Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Applications due February 5 for Downing Grants for HART Undergraduate Research and Travel

HART majors and minors are encouraged to apply for a spring 2016 Downing grant by Friday, February 5.  The department awards these Downing grants for travel to exhibitions and research centers to supplement academic instruction for HART students who are in the Honors Program, senior seminars (HART 4960), or  “W” (writing) courses.  The Downing 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 spring 2016 Downing grants—due Friday, February 5—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 (accommodation, 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 research on projects ranging from a Marcel Duchamp installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in the British Museum, to a Gothic reliquary in the Louvre.

Most recently awarded a Downing grant, Jalen Chang, HART and economics major, spent seven days in Germany, traveling to Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden over Thanksgiving break.

“At the suggestion of my honors thesis adviser, Professor Christopher Johns, I embarked on this solo journey in order to view the works of Caspar David Friedrich in their homeland, an invaluable and rewarding trip,” said Chang, who viewed more than forty Friedrich paintings. “This was crucial to the quality of my project (involving the nationalistic and anti-Napoleonic interpretations of the German painter’s works), as his pieces have a unique and complicated meaning to Germany’s people and history.”

*Jalen Chang, HART and economics major, Class of 2016, provided the photographs for this blog post:  Dresden Castle; and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin at night.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 25, 2016 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Archaeologist Margaret Miles to Present Talk on Elymian Segesta on January 22

In addition to delivering the Goldberg Lecture on January 21, archaeologist Margaret Miles, Professor of Art History and Classics, University of California, Irvine, will present a lunchtime talk entitled “Elymian Segesta:  Trojans and Greeks in Western Sicily” on Friday, January 22, at 12:10 pm in 309 Cohen Hall.  Miles will examine the history of Segesta, its temples and sanctuaries, and how the Trojan War was used by non-Greeks to form a link with the larger Hellenic past.

As a crossroads of civilizations in the Mediterranean, Sicily has always produced cultural innovators—from Stesichoros to Archimedes, Mithaikos to Giuseppe de Lampedusa.  Garibaldi got his start in western Sicily and led the way to founding modern Italy.  In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas stops twice in Sicily, where he was welcomed by fellow Trojans, refugees from the war, and he founded the new cities of Segesta and Eryx—Virgil used ideas already in the air centuries earlier, well before Romans were powerful.  But how did Segesta really get started?

New investigations of an Elymian sanctuary at Segesta support a picture of a city culturally linked to their sometime enemy and neighbor Selinous, a Greek city famous for its many temples.  The people of Segesta, although Elymian, also made considerable investments in two large Doric Greek temples:  an unfinished one on the tourist circuit today, and another, earlier and larger, and barely known but soon to be revealed.

Miles begins new fieldwork at Segesta in June.  She recently served a six-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classical Studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Cosponsored by the Departments of Classical Studies and the History of Art, Vanderbilt University, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, her talk 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 History of Art department at 615.322.2831.

*View of east side of Doric temple at Segesta, Sicily

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 18, 2016 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Jalen Chang Visits Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden to View Friedrich Paintings on a Downing Grant

Thanks to the generosity of the Downing family and Vanderbilt’s History of Art department, my Thanksgiving dinner this year took place in a hotel room roughly 5,000 miles away from anyone I knew, in between a flurry of museum visits in three different German cities.  At the suggestion of my honors thesis adviser, Professor Christopher Johns, I embarked on this solo journey in order to view the works of Caspar David Friedrich in their homeland, an invaluable and rewarding trip.  

In the seven days I spent in Germany, I traveled to Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden, and saw more than forty Friedrich paintings.  This was crucial to the quality of my project (involving the nationalistic and anti-Napoleonic interpretations of the German painter’s works), as his pieces have a unique and complicated meaning to Germany’s people and history.  Consequently, only one is located in the United States.

My working title is The Politicized Sublime:  An Examination of Friedrich’s Anti-Napoleonic Landscapes.  Getting the opportunity to see the artwork I had been researching for months in a location that added an extra aura of importance and weight was an incredibly cool academic experience, and one that has motivated me to pursue my project further in graduate school.  If the only downside was eating take-out wurst for Thanksgiving in a foreign country, I would make that trade-off again without a second thought.

