Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Christopher Johns to Present Paper at International Conference in Lisbon

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will deliver a paper on March 28 at the International Conference of the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon. His paper is entitled “Queen Maria I, Pope Pius VI, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Lisbon, Rome, and the Counter Enlightenment.” The overall theme of the conference is “Rome and Lisbon in the Eighteenth Century: Music, the Visual Arts, and Cultural Transfer.”

Johns will examine the political and religious policies of Queen Maria I of Portugal (reigned 1777-1816) in the context of the construction and decoration of the Basilica of the Estrêla in Lisbon, the first church in the world dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  The Queen’s support for the Sacred Heart devotion was shared in Rome by Pope Pius VI, who granted the Portuguese court’s request to extend the Cult of the Heart to Portugal and its empire.

Pompeo Batoni, Europe’s most celebrated painter, was commissioned for a series of seven grand altarpieces for the new basilica.  The subjects chosen are allegorical and mystical in nature, countering currents in Enlightened Catholicism that emphasized service and social utility over mystical revelation as the truest form of devotion.  Indirectly, Maria and Pius were expressing support through visual culture of the Jesuits, who had been abolished in 1773 but who would be reinstated by the Papacy after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire in 1816.

A few days before leaving for Lisbon, Johns presided at the Presidential Address by Melissa Hyde, University of Florida, on March 22 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies held in Denver.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 26, 2019 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Manuscript Historian Kathryn Rudy to Deliver Goldberg Lecture on April 3

Readers in the late Middle Ages sometimes destroyed their manuscripts in the very act of handling them through acts of veneration, ritual, and public performance. Kathryn Rudy, manuscript historian and professor in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews, Scotland, will deliver the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture on Wednesday, April 3, at 4:10 pm in 203 Cohen Memorial Hall, with a reception to follow in the atrium. Her lecture is entitled “Rubbing, Touching, and Kissing Medieval Manuscripts in the Late Middle Ages.”

As literacy grew during the three centuries before the printing press, people learned not only how to read, but also how to handle their manuscripts. Certain physical gestures that readers enacted with illuminated manuscripts—including kissing or laying hands on certain images, and rubbing out the faces of others—imparted a ritual significance to books. Just as our 21st-century culture of ever smaller screens has created a set of gestures and habits that had not previously existed (typing with two thumbs, scrolling, clicking, tapping), reading manuscripts, which were increasingly available in the late Middle Ages, also gave people a new set of physical gestures, several of which destroyed the images in their books.

In her lecture Rudy will consider the settings and circumstances by which readers learned to handle—and deface—their manuscripts. People in authority, including priests, teachers, parents, and legal officials, touched books publicly to carry out rituals. In so doing, they inadvertently taught audiences how to handle books in highly physical ways. Cumulative wear in books testifies to how they were used and handled.

Rudy’s research concentrates on the reception and original function of manuscripts, especially those manufactured in the Low Countries, and she has pioneered the use of the densitometer to measure the grime that original readers deposited in their books. She is currently developing ways to track and measure user response to late medieval manuscripts.

Rudy is the author of five books, including Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Piety in Pieces: How medieval readers customized their manuscripts (Open Book Publishers, 2016); and Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015).  She held a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship (2017-2018) to write a book about physical interactions with the manuscript in late Medieval England. She currently is a fellow (2018-2019) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam to complete a book about manuscript production in Delft. She has a Leverhulme Major Research Grant (2019-2022) for a study titled “Measuring medieval users’ responses to manuscripts: New technological approaches.”

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in all non-reserved spaces in Lot 95 near 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.

*Manuscript folio with a design featuring the Wound of Christ, which has been severely scraped (Paris, BnF, Ms. Fr. 574, fol. 140v.)

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 22, 2019 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Parthenon2 Symposium March 28-30: Digital Approaches to Architectural Heritage

Dorina Moullou, an archaeologist with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, will deliver the keynote lecture for the upcoming symposium PARTHENON²: Digital Approaches to Architectural Heritage on Thursday, March 28, at 6 p.m. at the Nashville Parthenon, Centennial Park. Her lecture is entitled “On the Sacred Rock: The Athenian Acropolis from the Drawing Board to the Digital.” Organized by Betsey Robinson, acting chair and associate professor of history of art, the symposium will continue on Friday and Saturday (March 29-30) at 9 a.m. in the Reading Room of Vanderbilt Divinity School and feature an exciting array of scholars applying advanced digital technologies to the study and documentation of historical architecture around the world.

