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.

Operativity and Digital Capture: A Public Symposium
January 11, 2025 | 10am-3pm

Operativity and Digital Capture is a public symposium with media archeologist, Dr. Jussi Parikka, the first Visiting Professor at @ideasandsociety . At this event, theorists, artists, scholars and practitioners from Southern California will discuss the operations of machine vision, especially relating to agency, culpability and connection in an image world functioning at a remove from human engagement.

The symposium is presented as a part of Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World on view at UCR ARTS California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts from September 21, 2024 to February 2, 2025.

Registration is free and seats are limited. https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/…/operativity-and-digital-capture/

UCR ARTS
California Museum of Photography
Culver Center of the Arts
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
ucrarts.ucr.edu

Digital Capture is made possible with leading support from Getty through the @pstinla : Art & Science Collide initiative.

Co-presented by University of California, Riverside’s California Museum of Photography, Center for Ideas and Society, History of Art Department, and Media and Cultural Studies Department. Additional support provided by the English Department at UCR. Support for the Inaugural CIS Visiting Professor is generously funded by UCR’s Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, Marko Princeva.

Department of the History of Art & The Art History Graduate Student Association

Live from the Library of Congress! A Guide to Visual Archival Research

Leigh Gleason, Ph.D.
Head of the Reference Section
Prints and Photographs Division
Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, and its visual collections in the Prints & Photographs Division alone number 17 million items. Because of its scale, it can be difficult to understand what the Library actually has, or how to see it in as you conduct your research. Hear from a Library of Congress reference staff member about navigating the art and visual collections at the Library both remotely from California and in-person in DC, and learn about fellowships offered by the Library.j

Leigh Gleason is a UCR alum (MA 2005), and was formerly the director of collections at UCR ARTS. Since 2023, she has been the head of the reference section for the Prints & Photographs Division, overseeing a reading room that greets some 1700 in-person visitors per year, in addition to a robust virtual refer-ence service. Leigh holds a PhD from the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK), as well as a MLIS from San Jose State University.

Wednesday, November 20,10:00-11:00. Via Zoom
Join here