Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Tsakirgis to Lecture on Dinsmoor and Design of Nashville Parthenon

Barbara Tsakirgis, associate professor of classics and history of art, Vanderbilt University, will deliver the American Institute of Archaeology lecture on Tuesday, March 12, at 7 p.m. at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. Her lecture is entitled “The Athens of the South: William Bell Dinsmoor and the Design of the Nashville Parthenon.”

Dinsmoor was a professor at Columbia University, where Tsakirgis was first invited to present this lecture in September. Dinsmoor, a long-time professor at the American School in Athens, was the world’s leading authority on the architecture of the ancient Athenian temple. When the Nashville-based architect Russell Hart was designing and building the permanent replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, he invited Dinsmoor to share his deep knowledge of the ancient building.

In her lecture Tsakirgis will explore how the design of the Nashville Parthenon benefited from this scholarly input and how Dinsmoor came to use his experience in the design of the Nashville replica as he thought about and wrote about the original Parthenon.

Tsakirgis, a classical archaeologist who specializes in the study of ancient Greek houses and households, is 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 is publishing the remains of the Greek and Roman houses excavated at both sites.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, the Vanderbilt History of Art Goldberg Lecture Series, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Holiday Inn at Vanderbilt. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 4, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Fine Arts Gallery Highlights British Art in Exhibit Opening March 13

British art from Vanderbilt University’s Fine Arts Gallery Collection is the focus of an exhibit titled Four Hundred Years of British Art, which will open on Wednesday, March 13, in the Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Hall with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

This comprehensive survey—the first of its kind in more than two decades to draw on the nearly 300 British objects held by the Gallery—is presented in honor of Robert L. Mode, associate professor of art, who will retire after forty-six years of teaching art history at Vanderbilt. Much of his research and teaching focused on British art.

Four Hundred Years of British Art will include examples of eighteenth-century English portraiture by such noted artists as Benjamin Wilson and George Romney, along with a work attributed to the school of Sir Thomas Lawrence; a selection of engravings by the pictorial satirist and social critic William Hogarth; two biting satires of the English upper class by Thomas Rowlandson; early nineteenth-century prints by Joseph Mallord William Turner, and the master mezzotint printmaker Richard Earlom; and paintings from the founder of the Norwich School of landscape painting, John Chrome.

On view through June 15, the exhibit also features works by several artists associated with the late nineteenth-century etching revival: Sir Francis Seymour Haden, Richard Samuel Chattuck, and Samuel Palmer; selections from the Gallery’s large collection of etchings by Gerard Brockhurst, one of the premier portraitists of the early twentieth century; and modern and contemporary works by such noted artists as Patrick Caulfield, Bernard Cohen, Michael Craig-Martin, Lesley Foxcroft, Elisabeth Frink, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, Henry Moore, and Roland Penrose.

Curated by Joseph Mella, director of the Fine Arts Gallery, the exhibit features the research and writing of Fine Arts Gallery interns Caroline Passano and Emma Trawick. The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody campus. Gallery hours (March 13-May 4) are noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday; noon to 8 p.m., Thursday; and 1-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, with the exception of Sunday, March 31, when the gallery will be closed. Gallery hours (May 5-June 15) are noon to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; and 1-5 p.m., Saturday.

For more information, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery or call 615.322.0605 (gallery) or 615.343.1702 (office).

*Thomas Rowlandson (British, 1756-1827), Glow Worms, etching with watercolor, 1805-1812

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 4, 2013 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Leonard Folgarait Edits Book on Mexican Muralism

A multi-author volume that deals critically and from a variety of thematic perspectives with Mexican mural painting—its problems, achievements, failures, and legacy—became the project of three editors and contributors: Leonard Folgarait, professor of history of art, Vanderbilt University; Alejandro Anreus, professor of art history and Latin American/Latino Studies, William Paterson University; and Robin Adèle Greeley, associate professor of art history and Latin American Studies, University of Connecticut. The result is a comprehensive collection of essays entitled Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, published in 2012 by the University of California Press.

Three generations of international scholars examine Mexican muralism in its broad artistic and historical contexts, from its iconic figures—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—to their successors in Mexico, the United States, and across Latin America. These muralists conceived of their art as a political weapon in popular struggles over revolution and resistance, state modernization and civic participation, artistic freedom and cultural imperialism. Contributors to this volume show how these artists’ murals transcended borders to engage major issues raised by the many different forms of modernity that emerged throughout the Americas during the twentieth century.

