Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Robert Storr to Present Goldberg Lecture on September 21

Artist and critic Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, will reflect on the work of internationally acclaimed photographer Carrie Mae Weems at the fall 2012 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Friday, September 21, at 1:10 pm in the Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center. A reception will follow Storr’s lecture and the event is free and open to the public.

On Saturday, September 22, at 1:00 pm, Storr will participate in a panel discussion, Carrie Mae Weems: Beyond Black and White, moderated by Katie Delmez, curator, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Other panelists include Franklin Sirmans, curator of contemporary art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Deborah Willis, professor of photography and imaging, Tisch School for the Arts, New York University. Contributors to the publication accompanying the Frist exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, they will discuss some of the ideas presented in their essays, including the incorporation of folklore in her work; the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux; expressions of black beauty; and Weems’s place within a broader tradition of photographs of African Americans by African Americans. The panel will follow a lecture at 11:00 am by Carrie Mae Weems in which she will discuss major themes in her work, including her commitment to promote justice as it relates to racism, sexism, and classism. These events at the Frist are free but registration is required.

Storr (B.A., Swarthmore College; M. F. A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago) was curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002, where he organized exhibitions on Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Tony Smith, and Robert Ryman. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Appointed professor of painting/printmaking and dean of the Yale University School of Art in 2006, Storr has also taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, New York Studio School, and Harvard University. He is a frequent lecturer in this country and abroad.

A contributing editor at Art in America since 1981, he writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). He has written numerous catalogs, articles, and books, including Philip Guston (Abbeville, 1986), Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons, Rizzoli, 1987), and the forthcoming Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois.

Storr has received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maine College of Art, as well as awards from the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In 2000, the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. The Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he was the commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 6, 2012 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

---

Gallery Intern Broadens Her Understanding of Research

Katherine Calvin, a history of art major who will graduate in 2013, discovered the excitement of doing independent research as a Fine Arts Gallery intern last semester. Calvin wrote about her experience in VUpoint, a publication distributed to first-year students to explain “the ins and outs” of Vanderbilt. To read Calvin’s essay, go to http://commonplace.vanderbilt.edu/hosted/VUpoint2012.pdf and scroll down to page 32 of the publication.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 27, 2012 in Student/Alumni, VRC

---

Tracy Miller Named Interim Chair of History of Art Department

A specialist in the ritual architecture of medieval China, Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art and former director of the Asian Studies Program, is the new chair of the Department of History of Art for the 2012-2013 academic year. Miller, who joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2000, teaches courses in East Asian art history and the history of Asian architecture, with special emphasis on the ritual and garden architecture of China and Japan.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in art history at Arizona State University, Miller spent two years in China (1991-1993) studying Mandarin and completing graduate coursework in architectural history at Beijing’s Qinghua University. She earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program in 2000. Miller lived another three years in Asia (1997-2000) engaging in fieldwork in Hebei and Shanxi provinces and continuing her training in classical Chinese and Japanese. While completing her doctorate, she was a research fellow at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, from 1998 to 2000.

This semester she is teaching History of Asian Art and Architecture: Tradition and Transformation. Her research focuses on the culture of ritual sites in medieval China (618-1644), specifically the ways in which identity was expressed visually through the media of temples and their artistic programs.

This past year Miller was the Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow and co-directed the Robert Penn Warren Center Faculty Fellows Program, Sacred Ecology: Landscape Transformations for Ritual Practice. The year-long interdisciplinary seminar explored the manifold experiences of complex ritual sites around the world and across all periods of history. Miller and nine other Vanderbilt scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, classical studies, history of art, Asian studies, history, Latin American studies, and English, grappled with such issues as: How do people interact with landscape? How does it inspire them to create buildings? How do they integrate building structures into the landscape? How do they modify landscape for their own desires and interests in interacting with the divinities that reside at that site?

Her first book, The Divine Nature of Power: Chinese Ritual Architecture at the Sacred Site of Jinci (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), received the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication in 2008. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, Miller sought to recover the motivations behind the creation of art, including temple buildings, sculptures, and wall paintings, within a sacred landscape, addressing the way in which specific temple forms and their placement within the landscape affected the understanding of the identities of divinities worshipped within them.