*Jalen Chang, HART and economics major, Class of 2016, was awarded a Downing grant for the fall semester 2015 and traveled to Germany to pursue his research over Thanksgiving break.  Chang is also president of the Vanderbilt Baseball Club.  He provided the photographs for this blog post:  Jalen Chang posed in front of the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and a view of “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 13, 2016 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Goldberg Lecturer Margaret Miles Addresses Augustan Renewal in Athens on January 21

Archaeologist Margaret Miles, Professor of Art History and Classics, University of California, Irvine, will deliver the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History entitled “Transferred Temples and Augustan Renewal in Athens” on Thursday, January 21, at 4:10 pm in Cohen Memorial Hall, room  203.  A reception will follow in the Cohen atrium.

Soon after defeating Cleopatra and Marc Antony at Actium, Augustus required populations (and cults) in western Greece to be uprooted and moved to create a new city, to be called Nikopolis, and to a now much larger Patras. Thereby Augustus created new Roman administrative centers in Greece that had easy links by sea to Italy.  Meanwhile Athens was still trying to recover from the devastating siege of Sulla a generation earlier.

Augustus supported an extensive program of religious renewal and architectural reconstruction, apparently forgiving the city’s support of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.  The architectural renewal is reflected in the importation of several 5th century BCE temples and one double stoa from the Attic countryside into central Athens. New construction was sponsored as well, and at least one temple in the countryside was rebuilt and rededicated.

In her lecture Miles will present the latest evidence for these remarkable transfers and deliberate recycling of 5th century BCE architecture and investigate the implications of this classicizing building program for the political realities in Augustan Athens.

Miles recently served a six-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classical Studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.  Her publications include a study of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (Hesperia 1989), Agora Excavations XXXI: The City Eleusinion (Princeton, 1998), Art as Plunder: the Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge, 2008), and three edited volumes: Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited (Berkeley 2011), Autopsy in Athens: Recent Archaeological Research in Athens and Attica (2015), and Blackwell’s Companion to Greek Architecture (forthcoming 2016).  Miles begins new fieldwork at Segesta in Sicily in June, 2016.

Cosponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Archaeological Institute of America, 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.

*View of the Agora, Athens, Greece

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 8, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Studio VU Lecture Series Features Regina Agu on January 20 in Ingram Studio Arts Center

Artist Regina Agu’s work explores the intersection of memory and history, with interests in the production, performance, and archiving of historical narratives, personal memory, and collective memory.   Agu will present a lecture at 7 pm on Wednesday, January 20, in Room 220 of the Ingram Studio Arts Center on the Vanderbilt campus.

Agu works across disciplines both individually and collaboratively on such subjects as  diasporic subjectivity at the intersection of collective and personal history; public policies as they govern and regulate communities of color; choreographies and sites of mass congregation and demonstration; and residual traces of hidden or suppressed narratives.

Agu’s work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances at New Museum, labotanica, DiverseWorks, Project Row Houses, University Museum at Texas Southern University, Box 13, and Lawndale Arts Center, among other venues.  Her published experimental texts include ON/OFF (onestar press, Paris, France via Book Machine, Houston), Visible Unseen (Nyx, a nocturnal, Goldsmiths, University of London), and Index, With and for: “Black Mo’nin’,” by Fred Moten (Book Club Book, Future Plan and Program). She is a partner at Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run artist space in Houston, TX, and a co-founder of paratext, an independent small press.

Sponsored by the Department of Art, the lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the lots to the side of Ingram Studio Arts Center as well as the parking lot across the street on 25th Avenue South and the parking garage via the Highland Avenue entrance.

For more information, please contact the Department of Art at 615-343-7241 or martha.l.dale@vanderbit.edu.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 8, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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“The Last Laugh: Selections from Michael Aurbach’s Secrecy Series” Opens January 14

Presented in honor of Michael Aurbach, professor of art, who retires this year after 30 years of teaching sculpture and drawing at Vanderbilt, The Last Laugh features three large-scale sculptures from Aurbach’s Secrecy Series and will open on Thursday, January 14, in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Memorial Hall.  The reception is from 5 to 7:30 pm, with the artist’s talk at 6 pm in Cohen 203.

On view through March 3, these sculptures, in addition to others from the series, are an artistic commentary on the use and abuse of power by individuals.  His artworks are characteristically imbued with wit and satire, each large-scale sculpture a kind of stage.  In that way Aurbach suggests that those leading the institutions to which the works point are bad actors in a dark and laughable play.  Included are Administrative Trial and Error (2008), Administrative Spectacle (2013), and the newly completed Cassandra (2016).