In addition to co-editing the book, Folgarait contributed two essays: “José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture in the Dartmouth Mural” and “Murals and Marginality in Mexico City: The Case of Tepito Arte Acá.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 27, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Christopher Johns to Lecture at Pierpont Morgan Library

Christopher M. S. Johns, Norman and Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will lecture on Piranesi and the Warwick Vase: Image, Text, Fragments and Fictions in European Neoclassicism at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York on March 4. The lecture is part of a symposium devoted to artist’s letters. The Morgan Library has a substantial collection of artist’s letters, which date from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 26, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Tim Winters to Lecture on the Parthenon Marbles in Nashville

Tim Winters, professor of classics in the department of languages and literature, Austin Peay State University, will deliver the American Institute of Archaeology lecture on Tuesday, February 26, at 7 p.m. at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. His lecture is entitled “Belle Kinney, Leopold Scholz, and the Parthenon Marbles in Nashville.”

Winters (Ph.D., Ohio State University) has taught classics at the university level for more than 20 years. A dedicated teacher, he has received Austin Peay’s major faculty awards: the Socrates Award for Excellence in Teaching and the APSU National Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award.

Among his research interests are Greek epigraphy, archaeology, and historiography. Winters lived in Greece for two years where he studied at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has directed APSU’s Study Abroad to Greece program since its inception in 1999. This past summer he served as the Gertrude Smith Professor of Classics for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, his third time in this position.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, the Vanderbilt History of Art Goldberg Lecture Series, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Holiday Inn at Vanderbilt. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on February 25, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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Alexandra Carpino To Deliver the Cinelli Lecture on February 5

Alexandra Carpino, professor of art history and department chair of comparative cultural studies at Northern Arizona University, will deliver the American Institute of Archaeology’s annual Ferdinando and Sarah Cinelli Lecture in Etruscan and Italic Archaeology on Tuesday, February 5, at 7 p.m. at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. Carpino’s lecture, Etruscan Faces: From the Symbolic to the Real, will focus on the development of naturalistic portraiture by the Etruscans, one of the major contributions of this fascinating, though mysterious, culture that flourished in Italy from the late eighth century BCE to the first century BCE.

Carpino’s dissertation focused on Etruscan bronze mirrors, and her book, Discs of Splendor: The Relief Mirrors of the Etruscans (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), is the first detailed scholarly study of these splendid examples of Etruscan sculpture and metallurgy. Carpino is currently working on a Companion to the Etruscans with her colleague, Sinclair Bell from Northern Illinois University, an anthology of essays on the most current research on Etruscan art and culture that will be published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2014. She organized a session of the Companion’s papers for the 2013 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America held in early January in Seattle where she presented her research on “The Iconography of Violence Against Women on Engraved Etruscan Bronze Mirrors.”

Her essay on Etruscan portraiture will also be part of Routledge’s 2013 volume, The Etruscan World, edited by Jean M. Turfa. Carpino promotes awareness of Etruscan culture through her teaching and her work with The Etruscan Foundation. She is editor-in-chief of Etruscan Studies: Journal of the Etruscan Foundation.

As one of the top Etruscan art scholars in the country, Carpino is also passionate about the importance of art education for the very young. To that end, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Flagstaff-based Masterpiece Art Program, which is a long-standing organization that seeks to bring art and art history into local elementary school classrooms. According to Carpino, it is critically important—especially at a time when education resources have been greatly diminished—to continue to introduce great art to children.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, the Ferdinando and Sarah Cinelli Lecture in Etruscan and Italic Archaeology, the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, the Vanderbilt History of Art Goldberg Lecture Series, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Holiday Inn at Vanderbilt. Those who plan to attend the lecture are asked to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 30, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Courtney Martin To Present Film Documentary on British Pop Artists

Courtney Martin, assistant professor of history of art, will present Ken Russell’s Pop Goes The Easel on Monday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. in Sarratt Cinema. Russell’s first full-length documentary for the BBC’s arts series Monitor focuses on four British pop artists—Peter Blake, Peter Philips, Pauline Boty, and Derek Boshier.

Revolutionary in his approach, Russell developed a whole range of new techniques to capture and reflect the excitement and energy of these young artists, which was cutting edge back in 1962, but are now part of the very heart of documentary-making. Pop Goes the Easel is a beautiful film that captures these artists, their work, and the start of the swinging sixties perfectly.

Free and open to the public, the film is sponsored by the International Lens Film Series at Vanderbilt, which strives to transcend geographic, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries by facilitating conversation and greater cross-cultural understanding through cinema.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 30, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Vivien Fryd Organizes International Conference in Berlin

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, has organized an international conference on American icons and monuments to be held January 25 at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Fryd, the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art, will deliver the keynote address: “The Statue of Liberty: A Chameleon-Like Hollow Icon.”

