CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR SPRING 2013 ART HISTORY GRADUATES

 

Kelly Bethke, Sarah Ashley Black, Kyrie Eleison  Hartsough Caldwell,

Zoe Elizabeth Cooper, Renata B. Danks, Megan Leigh Dickman, Amanda Fragner

Amy Elizabeth Heunisch, Nicole D. Kauper, Michael Dineen Presiado, and Meredith Leigh Wald.

'RECONSTRUCTING GRANT WOOD'S SULTRY NIGHT'

 

 

ART HISTORY HONORS COLLOQUIUM

Meredith Wald, “Edgar Degas' Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen”

Kyrie Caldwell, "Digital 'Fayth' and Ritual 'Play'": A Study in Religious Participation and Audiovisual Affect in Contemporary Video Games.

 

EMILY PRINGLE, HEAD OF LEARNING PRACTICE AND RESEARCH AT TATE MODERN

 

LECTURE BY PROF. STEVEN HAHN

The Dimensions of Freedom: Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of the New American States

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor of nineteenth-century African-American history and the international history of slavery and emancipation launches the 2012-2013 Emancipations Series.

For more information see the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities website. 

LECTURE BY PROFESSOR KATHLEEN RYOR

 

"Martial Arts: Cultural Interactions between the Civil and Military in Ming China"

Scholarship on art collecting, art production and the broader world of elite cultural practices during the Ming dynasty has focused on the role that wealth and social status has played in the formation of taste and style, and the ways that anxieties about fluidity in social boundaries in the late Ming led to more vocal attempts to distinguish those who possessed "genuine" aesthetic sensitivity and cultural refinement. Much of this discussion has centered on various strata of the educated elite, which include landholders and government officials with degrees, and merchants. Conspicuously absent from such examinations of social position and its relationship to art and material culture is any discussion of the elite members of the hereditary military class. Yet, during the sixteenth century, Ming China was engaged in several military campaigns of enormous importance to the empire. Not surprisingly, military generals and commanders formed social as well as political relationships with civil officials and other members of the educated civil-degree-holding literati. This lecture will show that military men often participated broadly in activities typically closely associated with educated elites who engaged in civil-service examination culture, in areas such as scholarship, poetry-writing, painting, calligraphy, and collecting antique artifacts. Furthermore, it will be argued that this phenomenon is not merely another example of a one-way flow of cultural influence from the elite arbiters of taste in civil society. On the contrary, high-ranking or influential civil literati who were seriously involved in military matters often engaged actively in pursuits commonly associated with men from hereditary military families, such as archery, swordsmanship and other martial arts, the study of the military classics, writing of military strategy and the collecting of swords.

SCHEWE AWARD PRESENTATION

The Schewe Award, named after Prof. Douglas Schewe, is awarded for the best graduate student paper in a given year. This year the award committee has decided to make two awards:

1st Prize: Lex Lancaster King for her paper, "Specific Objects, Queer Archives: Sadie Benning’s Abstractions"

2nd Prize: Daniel Cochran for his paper "Hybridity and syncretism in the Art and Architecture of the Mausoleum of Constantina"

VAGANTES CONFERENCE KEYNOTE LECTURE

Prof. Thomas Dale (Dept. of Art History)

"Romanesque Sculpture, The Senses and Religious Experience" 

Professor Thomas Dale will give the keynote lecture for the Vagantes Conference, "Romanesque Sculpture, The Senses and Religious Experience" at 5:00 on Thursday March 21st in the Chazen Auditorium, 750 University Ave. A reception will follow in the Chazen Lobby.

COLLOQUIUM WITH FAISAL ABDU'ALLAH

"Relocating the Senses"

The Department of Art History is pleased to announce that our Sept. 13th colloquium will feature internationally renowned artist of photographs, prints, and performance, Faisal Abdu'Allah.  Faisal Abdu'Allah will be the UW-Madison Arts Institute artist in residence during the Spring 2013 semester.

ISLAMIC ART HISTORY CANDIDATE LECTURE

Ünver Rüstem (Harvard University)

“A Baroque of One’s Own: Eighteenth-Century Imperial
Ottoman Mosques on the World Stage.”

