Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Fine Arts Gallery Opens Exhibit on Race, Sports and Vanderbilt on Friday, September 23

The late 1960s, now fifty years in the past, remains a period that is recalled with a variety of interpretations—some accurate, some highly selective, some inaccurate—by those who lived through it. The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery presents Race, Sports and Vanderbilt: 1966–1970, which opens Friday, September 23, in Cohen Memorial Hall and highlights artifacts, photographs, texts, video, and voice—the material culture of this time on Vanderbilt’s campus and in the Nashville community.

The exhibition, curated by Martin Rapisarda, associate dean of the College of Arts and Science, is the gallery’s fifth consecutive collaboration with the Commons Reading. This year’s selection is Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South by Andrew Maraniss, which provides the social and cultural context for Vanderbilt in the late sixties. Central to the exhibition is the story of Perry Wallace, a Nashville native who had been the valedictorian at Pearl High School. Maraniss writes that “impressed with Vanderbilt’s engineering department … he chose Vanderbilt in spite of the fact he would be the SEC’s first black player, not because of it.”

An opening reception will be held in the Cohen atrium from 5 to 8 pm in conjunction with Fall for the Arts and Parents’ Weekend. At 6 pm in Cohen 203 there will be a panel discussion moderated by Rapisarda that will feature Maraniss, along with Vice Chancellor for Athletics David Williams and Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion George C. Hill.

Race, Sports and Vanderbilt: 1966–1970 seeks to answer the question “How does today’s Vanderbilt differ from the Vanderbilt of 50 years ago, and in what ways is it the same?” With a specific focus on race and sports, the exhibition helps visitors explore these questions in order to illuminate the turbulent 1960s, which was characterized by contradictions and conflict.

Using material from Vanderbilt University Library Special Collections, Vanderbilt Athletics, the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, the Nashville Public Library, and The Tennessean, among other sources, those who lived through the sixties can converse with Vanderbilt students on the civil rights movement as it engaged the Vanderbilt community then. Sports and the racial integration of SEC teams were one way this struggle came to the fore. The exhibition seeks only to provide a glimpse into this history and will concentrate on how it played out on Vanderbilt’s campus, with the goal of providing our campus community and greater Nashville the opportunity to discuss these issues anew in the gallery and at related special events.

On view through December 8, this exhibition is co-sponsored by Vanderbilt Athletics; the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; Vanderbilt School of Medicine; the College of Arts and Science, and The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons.

Free and open to the public, the gallery is on the second floor of Cohen Memorial Hall, located at 1220 21st Avenue South on the Peabody College campus.  Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am-4 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 1–5 pm. Please note that the gallery will be closed October 13-16 for Fall Break and November 19-27 for Thanksgiving Break. For more information, visit the gallery’s website or call 615-322-0605.

Perry Wallace in a game against basketball powerhouse the University of Kentucky, 1970 (Courtesy of Vanderbilt University Athletic Department); and Joseph Mella, curator and director of the Fine Arts Gallery, installing the exhibit

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 21, 2016 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Cheekwood Announces Volunteer Opportunities for HART Students This Fall

The Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art recently announced volunteer opportunities for HART students this fall.

These include several dates this month and next: September 23-24, assisting at a booth offering art activities at the TACA Fair in Centennial Park (shifts are 10-2 and 2-6 each day); October 3-7 and October 10, working at one-day art camps held in the Cheekwood studios and covering a multitude of media (October 5 and 7 are clay focus days); and October 25 from 10 to noon, coming in costume to “Goblins in the Gardens” to distribute trick or treat offerings in the gardens or assisting guests with art activities in the studios.

If anyone is interested in joining the fun at Cheekwood this fall, contact Barbara Petersen, volunteer coordinator at Cheekwood, at volunteers@cheekwood.org, and she will send more details. Or you can call her at 615.353.6966 (Monday-Friday, 9-5).

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 14, 2016 in Events, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Applications Due September 30 for Downing Grants for HART Undergraduate Research and Travel

Vanderbilt’s History of Art students are encouraged to apply for a fall 2016 Downing grant by Friday, September 30. The department awards these Downing grants for travel to exhibitions and research centers to supplement academic instruction for HART majors who are in the Honors Program, in senior seminars, or in “W” (writing) courses. These grants, which provide assistance for up to $1,500 in travel costs, are awarded in the fall and spring of each academic year.

Applications for the fall 2016 Downing grants—due Friday, September 30—should be addressed to the Downing Grants Committee, c/o Professor Elizabeth Moodey and submitted by email. Please email them to Professor Moodey (elizabeth.j.moodey@vanderbilt.edu).

