Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

John Janusek to Present AIA Lecture (with libations) on January 27

Instead of our usual venue (the Parthenon), John Janusek, associate professor of anthropology, Vanderbilt University, will deliver an Archaeological Institute of America lecture on Tuesday, January 27, at 6 pm at the Yazoo Taproom, 910 Division Street. In his lecture, titled “Beer. Brewing, and Empire in Ancient South America,” Janusek will talk about his research and excavation of the Tiwanaku in the South American Andes in Bolivia.

An archaeologist interested in the development of complex societies and cities in the South American Andes, he has worked in the Bolivian highlands since 1987, conducting research principally focused on the Tiwanaku civilization and its precursors. He currently directs an interdisciplinary research project at the sites of Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin.

Among his publications include these books titled Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes (Routledge, 2004) and Ancient Tiwanaku, part of Case Studies in Early Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Free and open to the public, Janusek’s lecture is sponsored by the Nashville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, and Vanderbilt’s Department of Classical Studies and Department of History of Art.

The Yazoo Taproom opens its doors at 5:30 p.m., and the lecture begins at 6 p.m. There will be a free beer ticket to anyone who is already an AIA member or who joins the evening of the lecture. Other sales support the AIA.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 26, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Book Explores Christian Rituals and Practices in Roman Africa

Patout Burns, Edward A. Malloy Professor of Catholic Studies, emeritus, and Robin Jensen, Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship, explore how early North African Christians lived out their faith in their recently published book, Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs (Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, November 2014). Using a combination of literary and archaeological evidence, this in-depth, illustrated book documents the development of Christian practices and doctrine in Roman Africa—contemporary Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—from the second century through the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Jensen and Burns, in collaboration with Graeme W. Clarke, Susan T. Stevens, William Tabbernee, and Maureen A. Tilley, skillfully reconstruct the rituals and practices of Christians in the ancient buildings and spaces where those practices were performed. Numerous site drawings and color photographs of the archaeological remains illuminate the discussions.

This work provides valuable new insights into the church fathers Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine. Most significantly, it offers a rich, unprecedented look at early Christian life in Roman Africa, including the development of key rituals and practices such as baptism and eucharist, the election and ordination of leaders, marriage, and burial. In exploring these, Christianity in Roman Africa shows how the early African Christians consistently fought to preserve the holiness of the church amid change and challenge.

“This is an astonishing compendium integrating history, theology, and material culture,” wrote John C. Cavadini, University of Notre Dame. “It is really unprecedented. The theology illuminates the art, and the art in turn illuminates the theology—and both make the history come alive, almost right before the reader’s eyes.”

Burns and Jensen will offer a Friday morning class for the Vanderbilt Osher Lifelong Learning Institute entitled “The Development of Christian Practice and Belief in Roman Africa.” The class will meet from 9:30 to 10:45 a.m. at Belle Meade United Methodist Church, 121 Davidson Road, beginning Friday, January 16, and on consecutive Fridays through February 20.

This course will survey the documentary and archaeological evidence for Christian rituals and practices during the first six centuries in the region stretching along the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea from modern Libya to Morocco. The presentations will focus on the interaction between practices (baptism, eucharist or Lord’s Supper, penance, ordination, prayer) and beliefs. They will include a survey of the archaeological remains for church buildings, baptisteries, and burials.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 14, 2015 in HART, VRC

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American Abstract Artists On View at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery celebrates the opening of American Abstract Artists: AAA 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio with a reception on Thursday, January 15, from 5 to 7 pm in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus. The exhibit, on view through February 27, highlights the American Abstract Artists group (AAA) that was founded in New York City in 1936 at a time when abstract art was not met with great acclaim.

The exhibition features original works created for this project, all digital prints, and marks a willingness to endorse progressive technologies and to advance an artistic tradition. The resulting portfolio and exhibit reflect an awareness of changing artistic sensibilities in a contemporary and evolving digital era.