This conference will address the icons and monuments in American visual and textual art and culture. Monuments are public, usually but not always, permanent visual structures—traditionally sculpture, architecture, or both, and sometimes painting—that are intended to symbolize something about a human deed or event or commemorate a great human being. In a broader sense, monuments function as one of the means civilization has devised to reinforce its cohesiveness and create a shared historical memory and national identity. Monuments are a way to transmit communal emotions, a medium of continuity and interaction between generations, not only in space, but also across time. Icons can be broadly defined as a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration. Sometimes a monument can become an icon; and an icon can be monumental but not necessarily a monument. Monuments and icons continue to develop in the modern and postmodern era, but now, as Erika Doss notes, they “deliberately contain irony, ambivalence, interruption, and self-criticality.”

This conference will explore why particular images, texts, and monuments in the U.S. have become renowned throughout the world. What do they say about national identity, historical memory, and/or political ideologies? How and why do different social groups contest certain monuments, icons, and texts? How and why do certain images of people, historical events, and/or national symbols become iconic? Does one national symbol, text, or icon mean different things over different times and in different locations of the world? If so, what contributes to this?

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 17, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Peter Parshall To Deliver Goldberg Lecture on January 24

Peter Parshall, curator of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, from 1999 to 2010, will present the spring 2013 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, January 24, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. His lecture is titled The Concept of Aesthetic Disinterest: G. B. Piranesi and the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Parshall was formerly the Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and the Humanities at Reed College. He completed his doctoral studies in art history at the University of Chicago, and his dissertation research as a fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.

Parshall has written and lectured widely on the art of northern Europe and the Renaissance with special emphasis on the history of prints, the early history and organization of collecting, and Renaissance art theory. He co-authored with David Landau The Renaissance Print: 1470-1550 (Yale University Press, 1994), recipient of the 1995 Mitchell Prize. While at the National Gallery of Art, he organized The Unfinished Print, an exhibition with catalogue also shown at the Frick Collection, New York, and the Städel Institut in Frankfurt. Jointly with Rainer Schoch he organized Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and their Public, the first major international loan exhibition on this subject.

Parshall recently turned his attention to the nineteenth century and curated The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900, an exhibition of prints, drawings, and sculpture that traveled to three venues across the United States. In the summer of 2010 he retired from his post as curator in order to have more time for research and writing.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the lecture is free and open to the public, and 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 January 14, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Mark di Suvero Exhibit Opens January 17 in Fine Arts Gallery

Mark di Suvero—Affinities, on view through February 28, celebrates Vanderbilt’s recent acquisition of Tumbleweed (1987), di Suvero’s monumental sculpture now installed on the grounds of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center on the main campus. The exhibit opens Thursday, January 17, in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Hall, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

While including several drawings by di Suvero, this exhibit is not so much an attempt to explore the artist’s influences as it is to find works of art within the Fine Arts Gallery’s collection that, as the title suggests, share an affinity with the artist’s practice. “Particular care was taken not to limit our choices to well-recognized artists one might expect in an exhibition of this kind in order to be more inclusive and less linear,” said Joseph Mella, director of the Fine Arts Gallery. By taking this approach, Mella hopes to suggest how disparate works of art can help define an artist’s sensibility.

This non-traditional methodology has resulted in an exhibition that includes works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Alexander Calder, alongside African masks, Chinese calligraphy, and Indian Tantra drawings. Mark di Suvero—Affinities brings together works of art across time and place, cultures and peoples, and aims to deepen our understanding of the subject of the exhibit and reveal certain affinities with the artist.

Mark di Suvero—Affinities is organized by the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Mella in conjunction with the artist, his studio, and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. A generous gift from Leslie Cecil and Creighton Michael, MA’76, with additional support from the Department of Art, made this exhibit possible. The recently established Kathryn and Margaret Millspaugh Fund for Art Conservation sponsored conservation treatment for several permanent collection works that will be on view.

From 4 to 6 p.m. that same evening, the Department of Art’s Space 204, located in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, will host an opening reception for the exhibitions Yuja, work by Jean Kang, the 2011 recipient of the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award, and The Dreams of Architects and Poets, work by Jered Sprecher. Both receptions are open to the public, and there will be a free shuttle bus available to take guests between the two galleries. For details, call Amy Bridgeman at the Fine Arts Gallery at 615.343.1702 or Diane Acree at the Department of Art at 615.343.7241.

The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Gallery hours are noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday; noon to 8 p.m., Thursday; and 1-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

*Image: Mark di Suvero, American, b. 1933, Untitled (from 16 “Magma drawings”), 2008. Pen, ink, and pencil on paper, 22-1/2 x 30-1/4 inches. ©Mark di Suvero. Courtesy Paul Cooper Gallery, New York, MDI-172-D

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 7, 2013 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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