His socially inspired works have been exhibited throughout the United States. For three decades Aurbach’s sculpture has addressed issues related to death, identity, and the plight of socially disenfranchised groups.  Much of his recent work serves as commentary on academia, secrecy and institutional behavior.

“The focus of the sculptor’s biting wit is the secretive, despotic stance toward underlings of those in power, be it academic authority or, by extension,  that of the government or the church.  Like a Baudelairean “fleur du mal” masking evil behind glamour, Aurbach’s installation [Administrative Trial and Error] embeds a lethal message within an attractive, admirably crafted configuration of steel pipes and sheet metal,”  wrote Dorothy Joiner, Lovic P. Corn Professor of Art History, LaGrange College  (World Sculpture News, Autumn 2009).

Aurbach has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards from institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Southern Arts Federation, and Art Matters, Inc.  He has exhibited widely, with more than 80 solo shows at such locations as the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, the Indianapolis Art Center, and the Artemisia Gallery, Chicago.  In 2001 his sculpture was included in the inaugural contemporary art exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 2015 Aurbach was awarded the Southeastern College Art Conference’s President’s Award for Exemplary Achievement, their highest honor in recognition of significant personal and artistic development as well as long-standing service.  He is a past president of the College Art Association (2002-2004), the world’s largest organization of visual arts professionals and he has lectured at more than 250 colleges, museums, and art institutions.

The Last Laugh is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and supported, in part, by the Department of Art.  Visitors to the opening reception may park, free of charge, in any unreserved space in Lot 95, accessible from 21st Avenue South.  The exhibit is free and open to the public, and gallery hours are Monday through Friday 11 am-4 pm and Saturday and Sunday 1-5 pm.

The Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For further information, please visit vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

Michael Aurbach
American, b. 1952
Administrative Trial and Error, 2008
Mixed media
8′ x 8′ x 12′
Courtesy Michael Aurbach

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 8, 2016 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures

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HART Major and Library Dean’s Fellow Haley Brown on CBAA Conference Panel January 8

Haley Brown, History of Art major (Class of 2016) and Library Dean’s Fellow, will present Contemporary Artists’ Books in Digital Humanities Projects at Vanderbilt in a panel session on Friday, January 8, at the 2016 College Book Art Association National Conference.  The session, entitled  “Visualizing Collections:  Artists’ Books at Vanderbilt’s Heard Library,” will be held from 10:00-11:30 am in the Lower Level Meeting Room of the Vanderbilt Student Life Center.

Other Vanderbilt panelists are Mary Anne Caton, senior consultant for educational and interpretive programs at the Heard Library, Folding, Printing, Binding, Cutting: Contemporary Artists’ Books; and Jana Harper, senior lecturer with the Department of Art, Collecting Books for Personal Pleasure and Useful Pedagogy.  Tate Shaw, director of the Visual Studies Workshop and assistant professor of English at SUNY Brockport, is the panel moderator.

Brown’s presentation is based on her Library Dean’s Fellow project during the fall semester 2015.  From Southern presses in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama to those in the West and Northeast, the 400-plus artists’ books in Special Collections represent diverse traditions in book objects—“books intended as works of art in themselves and designed as an artistic whole, integrating binding, text, illustration, etc.”  Artists have used their book arts to explore topics like race, memory, and dreams.  The goal of this project is to create a visual representation of the context for the book’s creation and a website layering the network analysis of this collection with a map of the artists’ presses together with selected collection images and video. Many of the approximately 500 books in Special Collections were cataloged and digitized for the 2012 exhibition, The Book as Art.

Brown digitized the remaining artists’ books, following archival standards, to create a website including network analysis of the collection, selected images of books, and a map of book artists’ studios, and schools. This project allows users to visualize relationships between presses, artists, and their teachers, schools, and styles.

For more information about the College  Book Art Association’s National Conference, January 7-9—“Telling the Story”—go to http://www.collegebookart.org/Conference-Schedule.

