of the Harvard University Art Museums.

Thursday, May 12, 2005
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art

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Caroline Goodson
(University of Notre Dame)

"Building with the Past:
the Basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome"

Tuesday, May 17, 2005
5pm Kresge 2-425

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Stephen Hill
Northwestern University

Grant Writing Workshop for Graduate Students

Tuesday, June 14, 2005
2-4pm

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Winter Quarter 2005

Fall Quarter 2004

Spring Quarter 2004

Winter Quarter 2004

Fall Quarter 2003

Spring Quarter 2003

Winter Quarter 2003

Fall Quarter 2002

 

Art History Lecture Archive:

Art History Lecture Archive: 2002-2003

Art History Lecture Archive: 2003-2004

Art History Lecture Archive: Fall Quarter 2004

Art History Lecture Archive: Winter Quarter 2005

Art History Lecture Archive: Spring Quarter 2005

Art History lecture Archive: Fall Quarter 2005

Art History Lecture Archive: Winter Quarter 2006

Art History Lecture Archive: Spring Quarter 2006

 

Art History Lecture Archive: 2002-2003

Dale Kent, Professor of History, University of California Riverside
"Patronage and Patriarchy in early Medicean Florence"
October 17, 2002

James Elkins, Professor, Department of Art History, Theory and CriticismThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"What is Visual Literacy? And Who Has It?"
November 18, 2002

Hans Belting, Professor of Art Studies and Media History, Institut fuer Kunstwissenschaft, Staatliche Hochschule fuer Gestaltung Karlsruhe
“Arthur Danto and the Crisis of the Work of Art in Post-Modernism"
January 17, 2003

Jas Elsner, Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology in the Classics Department at the Corpus Christi College of Oxford University
“Inventing Christian Rome: The Role of Early Christian Art”
Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Rebecca Spang, University College London historian of modern Europe
“Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution”
April 3, 2003

Leonard Barkan, Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University
"Aesthetics and Desire: A Renaissance Meditation"
April 10, 2003

Alex Potts, Professor and Chair of Art History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Autonomy in post-war art, quasi-heroic and casual"
May 1, 2003

Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Professor of Japanese Art, Yale University
"The Eyes of Michinaga: A Japanese Case Study in Art and Illumination"
May 7, 2003

David Craven, Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico
“Orozco's Prometheus and the Threat of Imperialism”
May 15, 2003

Richard Wollheim, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Univ. of California at Berkeley and Visiting Professor, Depts. of Art History and Philosophy, Northwestern University, Spring 2003
“Three Grades of Pictorial Organization (with special reference to Jacob van Ruisdael)”
May 22, 2003

Serge Guilbaut, Professor of Art History, University of British Columbia and Visiting Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, Spring 2003
”Jean Fautrier: The Color of Horror”
June 5, 2003

 

Departmental Colloquia on faculty/graduate student research 02-03


Professor David Van Zanten
“Paris Space”
October 10, 2002
Respondent: Carmen Niekrasz (PhD student)

Ming Tiampo (PhD student)
"Art in an Era of New Internationalism, Exchanges and Experiment in France and Japan, 1945-1965"
Respondent: Prof. Stephen Eisenman
November 14, 2002

Leah Boston (PhD student)
”Political Vision in the Salons of Les XX (1884-1893) “
Respondent: Prof. Claudia Swan
January 23, 2003

Professor Holly Clayson
“19th C. Women Artists in France: Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, and Biography in the History of Art”
Respondents: Justine DeYoung, Shalini Seshadri
February 6, 2003

Professor Stephen Eisenman
“William Morris”
Respondent: Leslie Ureña, Patrick Tomlin
April 24, 2003

Professor Lyle Massey
” ‘...almost as infallible as the object itself.’ : Picturing the Female Body in the 18th Century Obstetrical Atlas”
Respondents: Visiting Prof. Carol Knicely and Jessica Keating
May 19, 2003

 

Art History Lecture Archive: 2003-2004

The Department of Art History presents a lecture by

W. J. T. Mitchell

Addressing Media

October 9, 5:15pm
Pick/Laudati Auditorium at the Block Museum

How can we address, if not understand media? Where does media studies fit among the disciplines? This talk surveys the history of media theory from McLuhan to Baudrillard to Kittler and Luhmann, outlining strategies for addressing the bewildering variety of media, past and present.

