Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Vivien Fryd to Lecture on Andy Warhol’s Prints at the Portland Museum of Art

The Portland-area Vanderbilt Alumni Club has invited Vivien Fryd, professor of history of art, to lecture on Andy Warhol’s prints currently on view at the Portland Museum of Art. The event is scheduled for Saturday, December 10, and the exhibition, Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, is on view through January 1.

This major retrospective, encompassing more than 250 Warhol prints and ephemera from Portland-based collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, establishes Warhol’s innovative graphic production as it evolved over the course of four decades through his nearly singular use of the silkscreen process, a largely commercial format that Warhol elevated to high art status.

Warhol’s well-known fascination with popular culture instills the exhibition with a chronicle of American life in the second half of the twentieth century: from icons Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to the Birmingham civil rights protests, political posters of the 1970s, and 1980s ad campaigns.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 5, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Christopher Johns to Present Conference Paper on Johann Joachim Winckelmann at New York University on December 8

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will present a paper on December 8 titled “Winckelmann at the Villa Albani: Sculptural Display and the Politics of Patrimony in Enlightenment Rome.” The two-day conference, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Transalpine Fantasy of Modern Paganism,” is being held at New York University in honor of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Winckelmann, the celebrated antiquarian and reputed “father of art history.”

Johns will explore the cultural and philosophical connections between Cardinal Alessandro Albani and his librarian Winckelmann in the context of the chic new villa built by Albani on the Villa Salaria just outside the northern gateway of Rome. The villa’s primary function was to display the Cardinal’s impressive collection of antiquities, which was the finest private assemblage of ancient sculpture then in existence. The Villa Albani’s intellectual and museological culture also gave rise to some of the most influential art theoretical and historical publications of the eighteenth century, some of which are still of crucial importance to the disciplines of archaeology, philology, history of art, and museology.

*Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779), Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ca. 1777, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 49.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In this posthumous portrait Winckelmann is shown holding a Greek edition of Homer’s Iliad.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 5, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Tracy Miller Co-Chairs Panel at T’ang Studies Society Conference Celebrating Opening of the Elling O. Eide Library

Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art and Asian studies, recently co-chaired a panel at an international conference sponsored by the T’ang Studies Society and celebrating the opening of the Elling O. Eide Library in Sarasota, Florida. The theme of the panel was “Ritual Environments of the Tang Dynasty: Text Through Context.”

As access to tombs and temples from the Tang period has increased, scholars are now better able to match context to text, and are consequently better able to reveal the way in which
environments were designed, constructed, and used to facilitate ritual goals. In her paper Miller addressed “Ta 塔 and Gongta 宮塔: Examining Pagodas in Light of ‘Vedic Buddhism.’” The four papers presented by this panel matched object to text in an effort to discover the mechanism by which the physical was believed to enable access to the spiritual.

The three-day conference in November examined contemporary approaches to the Tang Dynasty and showcased the vibrant and robust collection of scholarly materials in the Elling Eide research library, which contains more than 60,000 volumes covering every period of Chinese history from ancient times to the modern era.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 30, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Session Features Scholars of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Water Management and Culture

The EOS Project, the Program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and the History of Art Department cosponsored a brainstorming session, Mater and Matrix: Water in Diachronic and Interdisciplinary Perspective, on November 18 in Cohen Memorial Hall. Scholars of ancient, medieval, and modern water management and culture, including HART Professors and EOS Fellows Betsey Robinson and Tracy Miller, compared approaches, evidence, successes, and pitfalls.

“Humanists and scientists, we are united by research interests in how water bodies and hydrological processes are affected by human activity and, in turn, how changing conditions impact society,” said Robinson, Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor of history of art. “We explore the power and possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration across time, around the world, and in diverse fields, from archaeology and art history to sociology and engineering.”

In addition to Robinson and Miller, other participants included Sophie Bouffier, professeur d’histoire greque occidentale, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France; and from Vanderbilt—Jonathan Gilligan, associate professor of earth and environmental studies and associate director for research, Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network; David Hess, professor of sociology and director of Program on Environmental and Sustainability Studies; and George Hornberger, professor of earth and environmental studies and director of Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment.

Life was born in water and is carrying on in water. Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.
–Albert Szent-Györgyi, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 14 (1971) 239

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 29, 2016 in Events, HART, VRC

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Tracy Miller Lectures on Blossoming of Buddhist Sacred Space in Medieval China at Yale University

Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art and Asian studies, addressed “Geometry, Cosmology, and the Blossoming of Buddhist Space in Medieval China” in a lecture that was hosted by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University.

