Art History Week

News and Events ~ NOVEMBER 11 - NOVEMBER 27, 2009

Upcoming Lectures & Events

Keynote lecture in the Year of the Humanities and the Visual Culture Center series
"Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism"

November 16 & 17, James Delbourgo (Associate Professor of the History of Science and Atlantic World at Rutgers University)

November 16: James Delbourgo will speak on "The Newtonian Slave Body" in Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, room L140 from 6:00-7:30 p.m., to be followed by a workshop.

November 17, 1:30-3:30pm: "Fugitive Colors," a workshop with James Delbourgo. Memorial Library Commons, Room 460 Memorial Library. Advanced registration and reading are required.

For information on event schedule and registering for workshop, please see the Visual Culture Program web page or email visualculture@education.wisc.edu

Mellon/White Workshop

Dates and Times: November 18 & December 2, 6:00-8:00pm
Location: Room 212 University Club
Light refreshments will be provided.

November 18 workshop on Sense Organs
December 2 workshop on Hallucination, Delirium, and other Modes of "Sensory Distortion"
To gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu

Exhibitions

Chazen Museum of Art:

Back in the World: Portraits of Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans
From October 31, 2009 through January 3, 2010| Mayer Gallery

Nearly 30 large-format color portrait photographs will be on view at the Chazen Museum of Art in the exhibition Back in the World: Portraits of Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans. As part of its Wisconsin Stories project, Wisconsin Public Television has produced documentaries about Wisconsin veterans' experiences in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. During production of the Vietnam project (to air in 2010), photographer James Gill took portraits of the veterans who participated in the documentary as a tribute to their service. These photographs provide insight into the veterans' memories and experiences, which they carry long after the war ends. The scale and presence of the images, combined with brief excerpts of interviews with their subjects, place them in a long tradition of art that delivers a powerful social message.

Nicola López: Urban Transformations
October 17, 2009 through January 3, 2010| Brittingham Galleries VI & VII

From October 17, 2009 through January 3, 2010, the Chazen will exhibit the twisting, jumbled topography of artist Nicola López. One might be tempted to call her a landscape artist, but not in any traditional understanding of the words. The works in Nicola López: Urban Transformations are not pastoral rural scenes but unpredictable urban worlds built with the imagery of debris from our manufactured, technological world.

Gallery I, The Known and the Unknown, Miriam Hall & Justin Nolan
Two photographers push beyond the conventions of their medium to engage with questions about what we think we know and what we don’t see, what seems familiar or abstract to us.

Gallery II, Oil & Water Mixed, Aaron Wilbers & Doug Haynes
This exhibit provides viewers with the opportunity to see how two artists working in two distinct media can arrive at similar styles.

Gallery III, Insufficient Avatars, Dave Beck & Piper Vollmer
Two recent graduates from UW-Madison’s Fine Art Program utilize digital and virtual media to re-examine the alleged qualities of objects or ideas in cyberspace.

Overture Galleries are free and open to the public, and are sponsored in part by DeWitt, Ross & Stevens Law Firm. Gallery hours: Monday through Thursday from 9:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m., Friday from 9:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m., Saturday from 10:30 a.m. - 9:00 pm, and Sunday from 12:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. For more information about these exhibits, please contact the Gallery Coordinator at 608.258.4961, galleries@overturecenter.com or visit our website at Overture Galleries

This exhibit showcases photographs from Jonas Bendiksen’s seven years of travel around many of the lesser-known regions of the former Soviet Union, including Transdniester, Abkhazia and the Kazakh steppes that are littered by the remnants of crashed Soviet spacecraft. By bringing Jonas Bendiksen and his Satellites exhibit to campus we hope to illuminate areas that are largely unknown in the West.

“Satellites” is presented by the WUD Art Committee with CREECA (Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia). Additional support is provided by the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters & Science, the UW-Madison Central Asian Student Association and the Russian Student Organization. This exhibition is organized by Magnum Photos.

Engaging both popular and idiosyncratic self-generated narratives, this sculptural exhibition questions notions of belief and examine its effects and potential consequences.

Childhood memories and family dynamics are the catalysts for Buie’s work. Using layering and textures, Buie creates a visual dialogue, allowing viewers to understand as well as create their own visual narration, in works that are both ambiguous and complex.

The Art League of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art has joined forces with Overture Center for the Arts to present a greatly expanded Holiday Art Fair on November 20, 21, and 22, 2009. This long-time Madison tradition, which features art and gourmet vendors, seasonal decorations, entertainment, and a sale of "rediscovered treasures" against a backdrop of stunning contemporary architecture, provides a perfect holiday shopping opportunity for Madison and surrounding communities. Holiday Art Fair 2009 will include nearly 100 vendors--more than twice as many as in recent years--in spaces within both the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (227 State Street) and Overture Center for the Arts (201 State Street). The fair will take place on Friday, November 20 (noon-6 pm); Saturday, November 21 (10 am-5 pm); and Sunday, November 22 (10 am-3 pm).

George Segal: Street Scenes
Traveling through December 6, 2009
George Segal: Street Scenes showcases the work of this noted American sculptor for a new generation of museum visitors. Segal (1924-2000) used plaster, found objects, and an innovative working process to make his life-scale works. Focusing on human interactions and everyday events in the urban setting, the exhibition includes works from the 1960s, when Segal first began using plaster, to the 1980s and 1990s, as he documented the effects of economic change on urban environments.

Cage and Cunningham: Chance, Time, and Concept in the Visual Arts pays homage to the visual legacy inspired by the life and work of composer, poet, and artist John Cage (1912-1992) and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009). The exhibition pays tribute to Cage and Cunningham's fifty-year collaboration through works from the permanent collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as seminal works from collections in the region.

The exhibition will be on view in the museum's State Street Gallery from October 24, 2009, through May 9, 2010.

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, Opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum
New exhibition challenges preconceptions of the Pop icon, begins four-venue tour on September 26

The first U.S. museum survey exhibition to explore the work that Andy Warhol produced during his final years begins its national tour at the Milwaukee Art Museum September 26, 2009–January 3, 2010. Andy Warhol: The Last Decade reveals a mature artist in full command of his complex repertoire, mixing forms and media with audacious fluency. Created amidst the bustle of Warhol's Pop celebrity, the works on view illustrate as never before the artist's vitality, energy, and renewed spirit of experimentation.

For more information about exhibits at the Milwaukee Art Museum, visit their website: Milwaukee Art Museum

This fall, Assistant Professor of Art History Nancy Marie Mithlo hosted Sacramento State Ethnic Studies Professor Brian Baker as a guest curator of the exhibit "The Americana Indian: American Indians in the American Imagination" which opened Friday, September 25, 2009 at the Memorial Union Theater Gallery with a reception from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. The exhibit continues until November 10th.

Ph.D. candidate Amanda Flaata, at the end of her academic year in Istanbul, spent time working on a project led by Dr. Michael Kerschner of the Austrian Archaeological Institute to excavate the Archaic-Classical settlement on mount Panayirdag. The project started on June 21 and ended August 1.

PhD candidate Caroline Malloy recently presented a paper, "Island Light in Cuba and Ireland: the Stained Glass Vision of Rene Portocarrero and Harry Clarke," at the annual Mid-Atlantic meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Meghan Doherty will be one of eight presenters at the 31st Annual Conference on Book Trade History in London, November 29-30. She will be presenting a paper titled, "A Youngmans Time Well Spent: Seventeenth-century Drawing Manuals and their Print Sources." While in London she will also give a presentation to the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum on November 26.