Sponsored by the Department of English, the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, the Program in the Study of the Imagination, the Block Museum, and the Simeon F. Leland Fund
_____________

Gloria Ferrari Pinney

Landscape, Geography, and Cult in Prehistoric Greece:
the Frescoes of the West House at Akrotiri

Wednesday, October 22
5:15pm, Kresge Hall room 3-430
Northwestern University

Gloria Ferrari Pinney is Research Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Departments of the Classics and the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her most recent
book is entitled, Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece (Chicago, 2002).

Sponsored by the Department of Art History, the Department of Classics and the Classical Traditions Initiative
_____________

Phi Beta Kappa and the Council of Art History Undergraduates present a lecture by

Leonard Barkan

Words and Pictures

Thursday, November 13, 6 pm
Art History Seminar Room, Kresge 3-430

Poets from Homer onwards have engaged in the rhetorical device known as ekphrasis, or the verbal description of a visual art object. Conversely, artists, also from antiquity to our own time, have written words on their pictures. This lecture will connect these two practices in an attempt to understand the relationship between language and visuality, especially in the culture of the Renaissance, with special attention to Dante and Shakespeare, on the poetic side, as well as Mantegna and Michelangelo, on the painterly side.

Leonard Barkan is Professor of Comparative Literature and director of the Society of Fellows at Princeton. He has published extensively on art history in antiquity and the Renaissance. His books include: Nature's Work of Art: the Human Body as Image of the World, and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture.

_________________________

Mary Jane Crowe Professor
Professor Hans Belting

"Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology"
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Ripton Room, Scott Hall, 5:30-7:30pm
Seminar format, Part I (40 mins.) followed by a light dinner buffet
served 6:30pm during intermission. Discussion follows Part II (40 mins.)
Image theories find more attention in today's debates than art theories, due to the prominence of visual experience in our lives. In his presentation,Professor Belting introduces his own approach to this discussion based on his book on images in anthropological perspective which has provided the basis for an interdisciplinary research group he founded in Germany. Following his talk, advance copies of his most recent book Art History After Modernism (October 2003, University of Chicago Press) will be available.

Prof. Belting was a Professor of Art Studies and Media History at the HfG Karlsruhe (ZKM), 1992-2002 and Professor of Art History at the University of Munich, 1980-92. He is the author of the ground breaking books The End of the History of Art? (U Chicago, 1987); Likeness and Presence (U Chicago, 1994), and The Invisible Masterpiece (London/Chicago, 2001).

_______________
Jan 15, 5-7pm, Departmental Colloquium, Toby Norris

Feb. 5, 5-7pm, Departmental Colloquium, John Peffer
_________________

Georges Didi-Huberman
Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris

Will conduct a series of four seminars entitled
"Images, In Spite of All"

Friday, February 13, 4:00-6:00 PM,
2-380, Kresge Hall (French & Italian seminar room), Northwestern University
Monday, February 16, 4:00-6:00 PM,
2-380, Kresge Hall (French & Italian seminar room), Northwestern University
Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 PM,
Cochrane-Woods Art Center 157, *University of Chicago*
Wednesday, February 18, 5:00-7:00 PM,
Hagstrum Room, University Hall (second floor), Northwestern University

Professor Didi-Huberman's first book, L'invention de l'hysterie (1982) elucidated photography's complicity during the nineteenth century in the study and exploitation of the insane. (It has just been published in transdlation by the University of Chicago Press.) This was followed by a series of books on the psychology and cruelty of the gaze, among them Ce que nous voyons, ce que nous regarde (1992) Ouvrir Venus: nudite, reve, cruaute (1999) as well as a series of studies of Renaissance art and the complexities of media, among these Fra Angelico (1990, in English 1995) and Saint-Georges et le Dragon (1994). He has more recently explored the foundation of art history and the contribution of Aby Warburg, especially in Devant le temps: histoire de l'art et anachronisme des images (2000) and L'image survivante: histoire de l'art et temps des fantomes selon Aby Warburg (2002).