 The mid-eighteenth century saw the Ottoman capital of Istanbul undergo some of its most significant physical changes. Not only was the imperial mosque revived as a building type after more than a century’s hiatus, but a brand-new architectural style informed by Western models—the so-called Ottoman Baroque—emerged to eclipse older modes. These distinct but related phenomena have typically been viewed within a well-established decline paradigm that brands the material decadent and derivative. Challenging this characterization, Rüstem's talk will argue that the eighteenth-century mosques represent a conscious visual strategy to refashion the Ottoman capital for a changing world. In particular, the buildings’ creatively adapted Western references gave them new cross-cultural legibility at a time of heightened East-West interaction, allowing the Ottomans to reassert before a global audience the international standing of their empire. Rüstem's talk will focus on the Nuruosmaniye Mosque (1748–55)—the first great Ottoman Baroque monument—as a revealing case study of this bold endeavor. Bringing together various primary sources and looking at the mosque’s broader cultural and political context, Rüstem will demonstrate the Ottomans’ sophisticated and successful use of their most venerable building type to stake their claim to power on the modern world stage.

PUBLIC LECTURE BY YUHANG LI

"Splitting Hair for Salvation: the Gendered Materialization
of the Bodhisattva Guanyin in Late Imperial China"

Yuhang Li is an art historian of late imperial China. Her primary research interest is gender and material practice in relation to Buddhism in Ming and Qing China. Her dissertation (University of Chicago 2011) “Gendered Materialization: An Investigation of Women’s Artistic and Literary Reproductions of Guanyin in Late Imperial China” examines how lay Buddhist women participated in the cult of the most prevalent Chinese female deity, Guanyin, by reproducing images of her through painting, embroidery, and even using their own body to dress up as Guanyin and being captured in painting and photographs to reach religious salvation. Her broader research projects and research interests concern gender and Chinese art history, which cover women as a subject of representation and women as producers and patrons of the arts, as well as woman’s life cycle and its relation to material practice.

SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR NARCISO MENOCAL

"Frank Lloyd Wright and the Romance of the Master Builder”
Keynote lecture by Richard Cleary Professor and Page Southerland Page Fellow in Architecture, University of Texas at Austin
Friday, April 13th, 5:00 p.m., L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building
Reception to follow.

“In Honor of a Transcendental Scholar”
Former students and others will give short papers that honor Professor Menocal’s work and teaching.
Saturday, April 14th, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building

PUBLIC LECTURE BY DR. LOWERY STOKES SIMS

"How to Organize a Global Exhibition on Africa"

The Global Africa Project (2010) focused on aspects of design and art by individuals working in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States and the Caribbean. The exhibition challenged presumptions of what constitutes an “African” style or aesthetic by focusing on the inherently migratory nature of identity as it plays out in contemporary society.

For more information visit the Center for Visual Cultures website.

ART HISTORY CAREER FAIR

The Undergraduate Advisors in the Department of Art History are hosting a MAJORS AND CAREER FAIR for interested students on Thursday, April 18 from 4:30-6:00. We have reserved space for this event at the University Club (lower level), and plan to have generous food and beverages there, along with some presentations by faculty, staff, graduate students, members of the undergraduate club, and the humanities career advisor. The event is intended for current and prospective majors in art history. PLEASE NOTE: We would like interested students to RSVP for this event by emailing Teddy Kaul at ejkaul@wisc.edu, ideally by Monday, April 15.

• Learn about the revamped major requirements
• Hear about opportunities for internships at Chazen Museum of Art and elsewhere
• Find out about career options in Art History ranging from graduate school to museum positions
• Listen to current Art History graduate students discuss current research projects and ask questions about graduate student life
• Get information about career and post graduate preparatory resources for Art History majors here on campus
• Learn about study abroad opportunities in Art History
• Meet other students and learn about the Art History Society – the undergraduate art history organization

LECTURE BY PROF. MAGGIE BICKFORD

"Repossessing the Past: Refurbishing the Cultural Patrimony
at the Courts of Song-Dynasty China"

Chinese emperors of the 12th and 13th centuries created a new body of masterworks to stand in for lost famous paintings by the early Great Painters of China. The measure of their success is that we still use these Song-Dynasty creations as touchstones in our history of early Chinese art. How did this happen? Professor Bickford (Professor of Art History, Emerita - Brown University) will consider these imperial initiatives and their consequences for the History of Art in China today.

