3/17
Florence Gould Foundation Fellow Lisa Lee presents “Thomas Hirschhorn: Work in Movement.” Throughout the 1990s, contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn contrived unorthodox modes of circulation—gifting, pamphleting, hawking, abandoning—in pursuit of a “nonexclusive audience” for his work. This lecture will consider Hirschhorn’s …
3/14
The Research and Academic Program presents “The Evolution of Beauty: From Warblers to Warhol.” In this lecture Richard Prum discusses the aesthetic evolution of sexual displays of birds and presents a coevolutionary framework for aesthetic philosophy of the arts. He …
3/3
Center for Spain in America Fellow Julie A. Harris presents, “The Elusive Line between Ornament and Meaning in the Ornamental Carpet Pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles (c. 1260–1320).” Full-page “carpet pages” in the Hebrew Bibles of Iberia, like their counterparts …
2/18
Manton Post-doctoral Fellow Caitlin R. Woolsey presents “New Old Media: Tape, Type, and the Undiscovered Collages of Henri Chopin.” Henri Chopin (1922–2008) is known for mining expression beyond language in layered “audiopoems,” created by manipulating his voice and body noises …
12/3
Manton Fellow Jiat-Hwee Chang presents “The (Trans)formation of Air-conditioning Complexes: Architectural Histories and Futures from Asia.” How did cities and urban populations around the world become dependent on air-conditioning? How did air-conditioning dependency transform built environment, material culture, and social …
11/12
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Kirsten Scheid presents “Curating Jerusalem Actual and Possible: Political Lessons from a non-Euclidean City.” Treating an exhibition not as a representation but a “system of action,” reveals how it provides participants with a “critical space,” i.e., a …
11/1
Curatorial Fellow Adrienne Childs presents “Material Matters: Race and Materiality in the Decorative Arts.” A seventeenth-century ebony “blackamoor” cabinet, an eighteenth-century sterling silver slave candlestick, and a twenty-first-century black Murano glass chandelier are examples of decorative arts that figure into …
10/29
Clark Fellow Jessica Horton presents “Earth Diplomacy: Diné Arts of Reciprocity, 1966–1968.” From 1966 to 1968, the United States government commissioned Diné (Navajo) artists Bertha and Fred Stevens to demonstrate weaving and sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, ostensibly as …
10/1
Clark Fellow Susan Gagliardi presents “Mapping Senufo: Rethinking the Scholarly Monograph in the Era of Digital Publication.” What might research and the publication of results look like if scholars producing them integrated decades of theories about the construction of identities …
9/25
Anthony Grafton considers the meaning and relevance of margin notes found in Renaissance texts. In this period, educated readers went through their texts pen in hand. They underlining passages, adding references to names and short summaries in the margins, and …
9/17
Beinecke Fellow Jared Sexton presents “Basic Black.” What would happen, what would be enabled theoretically and practically if we re-imagined and re-envisioned all color and all colors as blackness in the most expansive sense? Thinking about the universe (of color) …
4/18
University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Art Seth Estrin is a historian of the art, archaeology, and visual cultures of ancient Greece. His research explores the making and viewing of art as a form of social practice in the ancient …
4/4
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the …
4/23
Mel Y. Chen presents “Arts of Agitation” This talk considers “agitation” as an interaction between bodily and political being. My attention to agitation has emerged as the last aspect of a study of chemical intimacies, wherein intoxication has operated as …
4/30
Clark Fellow Celeste Olalquiaga presents “In Quest of the Gorgon’s Head.” The terrifying Medusa of mythical fame is a reinterpretation of an archaic apotropaion, or protective emblem, the Gorgoneion. Greek classic culture transformed this protective figure into a destructive one, …
4/16
Mellon Decade Fellow Philippe Cordez presents “The Art of Commodities: Medieval Venice.” Since the twelfth century, Europe has seen a steady increase of highly specialized objects produced in large quantities, involving a variety of materials, techniques, ornaments, images, and functions, …
4/2
Robert Sterling Clark Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson presents “Louise Nevelson: Modernist Drag.” This talk investigates the work of sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), in particular her all-black wood-based reliefs—a formal idiom she pursued for decades—to argue for a politics of queer commitment, …
3/12
Clark Fellow Jennifer Bajorek presents “Strategic Invisibilities: Migration and Post-Representation.” This lecture explores work about migrants and migration in contemporary France. Bajorek thinks with artistic strategies that decenter the migrant as an anchor of truth and rights claims, and that …
3/5
Mellon Network Fellow Kris Cohen presents “Alma Thomas and the Graphical Picture Plane.” This talk describes how Alma Thomas’s Earth Paintings address, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction, nascent configurations of the computer screen …
