Work in Progress Lecture Series

Crafting Kashmir: Painting & Stitching Place in the Nineteenth Century
Fatima Quraishi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History

Crafting Kashmir: Painting & Stitching Place in the Nineteenth Century The verdant Kashmir Valley, a place of unearthly beauty, has long been a subject of praise and description. The history and geography of Kashmir appeared in multiple literary genres, including Sanskrit sources which claimed the valley to be a sacred landscape and Persian courtly literature which characterised Kashmir as being jannat nazir (paradise like). Recent scholarship has highlighted the connections between Mughal literary imaginings, political discourse, and the construction of gardens in Kashmir, interpreting these landscaped spaces as a means to claim sovereignty over the land. In the nineteenth century, the region was again the subject of an imperial discourse, that of the British empire, a discourse shaped by a particular interest in the production of Kashmiri shawls, a highly sought after commodity in Victorian England. Among the shawls were a small set of embroidered ‘map’ shawls which depicted the city of Srinagar and its significant landmarks, both natural and manmade, one of which was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria. Large-scale painted cotton maps of the entire valley were also produced in the mid-nineteenth century, often employing the same visual conventions as the shawls. This paper explores the image-making practices which underlay the production of these textiles, departing from existing scholarship which has emphasized their imbrication within the colonial enterprise. I instead approach their resistance of the colonial gaze and highlight how the craftsmen creating them were informed by a distinctly South Asian, perhaps even Kashmiri, sense of place.

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 5:30PM in ARTS 333

7th Annual Getty Graduate Symposium

2025 Getty Graduate Symposium Friday, February 7, 2025, 9:45am-6pm
Museum Lecture Hall and Online

The Getty Research Institute hosts the 7th annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcases the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into 3 sessions, the symposium includes 9 individual presentations, moderated panel discussions, and Q&A sessions with the audience.

Participants include our own PhD candidate, Ashley McNelis

This event is FREE free but advance tickets are required.

Participants:
Ashley McNelis, University of California, Riverside
Axelle Toussaint, University of California, Santa Cruz
Elissa Watters, University of Southern California
Elizabeth Fair, University of California, Berkeley
Emily Chun, Stanford University
Hande Sever, University of California, San Diego
Natalie Zhang, University of California, Los Angeles
Taylor Van Doorne, University of California, Santa Barbara
Zane Casimir, University of California, Irvine

Local and Transnational: Buddhist Iconographies in Contemporary Mongolian Art

Presentation by Prof. Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem
Herron School of Art and Design Indiana University-Indianapolis

January 30, 2025
11:00-12:20PM
INTN 3023
In-person or online

This presentation examines the uses of Buddhist teachings, iconography, and symbols in Mongolian contemporary art. Through a comparative analysis with well- known contemporary Himalayan artists, the presentation will discuss how the typology of the “Two Buddhisms” (Paul Numrich 2003, Johan Elverskog 2006), which refers to ethnic and local vs. modern and transnational, has an interesting parallel in contemporary art. The talk will introduce and analyze prominent Mongolian artists, such as B. Baatarzorig, B. Nomin, D. Soyolmaa and Ch. Baasanjav, whose works have been shown in galleries and museums around the world.

Prof. Tsultem is a scholar of Mongolian art and culture whose research focuses mainly on Buddhist art and architecture and contemporary Asian art. She is the author of many articles and books on the artistic and cultural history of Buddhist Inner Asia, including A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020). Prof. Tsultem has also had a prolific, international curatorial career, focused especially on exhibiting the work of contemporary Mongolian artists. She was most recently curator for Mongol Zurag: The Art of Resistance, which showed at the Garibaldi Gallery in Venice, Italy in late 2024.

Co-sponsored by UCR’s Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of the History of Art

Join Us for the 2023 Undergraduate Paths Series!

Demystifying Graduate School in Art History
Tuesday, May 9 at Noon via Zoom

This panel brings together current graduate students and faculty in art history. Panelists will discuss graduate school, applications, including how to put together and application and how to choose which programs are appropriate for you. Panelists will discuss their own experiences as graduate students of art history, what it entails, managing expectations and workloads, and strategies for successfully navigating graduate school.

Speakers:
Lily Allen, PhD candidate, UCR
Alan Carillo, PhD student, University of Iowa
Yong Cho, Assistant Professor, UCR
Rebekkah Hart, PhD student, Case Western Reserve University

Putting Your Art History Degree to Work
Tuesday, May 16 at Noon via Zoom

This panel brings together working professionals with undergraduate and advanced degrees in art history who have gone on to have a broad range of careers. Panelists will discuss their positions and their career paths, including how their art history degrees prepared them for their positions.