“As the ‘Athens of the South,’ Nashville has long prided itself as a city of humanistic inquiry and world heritage,” said Robinson. “This symposium builds upon this local tradition and an active community of Vanderbilt researchers working in digital studies of architecture and art, space and place, and cultural heritage.”

Because the original Parthenon now stands in ruins in Athens, the Nashville Parthenon is a tremendous resource not only for local scholars and students, but also for archaeologists who come from around the world to experience the architecture, art, and effects of space and light in this 1920s scale model of the original. In 2006, an international symposium at the Parthenon considered “Architecture, Sculpture, and Politics in Ancient Athens.” PARTHENON² follows that tradition, taking Nashville’s Parthenon as a venue, a subject of study, and a springboard for a broader discussion of digital methods in architectural heritage studies and beyond.

The Acropolis of Athens is the “most striking and complete ancient monumental complex in existence, an architectural treasure that belongs not only to Greek patrimony but to worldwide cultural heritage,” said Moullou, who will discuss the efforts of topographic and photogrammetric recording of the Acropolis from 1975 until today. In particular, she will focus on the 3D recording of the Acropolis and its monuments in the project, Development of Geographical Information Systems on the Acropolis of Athens.

Moullou will review the 900,000-euro project, describing the techniques used for data acquisition and processing (both geodetic and photogrammetric) and presenting results and deliverables.Today the tremendous value of this project is apparent in the published and posted results (https://acropolis-gis.ysma.gr/), and by the fact that the data have already been used in other research and restoration work, connected mainly with the fortification walls and the underlying rock of the Acropolis.

Her lecture is sponsored by the PARTHENON² Symposium, along with the Archaeological Institute of America and the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park.

The symposium will feature four sessions, three to be held on Friday, March 29, addressing Multimodal Research on Buildings and Settlements; Applied Photogrammetry; and  Parthenon2 (Pedagogy and Funding Digital Heritage Studies). On Saturday, March 30, the fourth session will focus on Virtual Architectures/Global Perspectives.

All innovators in digital heritage studies, the invited speakers will discuss their creative use of tools and methods such as photogrammetry, digital modeling/rendering, virtual reality, spatial analysis, and interaction geography to better understand and explain premodern architecture and urban landscapes around the world, as well as the human experiences within them. Formal research presentations will alternate with discussion sessions and informal demonstrations, allowing participants and audience to discuss theoretical and methodological problems, and to strategize about research design, best practices, teaching, and sharing results with the public.

The PARTHENON² Symposium is sponsored by Vanderbilt University Research Scholar Grant Program, Trans-Institutional Digital Cultural Heritage Cluster, Vanderbilt Institute of Digital Learning, Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, Mellon Faculty Fellowship in Digital Humanities, Department of History of Art, and Vanderbilt Initiative for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Research.

For more information, email keitlyn.alcantara@vanderbilt.edu or betsey.a.robinson@vanderbilt.edu or see PARTHENON²: Digital Approaches to Architectural Heritage.

*Nashville Parthenon (courtesy of the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park); Orthomosaic, Athenian Acropolis (courtesy D. Moullou); and 3D model, Erechtheion, Acropolis, Athens (courtesy D. Moullou)

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 22, 2019 in Conferences, Digital Humanities, Divinity School, Events, HART, HART in Nashville, Lectures, Nashville Arts, News, Technology, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Vivien Fryd’s Article Appears in The Conversation, San Francisco Chronicle

The Conversation, “A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo” by Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art:

The #MeToo movement has had a sweeping effect on politics, organized religion, educational institutions, Hollywood, sports and the military.

The cultural prominence of rape and sexual assault might be new. Efforts to bring attention to the issue, however, are not.

Beginning in the 1970s, a group of female artists in the U.S. started confronting rape, incest and sexual assault through performances, videos, quilts and other nontraditional media.

By tackling a taboo subject, they were at the forefront of raising public awareness of these issues. In my new book Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, I detail how their relentless efforts to end the silence surrounding sexual violence against women reverberates in the #MeToo movement today.

Continue reading and viewing images in The Conversation….