*Artist’s book from Special Collections, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University   **CBAA panelists (from left to right):  Jana Harper, Tate Shaw, and Haley Brown

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 7, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Mireille Lee Presents Paper on Classical Sculpture and Eugenics

Mireille Lee, assistant professor of history of art, will present a paper entitled “Classical Sculpture and Eugenics at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco” at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America held January 6-9 in San Francisco.

Her paper analyzes the use of classical sculpture and classicizing imagery in the display of the Race Betterment Foundation at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, which is celebrating its centenary this year.  Lee describes the profusion of classicizing imagery on the exterior and interior of the Race Betterment booth, among the most popular displays of the exhibition, as clearly illustrating the goals of eugenics.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the imagery of the classical past was consciously employed to create a vision of a new, utopian future.  Classicizing buildings and sculptures permeated the fairgrounds.  The official fair poster featured Hercules excavating the Panama Canal as his “thirteenth labor.”  All these images were intended to create “a beautiful, idyllic past, present, and future for the still-young state of California,” Lee writes, “and to hide the ugly realities of racism and forced sterilization that were suffered by many.”

In addition to presenting her paper, Lee will serve as a respondent for a colloquium on dress in the ancient Mediterranean.  She has published widely on the social functions of dress in ancient Greece, including her monograph Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

*Perham Wilhelm Nahl (1869-1935).  The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules, prize-winning poster for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 6, 2016 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Riyaz Latif Opens Conference with Talk on the Narrative Worlds of Islam in Ink, Silk and Gold

Riyaz Latif, Mellon Assistant Professor of History of Art, will give the keynote talk on Thursday, January 7, at 6:30 pm at the opening event of the College Book Art Association’s National Conference held at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.  His talk, entitled Narrative Worlds of Islam in Ink, Silk and Gold, will focus on works of Islamic art from the impressive collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Nearly 100 works in an array of media are currently on view through Sunday, January 10,  at the Frist.  Mostly functional objects, their meanings unfold as much through the materials out of which they were made as through the words and images they may bear.   A ninth-century Qurʾan written in gold calligraphy on indigo-stained parchment reflects the value placed on writing as a marker of religious and intellectual cultivation.

Trained as an architect in India, Latif primarily focuses his teaching and research on Islamic art and architecture.  He is one of ten Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar Fellows at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities addressing “When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center:  Vernacular Islam Beyond the Islamic World” during the academic year 2015-2016.   The seminar participants and the Warren Center will host a conference in the fall semester 2016 that will be open to the Vanderbilt community and the public to share results of the year’s work.

Latif’s book manuscript in preparation, Ornate Visions of Knowledge and Power:  Formation of Marinid Madrasas in Maghrib al-Aqsa, stems from his work focused on the art and architectural production in premodern Islamic Maghrib and its cultural moorings in the premodern western Mediterranean world.  This spring the Warren Center seminar participants will read chapters from his book manuscript on fourteenth-century Moroccan religious buildings.

Latif has also written about the Marinid necropolis of the Chella in Rabat, Morocco, and has published an article on the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the context of its visual imaginings by the preeminent Urdu poet, Iqbal.

For more information about the College  Book Art Association’s National Conference, January 7-9—“Telling the Story”—go to http://www.collegebookart.org/Conference-Schedule.

Leaf of a Qur’an, Tunisian, Fatimid or Abbasid Period, 9th or 10th century, probably Qairouan, Tunisia. Gold ink on indigo-dyed parchment, 11 x 14 3/8 in.  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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

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Christopher Johns Lectures at Washington University on Making of Saints in Enlightenment Rome

Christopher M. S. Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, delivered the lecture “Art, Medicine and the Making of Saints in Enlightenment Rome” at Washington University in Saint Louis last month.

Johns’ paper focused on the changes in procedures to make saints during the Enlightenment based on new medical knowledge that impacted how previously unexplained physical and psychic phenomena previously considered miraculous were now explicable as natural conditions rather than the product of supernatural intervention.  “How such changes engaged artistic representations of the miraculous in Enlightenment Rome was the primary theme of the lecture,” said Johns.

The lecture was a feature of the Salon Symposium on Enlightenment Science and Religion, the annual meeting of the University’s chapter of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  It is an interdisciplinary group devoted to furthering research and publication on the global eighteenth century.

Pierre Subleyras (1699-1749).  The Miracle of Saint Benedict, oil on canvas,  1744, Chiesa di Santa Francesca Romana, Rome.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 4, 2016 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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