This lecture is part of the "New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China" Burdick-Vary Lecture Series, organized by Julia K. Murray, Professor of Art History, UW-Madison.  The series is sponsored by the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Center for East Asian Studies

PRACTICING THEORY: FAUHAUS AND SENSIOTICS - BODIES, MINDS, SENSES & THE ARTS

The Institute for Research in the Humanities presents a duet by Faisal Abdu’Allah, Arts Institute Artist-in-Residence and Henry Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and IRH Senior Fellow.  The theory and method called sensiotics, coined in 2003 by Henry Drewal, explores how the senses are engaged in the creation and reception of the arts, and the making of culture. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and motion continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world, and art. Seeing (hearing, tasting, etc.) is thinking, sensing is theorizing, because in the beginning, there was no word, only sensations.

FauHaus (F = Faisal, H = Henry, Haus = WI), a riff on the BauHaus concept of interdisciplinary arts and born out of the theory of sensiotics, is an arts laboratory that demonstrates the poetic dalliance between theory and practice. Thinking, making and dissemination are integrated and reconciled to insure the clarity and longevity of artistic ideas. The work of Faisal Abdu’Allah repositions ideologies relating to representation and memory through the interface of photography, printmaking, moving images and performative installation. Since his acclaimed graduation show at the Royal College of Art he has won numerous prizes including the first prize at the Tallinn Print Triennial 2010 and The Mayors prize for Sustainability for his film 'Double Pendulum'. He has exhibited extensively in the UK, Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery. Recently his first retrospective 'Art of Dislocation' was shown at the CAAM, Spain. CAAM published his second monologue for which he was awarded a doctorate. He is represented by Magnolia Editions, California, USA and Autograph ABP, London. He is currently the UW-Madison Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence. Henry Drewal, a student of African and African Diaspora arts, is interested in multi-media, multi-sensorial arts experiences. He developed sensiotics after the transformative body-mind experience of apprenticeship under Yoruba master sculptors in West Africa. He has published several books and catalogues, and many articles including Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, and Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and its Diasporas and is working on a book-length study of Yoruba arts, a cultural sensorium, and an accompanying sensory exhibition.

Find more information at Faisal Abdu'Allah's Interdisciplinary Arts Residency home page. 

 

ISLAMIC ART HISTORY CANDIDATE LECTURE

Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College)

 "Reassessing an Islamic Golden Age: Architectural Patronage,
Destruction, and Concealment under Cairo's "Mad" Caliph (ca. 1000-1010).”

 

Although today, a predominantly Sunni city, Cairo was founded by an Ismaili Shiʿi dynasty, known as the Fatimids (969-1171).  The Fatimid era is generally considered a golden age of multicultural tolerance, characterized by an efflorescence of art and architecture.  The single exception to this narrative of an interfaith utopia is the reign of the “mad” caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (r. 996-1021 CE). Al-Hakim is most (in)famous for his destruction of Egyptian churches and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 1009-1010, an act that would some decades later serve as a rallying cry for the Latin Crusaders. However, al-Hakim also sponsored significant architectural projects, which would forever alter the face of Cairo and its place in the medieval world.

This talk investigates an unusual case of architectural mutation, in which al-Hakim commissioned and then concealed a pair of minarets in a Cairene mosque, radically altering the aesthetics and meaning of the structure in the process.  Pruitt will interpret this act of obscuration within the context of shifting sectarian identities in the Fatimid realm, suggesting that the minarets acted as a visual emblem of a revised Fatimid imperial ideology.