The application should consist of a detailed proposal of one page explaining the purpose and rationale of the proposed travel; projected costs (accommodations, travel expenses, and research costs—–note that food is not included); and a supporting letter by the instructor in charge of the project.

Past Downing Grants have supported travel for research on photojournalism in post-war Berlin, a Marcel Duchamp installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in the British Museum, and a Gothic reliquary in the Louvre.

One of HART’s Downing grant recipients last spring, Haley Brown, BA’17, spent two months in South Africa this summer, two weeks of which she was in Cape Town. Here she conducted research for her honors thesis at the Michaelis Fine Arts Library on the University of Cape Town’s campus and visited the Iziko South African National Gallery. Brown is writing about the works of four South African photographers—Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Santu Mofokeng—and their role in the socially tumultuous country.

“Through the generous aid from a Downing grant, I gained invaluable experience with the very subject matter I have been passionately researching over the past year,” said Brown. “To see these works in person has given my thesis argument so much more power in the sense that my personal experience will clarify and strengthen my writing.”

Entrance facade of the “Constitutional Court of South Africa,” written in South Africa’s 11 official languages and photographed by Haley Brown while in Johannesburg

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 9, 2016 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Downing Grant Supports Haley Brown’s Research on Post-Apartheid and Contemporary Photographers in Cape Town

This past summer I spent two incredible months in South Africa serving and learning from the country’s wonderful people. For the first six weeks, I had the privilege of participating in a Vanderbilt Office of Active Citizenship global service program where eleven Vanderbilt students worked at a primary school and care center in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

I then spent another ten days in Cape Town to conduct research for my honors thesis, “View Points: Diverse Practices in Late 20th Century and Current South African Photography.” My writing focuses on the works of four South African photographers—Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Santu Mofokeng—and argues for the extreme mobility that portrait photographers have had and still provide to the socially tumultuous country.

Through the generous aid from a Downing grant, I gained invaluable experience with the very subject matter I have been passionately researching over the past year. I spent most of my time in Cape Town at the Michaelis Fine Arts Library on the University of Cape Town’s campus. All the resources that I had sought to obtain in the States were right at my fingertips in the Michaelis Library, whose collection primarily focuses on African and South African art.

I also visited the Iziko South African National Gallery to see their extraordinary exhibit on South African artists. The exhibit included works from numerous iconic native artists (for example, Jane Alexander’s The Butcher Boys, mixed media, 1985-1986) as well as a few works by the photographers I’m researching. To see these works in person has given my thesis argument so much more power in the sense that my personal experience will clarify and strengthen my writing. In addition to visiting the National Gallery’s main exhibitions, I also coordinated my schedule to include a day at their art library as well. There I found other texts that the Michaelis Library did not have.

The remainder of my time in Cape Town included visiting other galleries around town – my favorite was a Pieter Hugo exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery. Hugo’s 1994 series depicts children from South Africa and Rwanda born after 1994 (the year apartheid was officially abolished from South Africa). Hugo printed the photos large scale and in full color. Although my thesis focuses on Hugo’s There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends series, experiencing his other series gave me a sense of the kind of visual language and physical presence he uses.

My time exploring what Cape Town had to offer, in both an academic sense and a cultural sense, laid the groundwork for my thesis to develop more maturely and naturally, something I would have never found in an American library or gallery. The seconds, minutes, and hours I spent pouring over books and photographs and absorbing the South African atmosphere made for many unforgettable memories.

Haley Brown, BA’17, is a history of art and psychology major. She will present the results of her research and defend her honors thesis in April. Her thesis advisor is Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of the history of art. Among Haley’s many photographs documenting her South African experience are the following (top to bottom): Street art in Woodstock, a suburb of Cape Town; the summit of Table Mountain overlooking the cape; Jane Alexander’s The Butcher Boys in the National Gallery; and peacocks outside the Blue Shed Coffee Roastry in Mossel Bay.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 2, 2016 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Jing Zhuge to Examine Role of the House in Late Imperial China in September 1 Lecture

Architectural historian Jing Zhuge, associate professor in the School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing, will present a lecture on Thursday, September 1, from 12:15-1:30 pm in Buttrick Hall 123. The title of her lecture is “Identity, Morality and Domesticity: A Merchant’s House in 16th- and 17th-century North China in The Plum in the Golden Vase.”

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and the Asian Studies Program, her talk is about a Chinese businessman’s house based on the famous late 16th-century novel, The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei 金瓶梅). Jing Zhuge will examine the architecture and activities within three different parts of the hero’s house as to social networks, family structure, and gender relationships in the late Ming dynasty.