*This article originally appeared in The Conversation on March 19, 2019, and was reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 19) and The Huffington Post (March 26).

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 21, 2019 in HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Alumna Jennifer Klos to Speak at Life After HART Event on March 20

Art is a part of our lives. It can be a blend of old and new, sophistication and whimsy, design and deeper meaning.—Jennifer Klos, HART alumna (BA’03), art consultant and owner of Collector House Inc.

The Department of History of Art is launching a new series called Careers for HART Majors and Minors–Life After HART. Our inaugural speaker will be Jennifer Klos, a Vanderbilt alumna with a double major in history of art and French. Join us for lunch and her presentation on Wednesday, March 20, between 12 and 2pm in HART’s Visual Resources Center, 134 Cohen Memorial Hall.

In 2015 Klos founded Dallas-based Collector House Inc., a boutique art advisory firm specializing in the acquisition of modern and contemporary art, including fine and decorative arts, that provides clients with comprehensive services in art collecting, collection curatorship, and educational programs.  A successful professional in the commercial art world, Klos describes herself as “curating with a collector’s eye and a traveler’s heart.” She enjoys sharing her curatorial eye, knowledge and expertise of the art world with clients in a fun and accessible manner.

“Art is layered and storied,” she wrote. “Collected spaces, whether in a home or a gallery, should feel that way, too. At the heart of it I’m a curator who helps people choose. I love bringing that blend of art and design to the work I do.”

During her eight-year tenure as curator at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Klos organized national and international exhibitions, expanding the presentation of decorative arts and design, and contemporary art installations. She earned her master’s degree in the history of decorative arts, design, and culture from the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Her master’s thesis is titled The Fashioned Travel Case: Women’s Luggage in Postwar America, 1946-1960. She is a graduate of London’s Inchbald School of Design and Christie’s Education London.

Her scholarly interests in decorative arts include the history of carpets, textiles, dress, ceramics and silver, with an emphasis on English decorative arts. As an independent curator and art historian, she regularly lectures on the topics of art collecting, design history, and English country houses. She is a board member of the American Friends of Attingham, a scholarly organization devoted to the study of English country houses and collections, and a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), The Decorative Arts Trust, and the Costume Society of America.

Photographs courtesy of Jennifer Klos

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 13, 2019 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Fine Arts Gallery Exhibit of Contemporary Mosaics Opens March 13 in Cohen Hall

Embodied: Mosaic Arts International 2019 Invitational, an exhibition surveying figurative works by five renowned mosaic artists working today, will open on Wednesday, March 13, in Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus. Join us for the opening reception from 5 to 7 pm in the atrium.

Featured artists are Lilian Broca (Canada), Shug Jones (United States), Michael Kruzich (United States), Atsuko Laskaris (Japan) and Carol Shelkin (United States). Gallery hours are 11am to 4pm Monday through Friday, and 1 to 5pm Saturday and Sunday.

The contemporary mosaics, on view through May 25, attempt to capture the personal histories, preserved memories, and emotional occurrences of everyday life. Through meticulous manipulations of glass, stone and ceramic, these detailed works achieve a dynamic range of color, texture and reflectivity. Their durable materials and methods do not stray far from those from antiquity. Neither do their stories: Scenes presented in Embodied share timeless themes of love and family, conflict and war, spirituality and society.

The exhibition is held in conjunction with this year’s American Mosaic Summit, held in Nashville at the Sheraton Music City Hotel from April 23-28. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Society of American Mosaic Artists. Since 1999, SAMA has presented programs, publications, events and exhibitions that promote, educate and inspire excellence in mosaic arts. Mosaic Arts International is the longest running annual juried exhibition showcasing mosaic art in the world.

The Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall at 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Admission and all events are free and open to the public. Parking is available anywhere in Lot 95 on the Peabody campus, accessible from 21st Avenue South.

*Michael Kruzich (American, b. 1964). Refuge, 2017. Stone, Italian smalti, and gold. 60 x 36 inches.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 11, 2019 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, News, Vanderbilt University, Visual Resources Center, VRC

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Vivien Fryd Featured in ART+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, Radio Interviews

As part of the Vanderbilt Libraries’ annual ART+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, Vivien Fryd, professor of history of art, will be the featured speaker.The event will be held on Wednesday, March 13, from 11 am to 1 pm in the Central Library, room 418A. Those attending will create, edit and add material to Wikipedia about women artists, architects, designers, critics, scholars, and curators. For more information, contact Mary Ann Caton, coordinator of the library event, at mary.a.caton@vanderbilt.edu.

