Portraiture, Modernity, and the Materiality of Objects
14th Annual Art History Graduate Student Association Conference, University of California, Riverside | May 16, 2026 from 1:00-5:30 PM | Via Zoom
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jenni Sorkin, Professor and Chair, History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Riverside’s Art History Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce its 14th Annual Conference, Portraiture, Modernity, and the Materiality of Objects.
The distant jadeite stone–its cool blue-green echoing young maize–was carved in the Olmec world into the sacred form of the Kunz Axe. Cobalt carried along Mongol-era trade routes met Jingdezhen’s kaolin clay and, through kiln fired, produced blue-and-white porcelain. In Roman art, materials such as marble, bronze, and pigment shaped movement, light, and the sensory experience of power. Across cultures and histories, materials have shaped not only objects, but the conditions of making, meaning, and use.
This conference invites graduate students to examine portraiture, modernity, and materiality as active forces rather than a passive surface. Matter speaks: their voice awakening the impulse to make. Objects are encountered through the body and the senses: handled, worn, repaired, and transformed over time. Drawing on approaches including phenomenology, material culture studies, and new materialisms, we ask how materials carry memory, structure experience, and demand particular modes of making, care, and interpretation.
The conference will be held on Zoom on Saturday, May 16, 2026.
The conference is free and open to the public.
The Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) currently stands as ruins on the outskirts of Beijing. Constructed in the eighteenth century as a garden-palace of the Qing emperors, it was infamously looted and burned by the Anglo-French in 1860 at the close of the Second Opium War. In the post-Mao era of the 1980s and 1990s, a fierce debate arose over whether to preserve its form as ruins or to reconstruct the imperial garden. In the meantime, developers seized upon the Yuanming Yuan as a model to replicate in theme park environments. This talk examines the off-site reproduction and displacement of the Yuanming Yuan as theme park reconstructions. I argue that the original Yuanming Yuan’s function as a Qing imperial microcosm is precisely what makes it an ideal model for replicating as theme parks that serve as national microcosms. I ask how the theme parks situate the Yuanming Yuan in historical time through the choice of its architectural replications; I also argue that the performances within the parks displace the Yuanming Yuan into a nebulous imperial past while simultaneously projecting it into an imagined national future.
Emily Citino, 2025 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
“Out of Character, Out of Order” shows how typographic design was employed to negotiate shifting colonial, postcolonial, and Cold War geopolitical dynamics between 1945 and the early 1960s. United Nations agencies and Korean linguists regarded the Sino-Korean form of writing as an impediment to promoting literacy and democracy; and the scholars also viewed it as a remnant of the ancient World Order that subjected Korea to Chinese power. Linguists and educators introduced various typographic solutions, including reorienting Hangeul from vertical to horizontal writing and deconstructing syllabic characters into phonemes. These efforts to follow what they assumed to be the “universal standards” resulted in deformed letters that merely imitated the Roman alphabet without improving the writing system’s legibility or readability. This paper demonstrates how the attempt to break from the old order inadvertently led to a departure from the inherent character of Hangeul, culminating in its swift absorption into a new order.
Conrad Rudolph, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Medieval Art History