The series is sponsored at Northwestern by the French Interdisciplinary Group, the Program for the Study of the Imagination, the Center for the Humanities, the Programs in Jewish Studies and in Comparative Literature, the Art History Department and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

____________

The Department of Art History presents

David Joselit
Professor, History of Art Department, Yale University

Tuning Out: Psychedelia and Revolution
Monday, March 8
5:00pm, Kresge Hall 1-375


Co-sponsored by American Studies Program, & the
Program in Media, Technology, and Society


______________________

The Department of Art History, the Program for the Study of Imagination, and the Science in Human Culture Program
are pleased to present

Mechtild Fend
Max-Planck-Institut fr Wissenschaftsgesichte


Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces. The Representation of Skin in late 18th- and 19th-Century France

March 31
5:00 pm at Kresge Hall, Room 3-430 (Art History Seminar Room)
__________________

The Department of Art History at Northwestern University presents

Prof. Alfreda Murck
Central Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Art History and
Peking University, Department of History, Beijing

Investigating Names:
How Chinese Paintings Get Their Titles

Chinese painting titles may be brief, discursive, descriptive, straightforward, or disingenuous. Because most painters did not provide their works with titles, that determination often was made by the collector or cataloguer. I will discuss conventions of naming, patterns of assigning titles, how titles shape expectations, where titles are located, and how we struggle to translate them into English.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004
5:00pm
Northwestern University
Kresge Hall 3-430
1880 Campus Drive, Evanston

Prof. Murck is the author of Poetry and painting in Song China: the Subtle Art of Dissent, (Harvard, 2000). As former curator of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1979-1986, she oversaw the installation of the 'Master of Fishing Nets' garden in the Chinese painting galleries. After living in Taiwan for nearly a decade, she now resides in Beijing where she teaches in two University graduate programs.

_________________________
Jonathan Katz
Yale University
“The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art”
April 21, 2004
5pm
University Hall 201

Sponsored by the American Cultures Colloquium, Departments of English, Art History and Gender Studies

___________

April 26, symposium
Woman Inside Out: Art, Gender and Anatomy in the Renaissance, Block Museum Auditorium
· Katharine Park, "Women's Secrets: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection"
· Fredrika Jacobs (Univ. of Virginia), "The Significance of Perceiving 'Mona Lisa's' Beating Pulse in the Renaissance"
co-sponsorship with Kaplan Center for the Humanities and PSI

________________
May 3, 5pm: Barbara Stafford
(Univ. of Chicago),"ABC: Artificial, Bio, or Carbon Life? The Body between Fact and Fiction,"
Block Museum Auditorium.
- related event
________________

Karim Traore
Department of Comparative Literature, University of Georgia, Athens

will introduce and lead discussion on

Ta Dona (Fire!)
The 1991 film directed by Adam Drabo, Mali. 100 minutes.
Bambara with English subtitles.
May 20, 2004
5pm
__________________
Huey Copeland
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, UC-Berkeley
From Post-Nat to Post-Black:
Lorna Simpson's Figurative Retreat
This paper charts the trajectory of Lorna Simpson's photo-text art from the mid-'80s to the present, in order to undo the swirl of racialized misrecognition that surrounds her work, and ultimately, to understand the importance of her practice for a variety of critical gestures aimed at signaling a break within black cultural production. What does it mean, in other words, to label Simpson's, or any other African-American art, as "after" slavery, nationalism, modernity, or even blackness itself?
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
5:00 pm
Kresge 3-430
Texts (available in art history office):
Thelma Golden, "Introduction: Post..." in "Freestyle" (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14-15
Greg Tate, "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," in "Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 198-210

 

Art History Lecture Archive: Fall Quarter 2004

Symposium:
Mellon International Dunhuang Archive and ARTstor

Speakers include:
Henry S. Bienen, President, Northwestern University
William G. Bowen, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
James Shulman, Executive Director, ARTstor
Sarah E. Fraser, Assoc. Professor and Chair, Art History Dept., Northwestern University
Richard E. Vinograd, Christensen Professor in Asian Art, Stanford University
Stephen F. Teiser, D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies, Princeton University
Patricia B. Ebrey, Professor, History Dept. and Jackson School of International Studies,
University of Washington, Seattle

Thursday, October 7, 2004
3-5pm Symposium, Hardin Hall
5pm-6pm Reception, Hardin Hall

_____________

Ananda Shankar Chakrabarty
(Northwestern University PhD Candidate)
"Pierre Soulages' Recent Paintings and the Prehistoric Hypotext"

Chakrabarty will present a chapter from his dissertation.