The AAA group has produced more than 120 exhibitions in museums and galleries and has print portfolios in major collections worldwide, including the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. Previous AAA print portfolios (1937, 1987, and 1997) were created using more traditional forms of printmaking such as lithography and other plate-based printing methods. The current president of AAA, Daniel G. Hill, explains that “the digital process enabled a wide variety of approaches that include abstract and documentary photography, scanning of flat-work made expressly for the project, digital compositing, and image manipulation, as well as the use of vector-based software and hand-coded algorithms.” Each print is original and has been individually signed, numbered, and dated by the artist.

Organized by the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the exhibit is accompanied by a catalogue that includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a member of AAA, painter, curator, critic and dean of the Yale School of Art. The Vanderbilt presentation is made possible, in part, by the Ewers Gift for Fine Art.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 pm. Please note that the gallery will be closed on Monday, January 19, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Free and open to the public, the Fine Arts Gallery is housed 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 the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

For more information, call the gallery (615.322.0605) or the curator’s office (615.343.1702); or visit vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 13, 2015 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Michael Leja to Deliver Goldberg Lecture on December 4

Michael Leja, professor of history of art and director of program in visual studies, University of Pennsylvania, will present the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, December 4, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. His lecture is entitled “Cubism in Bondage: Morgan Russell’s Synchromism,” with a reception to follow in the atrium.

Leja (PhD, Harvard University) studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences.

Synchromism was an art movement founded in the early 1910s by two American artists living in Paris at the time, Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973). With Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Russell created an avant-garde style of colorful abstract painting. Seeking a spiritual exaltation equivalent to that produced by music, with which he also experimented, Russell combined abstract shape and color in paintings.

Leja’s book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004) traces the interactions between the visual arts and the skeptical forms of seeing engendered in modern life in northeastern American cities between 1869 and 1917. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2005. Leja was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 17, 2014 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Documentary Screening and Panel Discussion Tonight in Cohen 203

In conjunction with I Am Unbeatable: Documenting and Celebrating Stories of Empowerment—Photographs by Donna Ferrato, the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery will host a screening of Nashville Public Television’s documentary film Living in Fear at 6 pm on Thursday, November 13, in Cohen Memorial Hall, room 203. Following the film will be a panel discussion moderated by LaTonya Turner, host of the documentary, and Joseph Mella, director of the Fine Arts Gallery.

The number of incidents and the severity of domestic violence has been a public safety crisis in Tennessee for decades, and the staggering statistics show there is no typical victim. Tennessee ranks tenth in the nation for the number of women killed by men, and more than half of the reported violent crimes in the state are related to domestic violence. In NPT Reports Domestic Violence: Living in Fear, we learn about the survivors, the perpetrators, and the witnesses to these criminal acts of violence.

The screening is free and open to the public, and the gallery will be open until 8 pm. For more information about NPT Reports Domestic Violence: Living in Fear, visit wnpt.org/domesticviolence/ or about the current gallery exhibit, visit vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

Donna Ferrato
American, born 1949
Sarah Augusta, 26, Finally Free from Abuse, 2012
Archival pigment print, digital 35 mm
© Donna Ferrato

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 13, 2014 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Creating a 3D Scan of the Korean Sculpture Discovered at Peabody

Representatives from Novacopy and Creaform will be in Cohen Memorial Hall on Tuesday, November 25, at 10 a.m. to create a three-dimensional scan of a rare Korean funerary statue that resided for nearly 45 years outside Payne Hall on the Peabody College campus. The sculpture currently stands outside the entrance to the Fine Arts Gallery while awaiting restorative care. The gallery will use the scan to record the sculpture pre-restoration and then archive it.

“The goal is to allow this scan to be the first of many 3D scans that will be accessible through DIMLI,” said Chris Strasbaugh, director of the department’s Visual Resources Center. “The scan could also be used to test 3D printers.”

