Conrad Rudolph Awarded the CHASS Distinguished Research Lecturer Award
http://chass.ucr.edu

The College of Art, Humanities, and Social Sciences presents the 2015-2016 CHASS Distinguished Research Lecturer Award to Professor of Art History, Conrad Rudolph.

Dr. Rudolph is an art historian whose research focuses on the art of Medieval Europe, with special attention to the role of visual expression in the articulation of intellectual and theological concepts, and their dissemination into the broader culture. As a medievalist, Rudolph’s work is lauded not only for its historical rigor, but also for its conceptual daring and theoretical sophistication. Rudolph is known to be a scholar who fearlessly asks the big questions. He also possesses the rare gift of being able to make complex and historically distant imagery clear and compelling to a twenty-first century audiences.

His record of publication and scholarly activity (six books; countless articles and chapters, fellowships, and academic presentations) demonstrates a remarkably high and consistent level of production. Especially noteworthy, however, is his string of recent achievements: publication of an award winning book, his 626-page The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century, election as a fellow of the elite Medieval Academy of American, and perhaps most strikingly, his National Endowment for the Humanities-funded FACES (Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems) project. This last project which mixes traditional humanistic scholarship with cutting edge digital facial recognition software to provide a new tool for identifying unknown sitters in artistic portraits. He is currently at work on a second and equally inventive project that uses spatial modeling technology to investigate the famous dome of the Florence Cathedral. Here, as in FACES, Rudolph enacts a rare and high-level integration of art history and the digital humanities.

Rudolph’s scholarship has had a profound effect on the study of medieval art and history at the highest levels. Yet, he has also committed himself to bringing this rigor and inventiveness to the classroom. Fueled by his passion and erudition as scholar, Rudolph is a demanding and inspiring teacher who has guided numerous UCR students into Medieval art.

Jason Weems Awarded Fulbright Fellowship

UCR Anthropologist and Art Historian Awarded Fulbright Fellowships
Yolanda Moses will study new model of inclusiveness in Australia; Jason Weems will explore the intertwining of art and archaeology in the Americas
UCR Today
by Bettye Miller on June 2, 2016

“Jason Weems, associate professor of art history, will pursue research at the Instituto Franklin of the Universidad de Alcala in Madrid, Spain, to develop an intellectual and historical framework for understanding American art through the lens of the Americas.

Weems, who joined the UC Riverside faculty in 2008, will spend the winter and spring quarters of 2016-17 conducting research and teaching at The University of Alcala’s Franklin Institute in a project that he hopes will foster a more globalized approach to American art history both at home and abroad. Research conducted in colonial archives and at various art museums also will support a book-length project, “Inventing the Americas: Art, Archaeology and the Modern Making of a Pre-Columbian Past.”

“While American art has traditionally been understood as the study of ‘art of the United States,’ recently efforts have begun to understand the deep entanglement of national art within a more expansive network of indigenous, cross-cultural and international exchange,” he explained. “One result of this shift has been the expansion of American art to encompass the many places and peoples, across both the Western hemisphere and the globe, which played formative roles in the synthesis of American artistic and representational practices. This more diversified appreciation is often referred to as the ‘arts of the Americas.’”

Refocusing American art scholarship away from narratives of European colonial domination toward a more balanced approach to the Americas offers new and better opportunities to understand the rich cultural networks that shape the history and future of the hemisphere and the place of artistic expression within it, Weems said.”

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Art and Materiality at The Getty Center

ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
In the past decade, the increased attention to the art object and its materiality has enhanced the study of art history, opening new avenues of investigation. Combined with more historical methodologies, the focus on materiality offers profound insights into the artworks’ meanings. Artists across space and time have infused materials with not only ritual and symbolic significance but also social, political, and economic functions. Art historians, increasingly in collaboration with conservators and scientists, are gaining insight into both the process of art-making, from raw material to finished object (the chaîne opératoire), and the strategic deployment of materials for their aesthetic qualities and their power to signify.
This two-day symposium will investigate the materiality of artworks and raise questions about procurement, trade, value, manufacturing, and the accumulation of new meanings as objects move between cultures.

UCR Faculty members, Jeanette Kohl and Malcolm Baker will present on Monday, April 18:

Monday, April 18 at 11:25 am:
Making, Replication, and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust: Digitizing and Interpreting Roubiliac’s Busts of Alexander Pope
Malcolm Baker, University of California, Riverside, and Chelsea Alene Graham, Yale University

Monday, April 18 at 1:45pm:
Tracing Presence: The Portrait Bust between Materiality and “Phenomenology”
Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside

Click here to view the full two-day program

RECEPTIONS
A reception will be held at the close of each day:
April 18th, 5:45 p.m., Lounge Patio, Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel
April 19th, 6:00 p.m., Private Dining Room, Getty Center

Dr. Steffen Siegel, Folkswang Universität der Künste

Cat in the Window? A Closer Look at How People Try to Have a Closer Look.
Dr. Steffen Siegel, Folkswang Universität der Künste (Essen, Germany)

According to Edgar Allan Poe, photography is best described as “infinite representation”. Especially during the medium’s first years comments often stressed photography’s unique capacity of capturing much more detail than possible in any painting, print or drawing. Magnifying glasses were common tools when it came to beholding — and praising — this novel kind of imagery. Today, we should know better. Every photograph is a sum of material, iconographic and social conditions–and of what we have learned about beholding photography. But still, there is an ongoing fascination with ideas like infinity, visual truth and perfection. In recent years, prominent photographs taken from the medium’s formative years–by Daguerre, Talbot, Bayard and other pioneers– have been put into reconsideration. Is it possible to see more than before? Especially with much more than an ordinary magnifying glass in our hands, is it possible to coax out more visual details, i.e. more information about times past? In my presentation I will introduce and reflect on the methods and results of such attempts. And I intend to pose a seemingly simple question: Is it possible to distinguish between beholding and imagination?”

A Case of Mistaken Identity Solved
UC Riverside art history professor corrects Getty Museum on misidentified Renaissance sculpture

She felt like a detective. Digging through notes and photos, asking for curatorial files, and doing research on child martyrs. She did all of this because as she gazed at the marble bust of a little boy at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles something just didn’t fit for Jeanette Kohl, chair of the art history department at the University of California, Riverside.

Turns out, Kohl’s instincts were correct, and the 15th century bust titled “Saint Cyricus” does not depict the child martyr, but rather a different child, Simon of Trent, who disappeared on Easter of 1475 and was soon found dead. Given Kohl’s thorough research, the Getty plans to change the label and identification of the important sculpture by the end of 2016.

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