Department Event:
Participants limted to Faculty, Students, and their Guests
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
5pm Kresge 3-430

_____________

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
(University of Illinois at Chicago)
Artist Talk

The diverse body of work created by MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle deals with such issues as representation and identity, social and geographic boundaries, and the effects of genetic developments on our concepts of individuality, privacy, and ethics. Manglano-Ovalle will discuss his current work, as well as The Garden of Delights (1998) featured in Gene(sis).
This event is partially funded by the Center for Art and Technology and the Myers Foundations. Block Museum

Friday, November 5, 2004
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art

_____________

Professor Sherry Lindquist
(University of Notre Dame)
" 'And What is More Amazing, there is Hell Painted Within:' Vision, Imagery, and Society in the Writings of Jean Gerson"

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France saw what has been called an
explosion of innovative imagery made by lay artisans for a wide public. Issues
such as the nature and function of religious images, the rise of secular
imagery, and the status of artists are often compartmentalized in the scholarly
literature addressing this period. The writings of theologian Jean Gerson
(1363-1429), "the most representative figure of his age," written in Latin and
French and directed to diverse audiences, offer a fascinating and synthetic
window into these topics. An analysis of Gerson's contradictory attitudes about the production and reception of late medieval art demonstrates the complicated way in which artistic imagery at this time asserted church authority even while providing a newly defined, flexible, and influential discursive arena for the laity.

Thursday, November 11, 5pm
Kresge Hall 2-425

Sherry Lindquist holds a PhD from Northwestern (1995), and is a Visiting
Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at the
University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on the complex
relationship between the social and the aesthetic, and draws on threads from
interdisciplinary scholarship regarding canons, artistic agency, visuality,
spatiality, and gender. She has received awards from the Mellon Foundation,
the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, the Getty, and most
recently, the Fulbright Program. Dr. Lindquist is currently at work on a book, Jean Gerson and Late Medieval Art: Image, Vision, Society, and her publications appear in Gesta, Manuscripta, Source.

______________

Eduardo Kac
Artist Talk

Eduardo Kac’s transgenic art has provoked both praise and controversy. In such work as the groundbreaking installation Genesis (1999) and the fluorescent rabbit of GFP Bunny (2000), Kac confronts complex issues concerning identity, agency, and responsibility. Kac will discuss the methods and themes of his artwork.
This event is partially funded by the Center for Art and Technology and the Myers Foundations. Block Museum

Friday, November 12, 2004
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art

____________

Professor James Meyer
(Emory University)
"Judd's Domesticity"

Known as one of the leading sculptors and critics associated with minimalism, Donald Judd developed an architectural practice in later years that has yet to be understood. An examination of Judd's designs for his houses in New York and Marfa, Texas, this talk considers the meaning of the domestic interior within Judd's oeuvre.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004 5:00 pm
Kresge Hall 2-425

James Meyer earned his PhD from John Hopkins University in 1995. He is an Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and is a Visiting Professor of Art History at Northwestern University for the fall 2004 . He is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (Yale University Press, 2001), the editor of Minimalism (Phaidon, 2000), and a frequent contributor to Artforum. His edited volumes of the writings of Gregg Bordowitz and Carl Andre are forthcoming from the MIT Press.
___________

Professor Darby English
(University of Chicago)
"Modernist Rhetorics, Repurposed"

In discussions about some recent work by black American artists, much is made of an opposition between abstractive practices and those "preoccupied with race and representation theory." This opposition and its characterizations beg at least two important questions-one concerning the depth of modernist commitment betrayed by the very practices for which "black abstraction" is presumed to bring remedy, and another to do with the very compatibility of modernism's epistemological ambitions with a truly progressive visual politics.