Conservation efforts for the statue are led by the Office of the Dean of Peabody College, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Asian Studies Program, Department of History of Art, Department of English, and the Vanderbilt Korean Alumni group.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 7, 2014 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Technology, VRC

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Sheri Shaneyfelt to Lecture on the Frist’s “Sanctity Pictured” Exhibit

Sheri Shaneyfelt, senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the department of history of art, will give a lecture on Tuesday, November 11, at 6 pm in Cohen 203 to correlate with the current exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts entitled Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy.

Beginning in the early thirteenth century, Italy was transformed by two innovative new religious orders known as the Dominicans, founded by Saint Dominic of Caleruega, and the Franciscans, founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Shaneyfelt will present highlights of the exhibition, which is the first to examine the significant role played by the two major mendicant orders in the great flowering of art in Italy in the period from 1200 to 1550.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Cohen Memorial Hall is located on the western edge of the Peabody campus at 1220 21st Avenue South. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 7, 2014 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Mireille Lee Writes Monograph on Ancient Greek Dress

Mireille Lee, assistant professor of history of art and classical studies, has written the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century: Body, Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece, forthcoming in December from Cambridge University Press.

By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, Lee reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this book synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society.

Accessible to a broad audience, Lee’s book is lavishly illustrated and relates ancient society to the modern world.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 7, 2014 in HART, VRC

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Vivien Fryd Presents Paper on Henry Ries at Berlin Conference

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, presented a paper on October 29 at the Fifth International Conference on the Image at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Fryd, niece of the New York Times photographer Henry Ries (1917-2004), addressed the topic Henry Ries’ Iconic Photograph of the Berlin Blockade: The Transformation of Germans from the Enemy to a Friend in the session entitled “Visualizing the Nation 1.”

Fryd examined his photograph of 1948, which celebrates the Berlin blockade when the United States becomes the friend and ally of his native Germany.

Ries, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Hitler with his sister (Fryd’s mother) in 1938, returned to Germany after the war and often used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath. Among his most evocative pictures of postwar Germany are his images of the Berlin airlift in 1948 and 1949.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 3, 2014 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Betsey Robinson Co-Presents Talk on Conserving Roman Mosaic

Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art, co-presented a talk entitled “A Roman mosaic in the south stoa, Corinth, Greece: New studies and conservation plans” with Nicol Anastassatou, chief conservator of the Corinth Excavations, American School of Classical Studies. Their presentation was part of a two-day colloquium held October 16-18 at the Getty Villa and organized by the North American Branch of L’Association International pour l’Étude de la Mosaïque Antique.

Toward the eastern end of the South Stoa at ancient Corinth stands a modern structure that was built to protect a late second/early third century CE mosaic. The central panel of the mosaic, discovered by Oscar Broneer in 1933 during his excavations, depicts a victorious athlete approaching a seated, semidraped goddess, perhaps Corinth herself, with attributes of the local Aphrodite (of Acrocorinth) and the nymph Peirene. Her shield reads “Eutychia” (Good Luck).

Robinson’s article, “Good Luck” from Corinth: A Mosaic of Allegory, Athletics, and City Identity (AJA, Vol. 116, January 2012, pp. 105-132), discussed not only the meaning and art historical value but also the need for conservation work after eight decades of exposure. Thanks to a generous grant from the Stockman Family Foundation, the mosaic is getting the necessary attention.

After the approval of a conservation study created by chief conservator Nicol Anastassatou, Robinson and two highly experienced mosaic conservators, Spiros Armenis and Charis Delis, are hard at work. The plan calls for the mosaic to be detached, the deteriorated preparatory layers removed, and the mosaic reset upon a new stable substratum. The team is currently in the process of cleaning the surface, consolidating fragmentary stone and glass tesserae, and preparing the mosaic for the detachment. The project is slated to take place over the next two years.

*Central figural panel from the Roman mosaic in the South Stoa, Corinth, Greece

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 27, 2014 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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