Miller was meticulous in her in-depth investigation of the dramatic ritual complex of Jinci, near modern Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi Province, with its more than thirty worship halls and subsidiary structures dating from the Song through the Qing dynasties. Built around three sacred springs that feed the Jin River, the complex is renowned for the monumental Sage Mother Hall (ca. 1038-1087), the second largest extant Northern Song dynasty building, the most decorative at the sacred site, and dedicated to the Spirit of the Jin Springs. For the literati elite of late imperial China, however, Jinci was thought to be dedicated to an ancestral figure, the Zhou dynasty lord Shu Yu of Tang and his mother Yi Jiang. By “reading the architecture” and integrating architectural evidence into the site’s 1,500-year-long textual history, Miller demonstrates “how Jinci reflects the interests of the agrarian community and how its architecture was manipulated to assert competing interpretations of the Sage Mother’s identity in order to claim dominance over the site.

Her current research is for a second book regarding Chinese medieval architecture entitled Building Across Borders: Regional Style in China’s Monumental Timber Architecture 900-1200. Central to her research are the timber bracketing systems that support the roofs of ritual structures. “These buildings and bracket systems are markers of self-awareness and self-confidence in a specific time and place,” said Miller, explaining that her work documents Chinese regional identity that persisted despite new rulers who sought to import styles from other regions. “The style of the bracketing is helpful in tracking the path of architecture and culture as the southeast increased its influence over north central China from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries.” ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 24, 2012 in HART, VRC

---

Elizabeth Moodey: Color Choices at the Burgundian Court

Within the codes of late medieval dress, artists used color not only to indicate rank or occupation but also to delineate mood or moral character. Elizabeth Moodey, assistant professor of history of art, presented a paper, titled Ledit duc, ledit jour: Color Choices at the Burgundian Court, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, in mid-May. Moodey considered the use of color as an aspect of dress at the court of Burgundy, using evidence from manuscripts, panel paintings, and chronicles to find instances of dress that were acknowledged as significant.

The title, she explained, comes from the chronicle of Jacques du Clercq, who reported that Philip the Good, the third Valois duke of Burgundy, chose to wear color for a single day (“the said duke, the said day”) in 1454 rather than his and his household’s habitual black. Philip broke a sixteen-year practice for the day of the Banquet of the Pheasant, his lavish banquet held in Lille to mount support for a crusade against Mehmet I that would win back Constantinople from the Turks. The chronicle stresses the importance of the duke’s choice, but without indicating how a modern reader should interpret it.

Moodey received a Getty Library research grant awarded to scholars whose work requires the use of specific collections housed in the Getty Research Institute. She used the time to pursue her grisaille project, a study of the color “gray” in medieval altarpieces, manuscripts, and dress. ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 24, 2012 in HART, VRC

---

Event Celebrates Generosity of Tom Brumbaugh and Olen Bryant

A colossal portrait head of Marian Anderson, internationally acclaimed contralto, from Alan LeQuire’s Cultural Heroes series was the centerpiece of an event honoring Tom Brumbaugh and Olen Bryant on June 24 at the Portland Public Library of Sumner County, Tennessee. Friends from across the region came to pay tribute to their generosity and passion for the arts over the years.

Brumbaugh, professor emeritus of fine arts at Vanderbilt until his death in December 2011, and Bryant, accomplished sculptor and professor emeritus of art at Austin Peay State University, moved from Clarksville to the Portland area in 1998. They soon became ardent supporters of the library, attending Friends of the Library meetings and donating artifacts to the annual silent auction. They generously contributed to the expansion of the original 6,700 square foot library into a newly remodeled 20,000 square foot building, formally dedicated in September 2011, and Brumbaugh bequeathed $50,000 to The Portland Area Library Foundation to be used as an endowment.

“Without the dedication of Tom and Olen, our library would be lacking in so many ways,” said Barbara Russell, director of the Portland Library. “Their generosity will benefit the people of the area through our library for years to come.”

Bryant, who received the Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2007, continues to prepare intriguing topical exhibits for library patrons in the handsome display cabinets he donated. One of his sculptures in his innovative, signature style graces the façade of the library overlooking a courtyard and garden being built in honor of these two men.

As a memorial to Brumbaugh, Bryant commissioned LeQuire, a Vanderbilt alumnus who had studied art history with Brumbaugh and sculpture with Puryear Mims, to cast in bronze the portrait head of Anderson for the Portland Library. LeQuire sculpted the singer in “a moment of performance, striving to infuse the clay with a living presence” rather than creating a strictly realistic likeness. Insight into a personality, he said, is revealed “through movement sensed through posture and passion projected through expression.”

