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

Close to the WAI Distinguish Lecture Series

Distinguished Lecturer, Workshop Facilitator and Keynote Speaker, Dr. Johannes Endres and Dr. Jeanette Kohl in Shanghai

To round off the Summer, the History of Art Departments Dr. Jeanette Kohl and Dr. Johannes Endres were distinguished lecturer, workshop facilitator and keynote speaker for the World Art History Institutes (WAI) 12th Distinguished Lecture Series.

As Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Jeanette Kohl delivered: A Murder, a Mummy, and a Bust – Forensics of a Renaissance Portrait Sculpture at the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. Dr. Kohl also provided an additional public lecture at the School of Arts, Peking University on Thinking with Busts. Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer.

Dr. Johannes Endres provided the keynote at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts (LAFA), Shenyang on Style in an Interdisciplinary Perspective.

In addition, Dr. Jeanette Kohl in collaboration with Dr. Johannes Endres lead a two-day workshop on The Concept of Style: Epistemologies in the Arts and Sciences at LAFA.

Here are some words shared by Dr. Jeanette Kohl:

“What an honor to give the final evening lecture at Shanghai‘s new World Art History Institute WAI. They shouldered a year-long program of 12 speakers from the US, the UK, Germany, and Italy holding workshops with Chinese students and giving several talks per visit and in various locations across the country. Last night was the closing ceremony, and I was really moved that they chose me to be present for this. Johannes and I met extremely dedicated colleagues, some brilliant students, and a deep appreciation for European art and culture. Frankly, I wish I‘d see more of this in the US.”

Twelfth Distinguished WAI Lecture on Renaissance Art and Culture

A Murder, a Mummy, and a Bust – Forensics of a Renaissance Portrait Sculpture

Professor Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside

Tuesday, 24 September, 7.30–9.30 pm, UTC+8 Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, onsite, Zoom & Livestreaming [London 12.30–2.30 pm; Berlin 1.30–3.30 pm; New York/Washington D.C. 7.30–9.30 am] LHS Art Museum, Shanghai

Francesco Laurana (1430–1502), Saint Cyricus (detail), marble, 38.7 diameter, 1470 – 1480. Los Angeles: J. Paul Museum.

On Easter Sunday 1475, the dead body of a 2-year-old Christian boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family’s house in Trent, Italy. Town magistrates arrested eighteen Jewish men and five women on the charge of ritual murder. In a series of interrogations that involved the use of torture, the magistrates obtained the confessions they needed. Eight were executed, others committed suicide in jail. The accusation was torture, strangulation and bleeding the infant to death to use his blood for the preparation of the Passover bread. The case of Simon of Trent went down in history as one of the most brutal and consequential blood libels against a Jewish community in Early Modern Europe. Lesser known is the heated debate about the visual and written propaganda the event set in motion in the cities of Northern Italy and Southern Germany. In my lecture, I will present a new identification of one of the major Renaissance sculptures in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the bust of a child erroneously identified as Saint Cyricus. I will discuss new conservatory and iconographic evidence for the object as a key work in the ferocious, anti-Semitic propaganda around the Trent blood libel of 1475. I will also reinterpret the bust’s role as a devotional image and its relation to the cult of relics that soon emerged around the dead body of Simon of Trent. The unusual object in the Getty collections is a particularly suited object to talk about the role of visual and conservatory observation, knowledge of historical contexts, and questions of methodology in Renaissance art history.

Speaker’s short bio: Dr. Jeanette Kohl is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Since 2021, she also serves as director of the UCR Humanities Center (CIS). Her research in art history focuses on portraiture, sculpture, and concepts of artistic representation and memory in the Italian Renaissance. She earned her PhD from the University of Trier/Germany in 2001 with a dissertation on Bartolomeo Colleoni’s burial chapel in Bergamo/Italy (“Fama und Virtus,” Berlin 2004), which was awarded the university’s prize for outstanding dissertations. Kohl has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the NEH, the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Köln, the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS), and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. Her new book “The Life of Busts. Fifteenth-Century Portrait Sculpture in Italy” is in press with Brepols for 2025.

Registration

If you are residing outside mainland China and interested in attending this or other WAI lectures, please register for virtual participation: https://forms.gle/LAj5SkGCuy7Pgu1x9