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

The Huntington Library hosts

Music in the Early Spanish Americas, Performance Spaces, and Archives

Missale romanum ordinarium (Mexico City: Antonio de Espinosa, 1561). RB 32667. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Ma huel cenquiza, ma nechicaui
(May they come together, may they assemble)

These opening lines of a Nahuatl garden canticle from the Psalmodia Christiana (Mexico City, 1583) set the stage for a conference focusing on the musical sounds, performance spaces, and sonic traces of the early modern Hispanic world. The Huntington Library is the ideal venue for an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas. Today, these musical and sonic legacies are preserved at the Huntington Library. To highlight these little-studied collections and encourage their value in pushing musical-humanistic research forward, this conference will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their current, cutting-edge research on the performances, performance spaces, and archives of this music.

Two-day conference | General: $35, Students and Huntington Fellows: Free | Optional lunch: $20 each day. Register at the Huntington Library website.

Conference registration includes general admission to The Huntington. Lunch reservations will close on March 17 at noon.

Friday, March 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 22, 2025, 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Education and Visitor Center, Haaga Hall
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Rd. San Marino, CA 91108
For questions about this event, please email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432.

Join Us for an Alumni Lecture!

The Sacred Enclosure of the Himorogi at Hiroshima

Christopher Mead Talk, 2025 Christopher Mead, Ph.D.
Emeritus Regents’ Professor, University of New Mexico

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial was designed and built between 1949 and 1955 as a permanent monument to world peace by the great Japanese modernist, Tange Kenzō. The monument seems so complete and self-evident that few visitors stop to ask an obvious if overlooked question: Why is the Peace Memorial not located at the hypocenter, the elevated site where the atomic bomb Little Boy detonated 1903 feet in the air and annihilated an entire city in less than a second on August 6, 1945? Why is the Peace Memorial in fact located some 1200 feet distant from the hypocenter on another of Hiroshima’s many islands? It is as if we had decided to erect the 9/11 Memorial, not where the World Trade Center Towers stood until September 11, 2001, but elsewhere in New York City, on Wall Street for example. In this talk, I take on this question by locating Tange Kenzō’s design at the intersection of Western paradigms of architecture and planning codified by Le Corbusier with Japanese traditions of cultural space and architecture. These traditions engage both Shintō and Buddhist beliefs and are rooted ultimately in the himorogi — the sacred Shintō enclosure where earth meets sky, and humans gather to welcome spirits called kami. Shaped by a sense of time and space unlike what we in the West assume when speaking of place, the himorogi answers our question in ways that we do not expect.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 5:00pm
The Barbara and Art Culver Screening Room at UCR ARTS
3834 Main Street, Riverside

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

Graduate Seminar with Dr. Jussi Parikka Followed by Book Talk

Monday, January 13, 2025 10am to 12:30pm
CHASS Interdisciplinary South 1111

Dr. Parikka is the inaugural International Visiting Professor at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, sponsored by the Vice Provost for International Affair’s office and the Center’s Being Human initiative.

This event will be followed by a book conversation at 2:00PM in INTS 1109 with Prof. Gloria Chan Sook Kim and Dr. Parikka about his new book, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024)

Living Surfaces Book Talk Living Surfaces examines a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces.

Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing at the event.

Parking permits will be provided for non- UCR guests.

Space is limited and registration is required for this event:

https://bit.ly/parikkaseminar

Sponsored by the Being Human Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society and the UCR English Department.