2/19
Clark Fellow Susan Sidlauskas presents “John Singer Sargent and the Matter of Paint.” The cosmopolitan son of a physician, John Singer Sargent dissolved the distinctions among fabric, flesh, and paint with the pictorial equivalent of dissection and its counter-activities: masking, …
11/27
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Jill Casid presents “Necrolandscaping on the Border.” In recent calls for an ecological aesthetics capable of reckoning with global Anthropocene crisis, landscape’s colonial and neo-colonial dreamwork, master-of-all-I-survey perspectives, and distanced way of seeing that reduces nature to …
11/13
Beinecke Fellow Mark Wigley presents, “John McHale and the Dissolving Architecture of Pop.” The British artist John McHale made some of the most radical and prophetic propositions about art, information, media, ecology, education, social life, prosthetics, the body, buildings, and …
10/30
Center for Spain in America Fellow Doron Bauer presents, “The Aesthetic Colonization of Conquered Islamic Cities: From Palma de Mallorca to Tel Aviv.” A detailed examination of the transformation of Islamic Madina Mayurqa into Christian Palma de Mallorca after the …
10/16
Florence Gould Foundation Fellow Gülru Çakmak presents “Painting, Photography and the Long Duration of History in Osman Hamdi’s Paintings.” In this talk, Çakmak will discuss a series of paintings made in the 1880s and 1890s by the Ottoman painter Osman …
9/25
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art before the Age of Art History Frédéric Ogée presents “Truth and Nature in British Art.” This lecture will survey British artists’ writings from c. 1700–1920, bringing out the priorities and values shared by …
5/1
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art Shira Brisman presents, “The Provisionality of Sixteenth-Century Designs.” In the sixteenth century, as goldsmiths affiliated with families such as Jamnitzer and de Bry began to publish their engraved designs for objects that could …
4/17
Clark Visiting Professor Nina Dubin presents “Master of the World.” In the wake of the world’s first international financial crisis, Cupid claimed pride of place in French eighteenth-century art. The naked, winged infant deity personified not only the folly of …
4/3
Holly Fellow Daniel Savoy presents “Food for the Soul: Michelangelo, the Laurentian Library, and the Body’s Spiritual Nourishment.” In his celebrated book, The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), the late James Ackerman (1919–2016) interpreted the Library of S. Lorenzo in Florence …
3/13
Mellon Decade Fellow Kevin Carr presents, “The Hagiography of Place: Illustrated Legends of the Zenkōji Triad and the Formation of Sacred Cartographies in Medieval Japan.” In medieval Japan, why did people make pilgrimages and donate to religious centers? What role …
2/27
Mellon Decade Fellow Renzo Baldasso presents, “Take Two: On the Origins of Graphic Design in Printed Books.” The lecture will focus on graphics revisions found in books from Gutenberg’s Bible to the Jenson’s early publications. Analysis of examples of page-design …
2/13
Lauren Cannady presents “Rococo Thought Patterns.” If eighteenth-century curiosity cabinets were repositories for the dead and ossified, the garden was a parallel cabinet that provided a space for the viable, for living curiosities. Given that the organizing principal of the …
11/14
Mellon Decade Fellow Andrew K. Scherer presents “Baak: The Qualities and Craft of Ancient Maya Bone.” This illustrated lecture explores the materiality of human and animal bone among the Pre-Columbian Maya (ca. 400 BCE to 1502 CE). The importance of …
10/31
Christopher Heuer presents “Arctic Ink.” When a mysterious cache of sixteenth-century Netherlandish engravings was found in the Arctic circle in 1870, many questions arose. What do such objects, for example, tell us about narratives of Renaissance globalization? About “cultural exchange” …
10/17
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Agnes Lugo-Ortiz presents, “Slave Portraiture at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation).” This talk will address the visualization of enslaved subjects in portraiture during the period of emancipation in the Caribbean. It will underscore the conflictive …
9/26
Clark Fellow Victoria Rovine presents “Cloth and Colonialism: France, French West Africa, and the Construction of Cultures.” Cloth’s soft, pliable nature makes it an improbable vehicle for the assertion of power, yet it played a singular role in the history …
9/12
Beinecke Fellow Matthew Jesse Jackson presents “Everythingism.” It could be argued that the most compelling art is no longer defined by particular media (painting, sculpture, photography, video), or by particular subjects (portraiture, landscape, still life, devotional image), or by particular …
5/2
Clark Fellow Ajay Sinha presents “An Indian Dancer in American Photographs.” This lecture tells a story of transcultural attractions in a set of more than a hundred photographs of the Indian dancer Ram Gopal, taken by the American photographer Carl …
4/18