ISLAMIC ART HISTORY CANDIDATE LECTURE

Yael Rice (Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art, Amherst College and Hampshire College, MA)

“Signs and Similitudes, Memory and Mimesis:
The Problem of Portraiture at the Mughal Court”

The Mughal emperors of the 16th and early 17th centuries have long been celebrated for their patronage of portraiture, which in its sheer descriptiveness appears to mark a bold departure from earlier, more codified and repetitive practices of image-making. While the seeming rise of Mughal mimetic portraiture has been attributed to the intervention of European engravings and paintings, in this talk I will trace a broader and alternate history of the portrait—and, specifically, physiognomic--image in the Islamic world, one that was mediated primarily through sight, imagination, speech, and text. Mughal court artists drew from but also introduced to this longer, established portrait tradition a new emphasis upon pictorial figuration. In doing so, royal painters presented themselves and their works as critical aids for imperial vision and memory—the very agents that could (and would) fix optical experiences in paint.

HONORS SYMPOSIUM

Reception follows in the Hagen Room

Erin Kauppinen, "The Ark's Demise: A Cabinet of the Seventeenth Century"

Synjin Mrkvicka, "Ben Shahn's Text and Images"

LECTURE BY JENNIFER GREENHILL

"Humor in Cold Dead Type: Performing Artemus Ward's London Panorama Lecture in Print"

This lecture explores the materiality of print and awkwardness of typographic humor through a study of Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869. The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material. Excessive in its contrivances, Ward’s book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page. It signifies, Greenhill argues, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.

Greenhill’s recently completed book Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine "serious" artistic culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.

Professor Greenhill will also hold a workshop focusing on her new research into commercial illustration from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. If you plan to attend the lecture please email Lauren Kroiz, kroiz@wisc.edu, to register and obtain the reading.

Sponsored by the UW-Madison Material Culture Program, University Lectures Committee, Department of Art History, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture

RECEPTION FOR "THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH WATERCOLORS 1790-1910" EXHIBITION

The Chazen Museum of Art is hosting a reception to celebrate the opening of "The Golden Age of Bristish Watercolors, 1790-1910."  This exhibition was curated by graduate and undergraduate students in the art history class AH555/855 "Victorian Networks: Themes Toward an Exhibition of British Watercolors."  See the exhibition online here.

CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF PROF. JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON

Please join us for a pair of events celebrating the
career of Professor Jane C. Hutchison:

"The Disembodied Object: Art and History in a Museum"
Keynote lecture by Peter Parshall, Curator Emeritus of Prints and Drawings,
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Friday, October 12th, 4:00 p.m., L140 Conrad A. Elvehejem Building

Papers and Tributes in Honor of Jane C. Hutchison
Saturday, October 13th, 9:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m., L140 Conrad A. Elvehejem Building

Download the full event program. (PDF)

EARLY MODERN CANDIDATE LECTURE

Shira Brisman, The Message in Transit

FRIENDS OF ART HISTORY LECTURE

"Balanced Bodies, Sanctified Souls:
Picturing Health in a Twelfth Century Monastic Medical Miscellany"

Ph.D. candidate in Art History Peter Bovenmyer will lecture on medicine, spirituality and visuality in the monastic imagination of the twelfth century.  A reception in the Kohler Art Library will follow the lecture.

LECTURE BY PROF. JEROME SILBERGELD

"The Birth of 'Literati' Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties:
How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know"

Every study of later Chinese painting history tends to establish two overarching categories into which all paintings are expected to fit: literati and not literati, the latter including court, ecclesiastical, and popular works. All modern viewers are charged with comprehending how this rubric of "literati painting," peculiar to China and tied to its civil service system, accounts for style. Yet the birth of literati painting has confused historians, for in its first few hundred years it exhibited a highly unstable visual identity that must prove baffling to anyone today expecting to see there a clear-cut differential between it and not-it. Professor Silbergeld (P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History - Princeton University) will discuss why this confusion exists, and explore how should we deal with this uncertainty about such a fundamental historical issue.

This lecture is part of the "New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China" Burdick-Vary Lecture Series, organized by Julia K. Murray, Professor of Art History, UW-Madison.  The series is sponsored by the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Center for East Asian Studies