She will address the following issues: How did the notions of family, gender and morality shape the idea of domesticity at the time the novel was written? How did the physical form of the house articulate and serve these ideas? Finally, this research will reveal that a house in late imperial China was not a refuge for people to hide from society as modern houses are. Instead, the most important aspect of dwellings and houses was to integrate the family into the society for external approval and respect.

Her main fields of research are the social significance of architecture in history, the historiography of Chinese architecture, and the reconstruction of traditional Chinese concepts of architecture.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 30, 2016 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Architectural Historian Jing Zhuge to Address Historic Preservation in China in August 31 Lecture

Jing Zhuge, associate professor in the School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing, will present a lecture on Wednesday, August 31, from 9:10-10 a.m., in Cohen Memorial Hall 324. Her lecture is entitled “Historic Preservation in China: Interest Chains and Value Judgments.”

Historic preservation is a global issue of pressing concern. Her presentation, sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Asian Studies Program, and the EOS Project Vanderbilt, will outline the complicated situation of historical preservation in China through three different case studies: (1) the preservation plan of “invisible” vernacular architecture managed by an inexperienced government agency; (2) the preservation of a world cultural heritage site suffering from excessive tourism; and (3) the preservation and exhibition of the site of an archaeological and historical monument. Jing Zhuge will analyze the different forces involved in these examples to explain how a preservation project works within the Chinese system. In conclusion she will focus on the most significant part, value judgments, and discuss how heritage preservation always includes intentional choices regarding history and memory.

Her main fields of research are the social significance of architecture in history, the historiography of Chinese architecture, and the reconstruction of traditional Chinese concepts of architecture.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 30, 2016 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Christopher Johns Receives Chancellor’s Award for Research at Fall Faculty Assembly

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, received the Chancellor’s Award for Research at the Fall Faculty Assembly on August 25. Johns was recognized for his book The Visual Culture of the Catholic Enlightenment (Penn State University Press, 2014), a culmination of many years of painstaking archival research. The book reflects a keen sense of mature interpretive conceptualization. It embodies his field-defining contribution to eighteenth-century European cultural history.

“Christopher’s writing has been described as a ‘magisterial and ground-breaking work,’” Zeppos said. “It is a landmark for his discipline that will influence generations of scholars to come.”

Until relatively recently, most scholars considered the notion of a Catholic enlightenment either oxymoronic or even illusory, since the received wisdom was that the Catholic Church was a tireless and indefatigable enemy of modernist progress. According to Johns, however, the eighteenth-century papacy recognized the advantages of engaging with certain aspects of enlightenment thinking, and many in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, both in Italy and abroad, were sincerely interested in making the Church more relevant in the modern world and, above all, in reforming the various institutions that governed society.

Johns has written another groundbreaking study that examines chinoiserie—European works of art and visual culture that were influenced by Chinese art—in the context of church and state politics, with particular focus on the Catholic missions’ impact on Western attitudes toward China and the Chinese. In his book, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context (University of California Press, 2016), Johns demonstrates that the emperor’s 1722 prohibition against Catholic evangelization, which occurred after almost 150 years of tolerance, prompted a remarkable change in European visualizations of China in Roman Catholic countries.

Emerging from an international conference on the papacy of Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini (reigned 1740-1758) and its legacy, the anthology Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality (University of Toronto Press, 2016) offers a broad and nuanced assessment of Benedict’s engagement with Enlightenment art, science, spirituality, and culture. Johns, co-editor of the volume, contributed two essays:  “Introduction:  Benedict XIV and Catholic Enlightenment” and “The Papacy and Coffee Culture: Benedict XIV’s Coffee House in the Quirinal Gardens.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 29, 2016 in HART, VRC

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Restoring Humanity: The Interconnectedness of Life Is Illustrated in Shimmering Glass Tiles

It has been 47 years since Ben Shahn’s mosaic Peabody—1968 was dedicated in the Hobbs Human Development Laboratory on what was then the campus of George Peabody College for Teachers. The effort to commission Shahn, an artist well known for his advocacy for the poor, was spearheaded by Susan Gray, professor of psychology, emerita, and an advocate for children, particularly those held back developmentally by poverty. She met Shahn in 1965, the same year the John F. Kennedy Center was established at Peabody. Knowing about his concern for the poor and dispossessed, “I thought I’d get up my nerve and ask him if he’d be interested in doing something for us,” she said in a 1990 interview, two years before her death. Read more…

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 25, 2016 in HART, VRC

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HART Alumnus and Sculptor Alan LeQuire to Unveil Tennessee Women’s Suffrage Monument on August 26

Nearly a century after Tennessee became the 36th state—the last state needed—to ratify the 19th Amendment giving all women the right to vote, HART alumnus and local sculptor Alan LeQuire will unveil his large-scale public monument to suffragists on Women’s Equality Day, Friday, August 26. The formal ceremony will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Centennial Park near the Parthenon, with a gallery and studio open house immediately following at the LeQuire Gallery, 4304 Charlotte Avenue, from 1-4 p.m.