Clark Fellow Tamara Sears presents “Wilderness Urbanisms: Architecture, Landscape, and Travel in Southern Asia.” In the early 1340s, the sultan of Delhi tasked the famed Moroccan traveler, Ibn Battuta, with the job of accompanying a group of Mongol emissaries on …
4/4
Mellon Decade Fellow Delinda Collier presents “Natural Media—Light, Water, and Wind—in Souleymane Cissé’s Finye (1982) and Yeelen (1987) .” Cissé’s un-commonsense proposition about “new” mediums is that they are both reducible to natural media and arbitrarily connected to language. This …
3/15
Clark Fellow Ivan Gerát presents “Image, Narrative, and Mentality: Recent Perspectives in Approaching Medieval Pictorial Legends.” The role of narratives in creative artistic processes and their influence on the historical functions of images open many fascinating questions in art history …
3/7
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art Jeehee Hong presents “Framing Affect and Vision in Middle-Period China.” This paper addresses how emotional expressions were shaped in material form through various modes of visual and spatial experiences in middle-period China (ninth–fourteenth …
2/28
Clark/Oakley Fellow Marden Nichols presents “The Painted Stage: Drama in Pictures and Pictures in Drama at Rome.” Despite the undeniable importance of sound and song to dramatic performances, the ancient Romans referred to their audiences as spectatores, or viewers. This …
11/29
Clark Fellow Robert Slifkin presents “The New Sense of Fate: Detrital Monumentalism in Postwar American Sculpture.” Tuesday, Nov. 29 5:30pm Conforti Pavilion
11/15
Clark Fellow Ernst van Alphen presents “The Melodramatic Imagination in Painting: Gesture and Emotion in Christina’s World.” Tuesday, Nov. 15 5:30pm Conforti Pavilion
10/13
In her recent research, Catriona MacLeod (University of Pennsylvania) examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form …
10/25
Mellon Decade Fellow Stephanie Porras presents “Maerten de Vos and the Renaissance In-between.” Maerten de Vos was a sixteenth-century Flemish artist who worked in Italy, a double convert (to Lutheranism before returning to Catholicism), and an export artist whose work …
10/18
Robert Sterling Clark Professor Avinoam Shalem presents “When Nature Becomes Ideology: Disclosing the Ruined Landscapes of Palestine (after 1947).” When Nature Becomes Ideology focuses on the topography of Palestine’s rural landscape after 1947. The modern era and especially the age …
10/4
Clark Fellow Martha Buskirk presents “The Convenient Fiction of Authorship (On the Interwined Fortunes of Art and Copyright).” Arguing that it is impossible to understand modern and contemporary art without taking into account articulations of intangible value that are the …
4/30
Convened by Mary Roberts and Marc Gotlieb, Objects of Orientalism is designed to open a new dialogue around orientalist visual practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to continue the methodological conversation around contemporary valences of the …
4/29
Convened by Mary Roberts and Marc Gotlieb, Objects of Orientalism is designed to open a new dialogue around orientalist visual practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to continue the methodological conversation around contemporary valences of the …
4/19
Clark Fellow Stephen Campbell presents “Against Titian.” Tuesday, April 19, 5:30-6:30pm Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone Hill, 225 South Street
3/1
Clark Fellow Juliet Koss presents “Model Soviet Time Machines.” Tuesday, March 1, 2016 5:30 PM-6:30 PM Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone Hill, 225 South Street
3/15
Drawn from Warnock’s current work-in-progress, this talk proposes a new reading of Hantaï’s oeuvre from the lens of these largely unfamiliar and rarely exhibited investigations. Tuesday, March 15, 5:30-6:30 Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone Hill 225 South St Williamstown, …
4/5
Clark Fellow Julie Ault presents “Undoing the Past: Recuperated Document and Uncertain History.” Tuesday, April 5, 2016 5:30 pm-6:30 pm Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone hill, 225 South Street
2/23
Clark/Oakley Fellow Kavita Singh presents “Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone.” Tuesday, February 23, 2016 5:30 PM-6:30 PM Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone Hill, 225 South Street
12/1
Clark Fellow Joanna Smith presents “Buried, Layered, Lasting, and Lost: Bronze Age Perspectives on the History of Art. Tuesday, December 1 5:30pm Hunter Studio, Lunder Center at Stone Hill, 225 South Street
10/27
Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor Mary Roberts presents a lecture, “Transcultural Objects: Islamic Art and Artist-collector Networks, 1860–1890.” It will take place at 5:30pm Tuesday, October 27th in the Hunter Studio of the Lunder Center, Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street.
10/20
Clark Fellow Michael Brenson presents a lecture “The Place of Art in an Artist’s Biography: The Challenge of David Smith’s Medals for Dishonor.” It will take place at 5:30pm Tuesday, October 20th in the Hunter Studio at the Lunder Center.
9/29
Associate RAP Director Christopher Heuer will deliver a lecture at 5:30pm on Tuesday, September 29th in the Hunter Studio at the Lunder Center.