As the earliest full-size towering pagoda extant in China, the pagoda at Songyuesi 嵩岳寺 in Dengfeng, Henan province (ca. 523 CE) is one of the most important objects we have for understanding the creation of Buddhist sacred space in Asia. Yet the plan of this structure, incorporating both dodecagon and octagon, is mysterious in its complexity－doubly so because it may be the only surviving example of its kind.

By focusing on the geometry used in its creation, Miller describes one possibility for determining the interior and exterior dimensions of the Songyuesi Pagoda plan, effectively encoding the structure with the potential for replication and regeneration important in the Buddhist sūtras as well as Indic temple designs of the period. “I also show how the same technique could have been used to create cosmological diagrams prior to the influence of Buddhist theology on Chinese society,” said Miller. “Thus, similarities in the use of geometry to describe the structure of, and potentially control, the cosmos in South and East Asia may have facilitated the rapid spread of Buddhism across this vast region.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 29, 2016 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Rebecca VanDiver Travels to Johannesburg to Present Conference Paper on November 18

Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of history of art, is a panelist and presenter at “Black Portraiture[s] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures,” a conference to be held November 17-19 in Turbine Hall in the Newtown district of Johannesburg, South Africa. VanDiver will address “On Fertile Ground: Africa, Motherhood and Reproduction in the Work of Four Black Women Artists” at a November 18 panel session entitled Visualizing Land.

The conference is the seventh in a series of transnational and diasporic conversations about imaging the black body. It offers a forum that gives artists, activists, educators and scholars from around the world an opportunity to share ideas, including more than 140 papers and performances presented on such topics as the global art market, activism, politics, tourism, sexuality, sites of memory, Afrofuturism, fashion, dance, music, film, and photography.

The conference was planned in collaboration with the U. S. Department of State, U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, Patrick H. Gaspard, Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, New York University’s La Pietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts and the Institute for African American Affairs.

*Kudzanai Chiurai, Genesis XI, 2016

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 15, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Studio VU Lecture Series Features Ian Berry on Wednesday, November 16

Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, will speak on Wednesday, November 16, at 6 pm in Wilson Hall, Room 103, as part of Studio VU: The Department of Art Lecture Series. A leader in the field of college and university museums, he is a regular speaker on interdisciplinary and inventive curatorial practice and teaching in museums.

Berry has organized more than 90 museum exhibitions, including interdisciplinary exhibitions for the Tang that combine scientific equipment, Hudson River School landscapes, Rube Goldberg cartoons, and Shaker furniture with new art from around the world. In addition to surveys of recent drawing, painting, and appropriation art, Berry’s curatorial projects have included monographic exhibitions with such artists as Terry Adkins, Nayland Blake, Kathy Butterly, Nicole Eisenman, Nancy Grossman, Jim Hodges, Nina Katchadourian, Corita Kent, Martin Kersels, Nicholas Krushenick, Los Carpinteros, Shahzia Sikander, Amy Sillman, Fred Tomaselli, and Kara Walker.

In his role as professor of liberal arts at Skidmore, he teaches an art history seminar entitled Inside the Museum and is a frequent guest speaker for a wide variety of academic departments. Berry is also the author and editor of many volumes devoted to contemporary art practice.

The lecture is free and open to the public, with parking available behind Wilson Hall and off 21st Avenue South. For more information, contact the Department of Art at 615.343.7241 or martha.l.dale@vanderbilt.edu.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 15, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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John Ott to Examine Hale Woodruff’s Radical Revision of Global Art History in November 10 Goldberg Lecture

As one of many efforts by mid-twentieth-century African American painters to reinvent abstraction into a more pluralistic cultural practice, Hale Woodruff’s six-panel mural for Atlanta University, The Art of the Negro (1950-51), offers a visual history of global art that freely mingles western and non-western art, ancient and modern cultures, and abstract and figural forms.

“The series unsettles conventional and linear histories of modernism not only by demonstrating its stylistic and demographic diversity, but also by revealing the complexity of the encounters between its practitioners and the non-western arts from which they drew inspiration,” wrote John Ott, professor of art history, James Madison University. “Woodruff’s radical revision of global art history to which his black colleagues also subscribed and contributed in print and in paint, was but one facet of this cohort’s larger project to carve out spaces for themselves in a white and increasingly homogenous gallery scene.”

Ott will deliver the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, November 10, at 4:10 p.m. in Cohen Hall 203 followed by a reception in the atrium. His lecture is entitled “Hale Woodruff’s Antiprimitivist History of Global Art.”