Thursday, December 2, 2004
5pm Kresge 2-425

Darby English holds a PhD from the University of Rochester and currently is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. His research interests include art historiography; modernity and modernism/post-modernity and post-modernism; installation art; writing on visual art by black practitioners in the US from the mid-nineteenth century; black cultural politics; postcolonial theory; critical race theory; art and continental aesthetics. His most recent publication is Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (eds. Darby English et al). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Art History Lecture Archive: Winter Quarter 2005

The Department of Art History is pleased to announce this event as part of the Myers Foundation Lecture Series in 2004-2005 that addresses new perspectives, voices, and media in art. The lectures are co-sponsored and organized with the Department of
Art Theory and Practice and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum.

Screening of Zhong Chen’s film, Love Poems

After a screening of his film, Love Poems, Chen will lead discussion about it. Chen is the first independent filmmaker in Sichaun. After earning his M.F.A. from Temple University in the States, he introduced the indie film world to Chengdu with Love Poems. This amazing film is a lavish, yet depressed, love story set against the urban backdrop of Chengdu, a city Chen has great affection for. Read more about the filmmaker and Love Poems here.

Thursday, January 27, 2005
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art

 

“Chinese Independent Filmmaking in Post Tiananmen Era”
Brown Bag Workshop led by Zhong Chen

After a screening of his current work, a documentary about the state of filmmaking after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, Chen will lead a workshop about the transformation of from state-run filmmaking to independent filmmaking, the revolutionary filmmaking of the Sixth Generation directors, and Chinese censorship which makes many Chinese films available only outside of China.

Friday, January 28, 2005
12pm-2pm Center for Humanities
*light refreshments provided*

Zhong Chen worked for Chinese Television for five years before he went to the film school at Temple University in 1998 and received his M.F.A. in 2003. Since 1999 his works have been screened in various international film festivals in the US and Canada, as well as in China. Love Poems, which will be screened this time at NWU, is his first narrative feature film. He is now based in Beijing.
____________________

Professor Matthew Biro
(University of Michigan)

"Raul Hausmann's Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Development of the Cyborg in Germany"

Monday, January 31, 2005
5pm Kresge 3-430
****
Colloquium:
"Representation and Event:Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys,
and the Memory of the Holocaust"
click here for article

Tuesday, February 1, 2005
11:30am Kresge 3-430
____________________

Senior Honors Thesis Colloquium
Department Event:
Participants limted to Faculty, Students, and their Guests

Wednesday, February 2, 2005
5pm Kresge 3-430
__________________

The Department of Art History is pleased to announce this event as part of the Myers Foundation Lecture Series in 2004-2005 that addresses new perspectives, voices, and media in art. The lectures are co-sponsored and organized with the Department of
Art Theory and Practice and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum.

Glenn Ligon
Distinguished Artist and Art Critic

Tuesday, February 8, 2005
5pm Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art
*Reception to Follow*


Glenn Ligon is a New York-based artist whose paintings and photographs have explored the imbrication of race, sexuality, and representation for over a decade.  At once sensuously rendered and acutely critical, his work has been consistently crucial to understanding the postmodern, the multicultural, and the global in contemporary aesthetic practice, as evidenced by his inclusion in such landmark shows as the 1993 Whitney Biennial and 2002's Documenta XI.  The subject of recent exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Kunstverein Munchen, Ligon's work was most recently on view in a solo show at Regen Projects in Los Angeles.  He is currently working on a study of
covers of books by and about African-Americans,
forthcoming from White Walls.

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Professor Sarah E. Fraser
(Northwestern University)

"Zhang Daqian, Amdo (Qinghai) Painters at Dunhuang in 1941, and the Practice of Artistic Archaeology (Meishu Kaogu)"

Zhang Daqian's (1899-1983) research and copying activities at Dunhuang in 1941-42 are well-known and widely celebrated.  They signaled a shift toward Chinese intellectual ownership of the site.  Often overlooked is the contribution that Amdo (Qinghai) Tibetan painters made to Zhang's artistic endeavor, and, in turn, how Zhang's invention of ‘artistic archaeology (meishu kaogu)' impacted the ensuing history of the Dunhuang Art Institute and the Dunhuang Research Academy.  This paper will focus on the relevance of Qinghai painting workshop of one of Zhang's Tibetan assistants during the 1940's, Caiwu Tsering, now 82.  