With the Cultural Heroes series, “I wanted to create larger-than-life portrait heads in clay that would affect the viewer with their beauty and presence,” LeQuire said. “I am interested in real people whose art succeeded despite obstacles. This early twentieth-century group represents the great contributions of the artists who were the grandparents of the Civil Rights movement.” Celebrated for her historic open-air performance in 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Anderson was banned from American concert halls until she was 58 because of the color of her skin.

LeQuire, internationally renowned for his monumental sculptures of Athena Parthenos in the Nashville Parthenon and Musica, nine dancing figures in a circular composition, on Music Row, was recognized at the event and spoke individually to guests as they viewed the bronze sculpture of Anderson. Other cultural icons represented in the Cultural Heroes series are Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”), Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White, with Louis Armstrong nearing completion. An exhibition of these portrait heads in clay had provided a lovely accent for the library’s formal dedication last fall.

“Viewed as the Pied Piper of the department of fine arts, Tom Brumbaugh was much beloved by his students and early on received the prestigious Madison Sarratt Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching,” said Hamilton Hazlehurst, professor emeritus of fine arts and longtime chair of the department, who attended the event with his wife, Carol, and other representatives from the department.

“He was always alert to and respectful of the problems of others, and his wise counsel was often sought, as witness the continual stream of those waiting outside his office. Generous to a fault, he contributed substantially to the department’s permanent study collection with objects he had acquired over the years. Tom was indeed the gentleman scholar. May his many contributions endure forever.” ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 11, 2012 in Events, HART, Student/Alumni

---

Barbara Yontz: Sculptural Installation in Space 204 through June 29

New York and Nashville-based artist, educator, and Vanderbilt alumna Barbara Yontz fascinates viewers with her use of sound, video, and such natural materials as wool and hair in No Going Back, currently on view through June 29 in the Space 204 gallery housed in the Ingram Studio Art Center on the Vanderbilt campus.

“These sculptural installations, some with sound or video, navigate the intra-relationships among materiality, emotion, and the body,” said Yontz, who is particularly interested in relationships—“the messy encounter between at least two relationships and the boundaries that separate and dissolve one from/or into another.” Such works as Touching From the Inside Out, You are There, Like My Skin, The Places Where We Meet, Mending Broken Hearts, and Reading Bodies reflect that interest.

Materials function in her work as “both metaphor and real substance with the memory of functional use value,” she explained. “Skin, hair, wool, and cocoons are all bodily materials that were once an essential aspect of adaptation for life. Now these materials are reused and made into artworks, separated from their original function but unable to shake the attachment.”

The centerpiece of the exhibit is The Star Womb Project: Monad to Nomad, an eight-foot, dome-shaped structure made of handmade wool felt, hog gut, and wood with five-channel sound, representing not only a womb or cave but also a nurturing listening space. Yontz developed this installation in response to the astrophysicist Daniel Wolf Savin’s research into the physics behind the formation of the first star. Originating from the “birth of a star” metaphor, the Star Womb imagines the universe as a maternal body from which the first star was born. “This piece,” she noted, “creates a situation where a time and place that humans could never really experience—space 13 billion years ago—can be embodied and imagined.”

Natural materials obviously hold an allure for Yontz, and she utilizes them in ways that highlight our frailty, curiosity, imagination, and fears. “In the end it’s an experiment with ways to move beyond individual boundaries, of negotiating social practices, politics, space, touch, and limits,” she said. “The work exists as evidence of my desire and active engagement with another.”

Yontz, associate professor of art at Saint Thomas Aquinas College in New York, earned the master of arts degree in art history from Vanderbilt in 1999. She currently lives in Manhattan and keeps a studio in Nashville. Her sculptural installations and performance art have appeared in exhibits at the Phoenix Gallery, Chelsea; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission, Nashville, Tennessee; the Jose Marti National Library, Havana, Cuba; the Boston Museum School; and the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, New Jersey.

Space 204 is in the Ingram Studio Art Center at 25th Avenue South and Garland Avenue. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. All exhibits are free and open to the public. For more information, call the department of art at 343.7241, or visit www.vanderbilt.edu/arts. ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 7, 2012 in HART, Student/Alumni

---

Fine Arts Gallery Exhibit Unites Prints and Poetry

Material Glance: A Portfolio of Lithographs by Antoni Tàpies and Poems by Shūzō Takiguchi opens Tuesday, May 29, in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Hall.