Ott’s areas of expertise are art history of the United States before 1945, with emphasis on art patronage, museums, and markets, and on social class and its intersections with ethnicity and gender; also Precolumbian art, with emphasis on Aztec Mesoamerica.

Through the example of Central Pacific Railroad executives in his recent book, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Ashgate Press, 2014), Ott redirects attention from the usual art historical protagonists—artistic producers—and rewrites narratives of American art from the unfamiliar vantage of patrons and collectors.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For more information, call the department at 615.322.2831.

*At Atlanta University, Hale Woodruff founded what was known as the Exhibition for African American artists. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection). “By bringing subjects of importance relating to the African-American experience to the American art canon, he was very much bent on helping to tell the history of African-Americans by painting murals,” wrote David Driskell, professor emeritus of art, University of Maryland.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 1, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Tracy Miller to Moderate Vanderbilt History Seminar on Monday, October 31

Kristina Kleutghen, assistant professor of art history and archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis, will present her paper, “The Terms of Vision in Late Imperial China,” at the Vanderbilt History Seminar on Monday, October 31, at 3:10 pm in Sarratt 216/20. Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, will serve as commentator for this session.

Kleutghen, who specializes in the visual culture of China’s Qing dynasty, will examine the introduction of Western lenses into China in the 17th century and the impact of these instruments on the ways of seeing. Her paper is part of her most recent book-in-progress, Lens onto the World: Optical Devices, Art, Science, and Society in China, which is the first to study the forgotten relationship between Chinese optical devices and art from the 15th through the early 20th centuries.

When the first Chinese treatise on optics appeared in 1847, it was inspired by the wide range of optical devices that had circulated in China for nearly 300 years. Since these devices were considered more within the realm of art than of science, their presence resulted in a wide range of paintings, prints, and visual culture. These works reveal that the effects of optical devices on vision and visuality arose less from foreignness, as might be expected, than from local culture and social class.

Her first book, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press), examines the Qianlong emperor’s use of “scenic illusion paintings” inspired (and produced) by European Jesuit artists as an example of early modern cultural exchange between China and the West.

Kleutghen’s paper is now available in the History Department office, 227 Benson Hall.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 27, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Reception and Tribute Honoring Barbara Tsakirgis Held at the Nashville Parthenon

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and The Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park hosted a reception and tribute honoring Barbara Tsakirgis, associate professor of classical and Mediterranean studies and history of art, on Monday evening, October 24, at the Nashville Parthenon.

A leading scholar of Greek art and archaeology and Vanderbilt professor for more than 30 years, Tsakirgis first studied at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens while a graduate student at Princeton. Through the years she has been a dynamic force for ASCSA, serving as a teacher, researcher, and long-standing member of the Managing Committee (vice chair, 2012-2016). She served two terms as an academic trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America and for 26 years headed the Nashville Society of the AIA. She is on the AIA Committee for Archaeology in Higher Education and a board member of the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, where she lectures about the Parthenon to the docents and other groups.

Her broad work on domestic architecture has contributed to a much richer understanding of the complicated interplay between private and public spaces and the experience of individuals, families, and communities in the ancient Mediterranean world. A long-time member of the excavation and research teams at the Hellenistic city of Morgantina in central Sicily and the Athenian Agora, the city center and marketplace of ancient Athens, she has published widely on the elements of Greek houses and households, including the decorated pavements at Morgantina and the remains of the Greek and Roman houses excavated at both sites.

“In the classroom Barbara’s knowledge and eloquence are legendary,” said Joseph Rife, associate professor and founding director of the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, “and her classes in classical art and archaeology have long formed a rock-solid foundation for two curricula—Classical Studies and History of Art. It is thanks to Barbara’s masterful teaching that Vanderbilt Classics has come to be recognized for its approach to the Greek and Roman antiquity from the integrated viewpoint of not just language and literature but also objects and landscapes. For Barbara, Sophocles and Plato are much richer with—and much poorer without—the Athenian Acropolis and Agora.”

Photograph of Barbara Tsakirgis in Greece, 2006 (above); photograph taken at the Nashville Parthenon (below): from left to right: George T. Orfanakos, American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), Jenifer Neils (Case Western University), Kathleen Lynch (University of Cincinnati), Barbara Tsakirgis and Jerry Spinrad, and Jack Davis (University of Cincinnati). Barbara’s ASCSA colleagues presented her with a framed image of the Statue of Liberty behind a personification of Greece, a poster by an anonymous artist of 1919.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 26, 2016 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, VRC

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