Speakers:
Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Contemporary Publishing Fellow, Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania
Maite Alvarez, Project Specialist, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Karen Gudino-Flores, Riverside Public Library, Main Library
Diego Roberto Irigoyen, Digital Resource Specialist, Department of Art History, UCR

2023 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series

Join Us on Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 5pm in ARTS 333

Lily Allen, 2022 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Mabel Alvarez’s Portraits in Hawaii, 1939-40
Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985) is one of four artists in my dissertation, which reevaluates the social and creative dynamics of one of L.A.’s first modern art groups — the Art Students League of Los Angeles — through intertwining analyses of the lives and works of Alvarez, Hideo Date, Benji Okubo, and Stanton Macdonald- Wright. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, Alvarez returned to the island in 1939 where she produced portraits of children of mixed Hawaiian, Asian, and Iberian heritage. My initial thoughts on this series was that the images’ modernity, sensitivity, and subjectivity made them prime evidence of an argument central to my dissertation: that Alvarez and her fellow artists painted pictures exploring concepts and sentiments that would later resonate with the Asian American Movement. However, what I saw in the various archives I visited in Honolulu has caused me to re-evaluate my hypothesis about this series, revealing connections to dark histories that clash with the portrayals’ apparent progressive potential and make them, in my mind, fraught objects both historically and currently.

Molly Bond, 2022 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
The Spaces of Relief: A Research Itinerary Across Italy
Relief sculpture flickers between the real and the virtual, mediating between tangible form and illusionistic space — in Renaissance terms, partaking of both “sculptural” and “painterly” effects. My dissertation takes this artform as its focus, broadly seeking to illuminate the complex and dynamic legacy of relief sculpture during the late 16th century in Italy. Primarily I concentrate on a group of bronze casters working in the Marche region during the late Cinquecento, who produced a number of bronze reliefs in and around the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto — home to the Virgin Mary’s miraculous flying house! In this presentation I will speak about
my time as a doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, especially my travel throughout the Marche as supported by the Forster-Hahn Award. This travel has been crucial for advancing my project: from completing archival and library research, to conducting an extensive photographic campaign of late Cinquecento relief, to exchanging ideas with a diverse, international group of experts in the field of Renaissance studies.

Becky Luo, 2022 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Articulating Sociality: Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections
In a 1991 lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute, Martin Wong announced, “Everyone thinks all I paint are Puerto Ricans, but secretly I paint Chinatown. For about the last ten years I’ve been accumulating a secret stash.” The following photograph documents an underpainting that would become the back of Iglesia Pentecostal, one of nine in a series of storefront paintings. The painting on the verso reveals inklings of secrecy throughout the artist’s interplay of language, visual motifs, and faces, signaling an ambiguous position within the communities he represented. Such ambiguities destabilize belonging as a constant; his acceptance into various social spheres is conditional and mutable. The research trip to NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections critically contributed to my understanding of Wong’s artworks as occupying a social function. In the fragmented phrases and unfinished sketches of his papers, Wong reflects on, interrogates, and utilizes art to navigate community.

Please join us for the in-person return of the Brink Carrot Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Tuesday, April 26 at 5:15pm
ARTS 333

BrinkCarrotForsterHahn2022 Lecture Series

Camilla Querin, 2021 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award

Though It is Dark, Still I Sing: Brazilian Art from the Military Dictatorship to the 34th São Paulo Biennial and Back

“Though It Is Dark, Still I Sing” is the title of the 34th São Paulo Biennial. It is a sentence that encapsulates also the somber atmosphere and the defiant attitude that artists displayed during the military dictatorship in Brazil, producing artworks to illuminate the socio-political situation and express dissent. In this presentation I will talk about my visit to the Biennial and the interviews I conducted with artists and curators in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which allowed me to collect important information to conclude my dissertation that looks at artistic practices of resistance during the authoritarian regime.

Jesse Rocha, 2021 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award

Emotional Histories and Documentation in the ACT UP Archives

The Richard G. Carrott award allowed me to travel to New York City in September 2021, where I worked with materials in the Special Collections of the New York Public Library. These objects included posters, stickers, and video records from AIDS activist groups ACT UP and Gran Fury. In particular, the video objects sparked my interest, as they reflected the emotional histories, social textures, and documentary impulses of a generation of artists and activists. My presentation will discuss how this research trip has influenced my thesis work on gay male artists in 1980’s Brazil.

Homer Charles Arnold, 2021 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award

Popping up: How CARP Invented the Itinerant Gallery in Los Angeles

During the 1970s, the exhibition initiative Carp produced revolutionary pop-up exhibitions throughout California. Working in response to the decade’s pluralism, Carp’s directors Barbara Burden and Marilyn Nix jettisoned traditional exhibition practices utilizing singular gallery spaces in favor of multiple sites including television stations and Wilshire Boulevard. Their approach invented the postmodern curator by attending to both the artwork and its site. My project reveals how Burden and Nix generated an exhibition format that became standardized. Carp’s archive is currently held in Redding, California. Access to these materials, made possible by the Forster-Hahn award, revealed the scope of Carp’s projects.