This monumental bronze work features heroic-scale portraits of five women from across the state and country who were leading suffragists and fought valiantly in the final ratification battle in Nashville in August 1920: Anne Dallas Dudley of Nashville, Abby Crawford Milton of Chattanooga, J. Frankie Pierce of Nashville, Sue Shelton White of Jackson, and national suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, who came to Tennessee to direct the pro-suffrage forces from the Hermitage Hotel. Portraits of contemporary leaders Jane Eskind, Lois DeBerry, and Beth Harwell appear on relief plaques.

“According to the Smithsonian, less than 8 percent of the portrait statues in the U.S. are of women,” LeQuire said. “I am very pleased that here in Nashville we will be bridging that gap with portraits in bronze honoring eight women.”

LeQuire’s initial training in sculpture was facilitated by such Nashville artists and family friends as Jim Leeson, Olen Bryant, and Vanderbilt sculptor and professor/mentor Puryear Mims. These early influences fueled his lifelong passion for sculpture. LeQuire was a pre-med student at Vanderbilt until he had the opportunity to study art and art history in France. “Basically that was me making the decision not to be a doctor. I could never stop sculpting—I was sculpting in my dorm room,” he said in an interview with the Nashville Arts Magazine (August 2016).

“I was not a natural sculptor; I’ve had to work at it. I’ve grown as an artist in my skill level. The goal is fluency, like learning a language.”

Known for such monumental works as the Athena Parthenos (1990) at the Parthenon and Musica (2003) near Music Row, LeQuire has also created portraits and figurative sculpture. He works mostly in clay, and many of his works are also cast in bronze. Musica, at the top of Demonbreun Street, is one of the largest cast-bronze figurative sculptures in the country.

LeQuire’s solo exhibition at his own LeQuire Gallery on Charlotte Avenue closes on Saturday afternoon, August 27. On view are drawings, watercolors, and portrait sculpture, as well as small to life-size figures in bronze and terracotta. In addition, the exhibit also features preparatory works from the suffragist monument, including maquettes and early models of the sculpture.

Suffrage maquette, clay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 23, 2016 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Millie Fullmer Appointed Curator and Director of HART Visual Resources Center

Millie Fullmer is the new curator and director of the History of Art Department’s Visual Resources Center, having served as assistant curator since August 2015 and more recently, interim director.

“This is an auspicious moment for Millie to take over the directorship of the VRC,” said Kevin Murphy, chair and professor of history of art. “The College of Arts and Science is in the process of establishing a new Digital Humanities Center with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We are looking for Millie to play a major role in integrating the efforts of the VRC into the College’s larger DH initiative, especially with the development of new technologies for teaching as an important part of the recent Academic Strategic Plan.”

Upon completing graduate degrees in art history and religious studies (New Zealand) and library and information science (New York’s Pratt Institute), Fullmer worked as an arts librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University’s Avery Library prior to coming to Vanderbilt. “Art librarianship and visual resources are no longer considered mutually exclusive,” said Fullmer, who envisions the VRC as a place where faculty and students can come together to learn about the latest digital tools and invent novel ways to support innovative research and teaching.

“In the age of the Internet, many predicted the demise of the librarian or in our case, visual resources curators,” said Fullmer. “The reality, however, is quite different. The information age has spawned countless data to sift through, creating a greater demand for information specialists that have the wherewithal to find the needle in the proverbial haystack. Visual literacy instruction in art history classrooms is a responsibility the VRC already performs, but we envision developing beyond the token 15-minute classroom instruction.”

With her boundless creative energy and imaginative prowess, Fullmer has distinguished herself as an invaluable asset to the department. An avid reader and lover of the arts, she is an active participant in the University and wider arts community of Nashville, regularly attending museums and galleries, art exhibitions, lectures, art crawls, concerts, and workshops and conferences. This summer she completed a part-time, six-month fellowship—the Lazenby Library Fellowship—as part of a historic initiative to reinstate Cheekwood as an American country era estate.

Also part of the package are our new director’s awesome baking skills. Her most recent creation: an apricot, walnut and lavender cake!

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 28, 2016 in HART, VRC

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