Published in 1975, Material Glance (Llambrec Material) brings together two important creative figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), one of the most universally recognized Spanish artists to emerge in the post-World War II era; and Shūzō Takiguchi (1903-1979), Japanese writer, critic and proponent of avant-garde art.

Writer and artist shared an interest in surrealism. Takiguchi was responsible for introducing surrealism to Japan in the late 1920s through his writings, and Tàpies was one of the founders in 1948 of Dau al set, the avant-garde surrealist and Dada-influenced artistic literary group and magazine of the same name.

Although Tàpies is best known for his paintings, he was also an accomplished printmaker, and his collaboration with such writers as Takiguchi is thought to have produced some of his most innovative work in the print medium.

For Material Glance, Takiguchi sent poems written in Japanese characters to Tàpies, who was responsible for creating the book. The artist’s choice of paper—a warm-toned, tan-colored Catalan estrassa paper used by butchers to wrap meat, with its irregular fiber echoing handmade Japanese paper—activates Tàpies’ aggressive, calligraphic line when the prints are viewed with Takiguchi’s poems. The physicality of the poetry, which describes interior worlds merging with exterior realities, is particularly sympathetic to Tàpies’ practice and sensibility.

“The play of language against the visual world of Antoni Tàpies, one of the artistic giants of our time who recently died, is remarkable, each contributing to the other’s unique vision,” said Joseph Mella, director of the Fine Arts Gallery and curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition, on view from May 29 until July 26, includes other works by Tàpies from the Fine Arts Gallery’s collection, and, as with this portfolio, many will be on view for the first time.

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is housed in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. The gallery’s summer hours are Tuesday-Friday, noon-4 p.m., and Saturday, 1-5 p.m.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 25, 2012 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART

---

Christopher Johns Lectures at Royal Academy of Arts

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, gave an invited lecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, on May 15. The lecture, titled Art and Culture in Rome in the 1750s, was sponsored by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art as part of a symposium in conjunction with the Royal Academy’s exhibition on Richard Wilson and classical landscape painting.

Earlier in the month Johns presented a conference paper titled Coffee, Tea and Chocolate: Enlightened Conversation and Papal Diplomacy in Benedict XIV’s ‘Caffeaus’ in the Quirinal Gardens. In conjunction with the international symposium, The Enlightened Pope: Benedict XIV (1675-1758), Johns co-chaired the conference with Rebecca Messbarger, associate professor of Italian, Washington University. Held April 30-May 2 in Saint Louis, Missouri, it represents the first interdisciplinary conference devoted to Benedict’s papacy and the Catholic Enlightenment to be held outside Italy. The conference was hosted by Washington University, Saint Louis University, and the Missouri History Museum. ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 23, 2012 in HART

---

Robin Jensen Examines Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity

What does early Christian imagery reveal about the theological meaning of baptism? Robin Jensen, Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship, addresses this theme in her latest book, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual and Theological Dimensions (Baker Academic, 2012). Jensen illumines the theological meaning of baptism by examining the multiple dimensions of the early Christian baptismal rite.

Jensen explores five principal motifs for understanding baptism—as cleansing from sin, sickness, and Satan; as incorporation into the community; as sanctifying and illuminative; as death and regeneration; and as the beginning of the New Creation—demonstrating how visual images, poetic language, architectural space, and symbolic actions signify and convey the theological meaning of this ritual practice.

In her richly illustrated volume, with many of the images photographed by the author, Jensen “has taken the vast and varied array of treasures comprising early Christian baptism and organized them into a theologically enlightening exhibit, leading the reader through a series of ‘rooms’ through which one may marvel at the rich and varied elements comprising the sacramental whole,” wrote Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., professor of theological studies at Vanderbilt. ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 23, 2012 in HART

---

Vivien Fryd Awarded Visiting Professorship for Fall 2012

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art and chair of the department, will be a visiting professor next fall at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Fryd was awarded the visiting professorship by The Terra Foundation for American Art.

Fryd will teach two courses—American Art Since 1945 and American Icons and Monuments—to students in the Kennedy Institute’s American Studies program. The Terra Foundation actively supports and initiates historical American art exhibitions, scholarship, and programs abroad, and finances renowned scholars and professors of American art to teach at this institution in Berlin, Germany, as well as other countries. ~Fay

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 14, 2012 in HART

---