Department Event:
Participants limted to Faculty, Students, and their Guests
Friday, February 11, 2005
11am Kresge 3-430

Click Here for Intro & Essay

Click Here for Images

Click Here for Video
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Symposium:
Designing the World: William Morris and the Art of Victorian England
(Moderator: Professor Stephen Eisenman, Northwestern University)

Speakers include:
Diane Waggoner, Assistant Curator, National Gallery
David Peters Corbett, Head of Department and Director,
Research School in British Art
Debra Mancoff, Northwestern PhD Art History Graduate, Independent Scholar and Curator
Partha Mitter, Professor of History of Art, University of Sussex
Christopher Reed, Associate Professor of Art, Lake Forest College
Jeffrey Sokoblow, Professor of English, Southern Illinois University
Elizabeth Helsinger, Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

Saturday, February 12, 2005
9am Block Museum of Art

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Professor Christina Kiaer
(Columbia University)

"Aleksandr Deineka's Socialist Bodies: Soviet Realism of the 1930s"

Monday, February 14, 2005
5pm Kresge 3-430
*****
Colloquium:
"The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress"
click here for article

Tuesday, February 15, 2005
9:30am Kresge 3-430
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The French Interdisciplinary Group together with the Department of Art History presents:

Anne Pingeot
(Curator of Sculpture, Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

"Can a Station Become a Museum for Sculpture?"

Wednesday, February 16, 2005
12 Noon Kresge 3-430

Ms. Pingeot is mounting the exhibition "Degas Sculptures" at the Milwaukee Art Museum (February 19 June 5, 2005).  She is author of some dozen books
and catalogues and collaborated on many more, among them Degas Sculptures: catalogue raisonnée of the Bronzes , Italie, 1880-1910: l'art italien a l'epreuve de la modernité , Paris-Bruxelles, Bruxelles-Paris: Realisme, Impressionisme, Symbolisme, Art Nouveau and the catalogue raisonnée of the sculpture in the Musée d'Orsay.

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The Classical Traditions Initiative together with
the Department of Art History presents:

Dr. Penelope Davies
(University of Austin Texas)

"Sending Mixed Messages: Changing Valencies of Nero's Golden House"

An egomaniacal tyrant who fiddled while Rome burned, who liked to sing and race chariots and throw raucous subversive parties: thus history's picture of Nero. In A.D. 68, the emperor received the senate's  official damnatio memoriae , condemnation of memory. His statues were toppled, defaced or recarved, his name chiselled out of inscriptions, his memory removed from history. As part of this condemnation, scholars have agreed, the Flavian emperors systematically destroyed Nero's Golden House, building the Colosseum in its stead, as a symbol of a restored democratic ideal. This paper refutes this view. Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that Nero was in fact popular with the masses whose voices history has silenced. Evidence also indicates that the Golden House was not systematically destroyed, and that far from being an anti-Neronian statement, the Colosseum was an ingenious "rehabilitation" of a Neronian concept, and a masterpiece of diplomacy on Vespasian's part. This paper shows that scholarship has repeatedly oversimplified and plainly misread the extant evidence on two of Rome's most famous buildings.

Thursday, February 24, 2005
5:15pm Harris Hall 107
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Dr. Sarah Adams
(University of Iowa)

"Pressures of the Object: Uli Art and the Archive"

Monday, February 28
5pm Kresge 3-430
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Dr. Krista Thompson
(University of Illinois at Chicago)

"On Discipline: Photography, Tourism, and Civilizing Black Subjects"

Wednesday, March 2
5pm Kresge 3-430
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The Klopsteg seminar series in Science in Human Culture and
the Department of Art History present:

Dr. Josh Martin Ellenbogen
(University of Chicago)

"Galton, Mental Imagery, and Pictures of the Ideal"

Friday, March 4
12:00 Noon Crowe 1-135
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Dr. John Peffer
(Northwestern University)

"Africa's Diasporas of Images"

Friday, March 11
5pm Kresge 3-430
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Dr. Jessica Levin
(University of Chicago)

"Fang Reliquary Sculpture: An Autopsy"

 

Art History Lecture Archive: Spring Quarter 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
 
Northwestern University Department of Art History Deering Library