Fryd continues to be interviewed on radio shows about her most recent book, Against our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art since the 1970s (The Pennsylvania State University Press). Her interview schedule for March includes: KKUP, Santa Cruz, “The Wimmin’s Music Program” (March 3); WFSK, Fisk University, Nashville, “What’s the 411? with Sharon Kay” (March 6); KAOS, Olympia, WA, “Once More Into the Breach” (March 7); Siouxland Public Radio (NPR affiliate), Sioux City, IA, “The Exchange” (March 8); WORT, Madison, WI, “The 8:00 Buzz” (March 13); “Conversations LIVE” (March 14) with host Cyrus Webb (one of the top internet programs available on blogtalkradio.com with about 200,000 listeners per interview); WCRN, Worcester, MA, “The Frankie Boyer Show” (March 14); WFHB, Bloomington, IN, “Interchange” (March 19); WPFW, Washington, DC, “What’s at Stake” (March 20); and KABF, New Orleans, “Wade’s World” (March 22).

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 11, 2019 in Events, HART, News, Vanderbilt University, Visual Resources Center, VRC

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Vivien Fryd: Female Artists Addressed Themes of Sexual Violence Long Before #MeToo Movement

Social media has brought sexual assault into the public eye, but bearing witness to sexual violence in popular culture didn’t begin with the invention of tweets and posts, according to Vanderbilt art history professor Vivien Green Fryd.

“What’s happening today with the #MeToo movement is a continuation of the feminist movement of the 1970s,” Fryd said. “It was a time when female artists consciously began using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest in order to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women.”

Read more of Joan Brasher’s article (Research News @Vanderbilt) based on a recent interview with Fryd about her latest book, Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 22, 2019 in HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati to Present AIA Lecture on February 21 at the Parthenon

Music was an integral component of daily life in the ancient Mediterranean world. The importance of music to religious ritual, celebratory banquets, personal entertainment, and even mythological narratives is made manifest through a wide variety of literary, visual, and archaeological evidence. In one region of South Italy (or “Magna Graecia”) alone, nearly 1,700 vases decorated with musical imagery and dating from the 4th century BCE have been recovered. Music and musicians on these South Italian red-figure vases were represented in a plethora of contexts, ranging from generic nuptial and funerary scenes to Dionysian and mythological compositions.

On Thursday, February 21, at 6 pm in the Nashville Parthenon, Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati will deliver an AIA lecture entitled “Making Ancient Vases Sing: Musical Imagery in the Art of South Italy.” Ikeshoji-Orlati is the Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Her presentation will begin with a survey of the corpus of musical imagery in South Italian red-figure vase painting from the 4th century BCE. Subsequently, the vases will be analyzed using two different, but complementary, approaches: a traditional, iconographic method; and a contemporary, data-driven one. The hybrid, analog/digital approach will demonstrate the complexity of ‘reading’ musical imagery on South Italian vases as documents of contemporary performance practice. In addition, it will highlight the agency of artists and artists’ workshops in the creation and dissemination of ancient perceptions and ideas about musicians and their instruments.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is cosponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, and the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat. The Parthenon is located at 2500 West End Avenue in the Centennial Park.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 18, 2019 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Vivien Fryd Featured in Radio Interviews About Her Latest Book

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, will be interviewed during the months of February and March on various radio programs across the country. The focus will be on her latest book, Against our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art since the 1970s, which was recently published by The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Her interview schedule for February includes: WGTD, “Morning Show,” NPR, Kenosha, WI (February 18); IHub Radio, “Conversations with Charlie Dyer,” Palm Springs, CA (February 19); WRFG, “Lambda Radio Report,”  Atlanta, GA (February 19); WGVU/WGVS, “Morning Show,” Grand Rapids, MI (February 21); WUML “Thinking Aloud,” Lowell, MA (February 22), KCBX “Ideasphere,” NPR, San Luis Obispo, CA (February 28); and WFOV, “The Tom Sumner Program,” Flint, MI (February 28). Stay tuned for an update on her interview schedule in March.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 18, 2019 in HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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