Lecture Series

 

Join Us for the 2023 Undergraduate Paths Series!

 
Undergraduate Paths SeriesDemystifying Graduate School in Art History
Tuesday, May 9 at Noon via Zoom

Register at https://tinyurl.com/yedd69dx

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

Register at https://tinyurl.com/yckz52tm

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

Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series 2023Lily 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

 

Sao Paulo Rexistir

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.

 

 

Ephemera from Gang of CarpHomer 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. 

 

Hot off the Presses: “The Human Being in American Art: A Transatlantic Book Launch”

We are pleased to announce an unconventional book launch celebrating the publication of Humans, a book about the history and future of the idea of the human being in American Art and Culture.

Wednesday, April 20 from 9:00-10:30am
Register at: https://bit.ly/hotp_humans

HUMANS

Edited by Laura Bieger (University of Groningen), Joshua Shannon (University of Maryland), and Jason Weems (University of California Riverside)

Volume 5 of Terra Foundation Essays, Terra Foundation/University of Chicago Press, 2022

DESCRIPTION:

Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking. Authors include Alan Braddock (William & Mary), Jessica Horton (University of Delaware), Michael Leja (University of Pennsylvania), Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art), Larne Abse Gogarty (University College London), Jean-Phillipe Antoine (Paris 8 University), and Cherise Smith (University of Texas Austin).

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Each of the volume’s authors will speak for five minutes in response to the questions below, before the event opens to audience discussion: What concepts of “the human” are needed now? What does it mean–and what does it take–to be human today? What role can art play in fostering the roles and understandings of the human being necessary now? What can we do now (as scholars, as members of society) to shape humanity for the future?

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REGISTER: https://bit.ly/hotp_humans
Wednesday, April 20 at 9:00 PDT (12:00 EDT, 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST)
This is a VIRTUAL event

Sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside
Co-sponsored by the Research Center for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics, University of Groningen; and the Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity, University of Maryland

 

Join us for the in-person return of the Work in Progress lecture series
Wednesday, March 2, 2002 @ 11:00am
ARTS Seminar Room 333

Concrete and Steel: Artists in Industrial Brazil
Dr. Aleca Le Blanc, Professor of Art History

Work in Progress Series -- Aleca Le BlancAlthough urban dwellers would have had to contend with the inconveniences associated with large-scale municipal projects, they also would have witnessed the engineering of new landscapes and the speed with which steel beams, poured concrete and panes of glass were assembled into museums, apartment blocks, and recreational buildings. It was in this visual context that some began to question the ontological limits of the art object and conceptualize projects at the scale of the newly built environments. In Lygia Clark’s work from the mid-1950s, she proposed moving her geometric compositions from the easel to the interior walls of the modern buildings under construction, documenting her environmental compositions with architectural maquettes in 1956. She went so far as to renounce her career as an artist—temporarily — while campaigning for the integration of visual art and architecture. Similarly, Abraham Palatnik also wanted to visually activate these new interior spaces, although for him it happened with colored light. Utilizing his training as a mechanical engineer, he built mechanized light boxes that projected a sequence of chromatic compositions generated by a system of pulleys, gears, levers, and lightbulbs contained within. In São Paulo, Geraldo de Barros produced an enormous photographic series, Fotoformas (1946-1951). Like Palatnik in Rio, light was often his subject-matter, although for Barros it was the natural light refracting through different building materials and architectural features, like textured glass or open doors. Often the light and shadows are so stark that they create compositions of geometric abstraction, a phenomenon that would become increasingly common as the city became progressively vertical. This talk demonstrates some of the ways that artists reimagined the possibilities of architecture amid a building frenzy.

 

 

Department of the History of Art & the Asian Studies Program present:
Northeast Asia Council Distinguished Speaker Lecture

King Sejong the Great and the Cultural History of Weather, Religion, and Wealth in Early Chosŏn Korea

Join us on Friday, February 26, 2021 at 3:00pm (PST) — via Zoom
Register at http://tinyurl.com/3cm8wtkq

JunhAhnTalkJuhn Ahn Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan

King Sejong (r. 1418-1450), whose much adored image is prominently displayed on Korea’s green-colored banknote and in the middle of Gwanghwamun Square, is often, if not always, remembered and celebrated for his role in the creation of the Korean alphabet, his passion for science, and his love for the common people. This image of the much beloved king, which developed under unique historical circumstances, obscures more than it reveals. Nationalistic efforts to paint King Sejong as an ideal Confucian monarch germinated during the colonial period and later gained steam after the fall of Korea’s first president Syngman Rhee in 1960. But, needless to say, King Sejong was more than just a caring benevolent Confucian monarch. Like many others who occupied the Chosŏn throne, Sejong was a complex figure who sought creative and politically expedient ways to address concerns that continued to trouble the relatively young Chosŏn dynasty. Extreme weather conditions, sharp population growth, shifting geopolitical winds, radical environmental transformations, and resistance to the state’s encroachment on private enterprise proved to be the greatest sources of concern. As Sejong and his predecessors knew well, these concerns could not be addressed without first addressing the so-called Buddhist problem. This talk will take a close look at the growing concerns about weather, religion, and wealth in Early Chosŏn Korea and shed new light on this oft-neglected aspect of Sejong and his reign.