2023 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Join Us on Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 5pm in ARTS 333
Lily Allen, 2022 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Mabel Alvarez’s Portraits in Hawaii, 1939-40
Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985) is one of four artists in my dissertation, which reevaluates the social and creative dynamics of one of L.A.’s first modern art groups — the Art Students League of Los Angeles — through intertwining analyses of the lives and works of Alvarez, Hideo Date, Benji Okubo, and Stanton Macdonald- Wright. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, Alvarez returned to the island in 1939 where she produced portraits of children of mixed Hawaiian, Asian, and Iberian heritage. My initial thoughts on this series was that the images’ modernity, sensitivity, and subjectivity made them prime evidence of an argument central to my dissertation: that Alvarez and her fellow artists painted pictures exploring concepts and sentiments that would later resonate with the Asian American Movement. However, what I saw in the various archives I visited in Honolulu has caused me to re-evaluate my hypothesis about this series, revealing connections to dark histories that clash with the portrayals’ apparent progressive potential and make them, in my mind, fraught objects both historically and currently.
Molly Bond, 2022 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
The Spaces of Relief: A Research Itinerary Across Italy
Relief sculpture flickers between the real and the virtual, mediating between tangible form and illusionistic space — in Renaissance terms, partaking of both “sculptural” and “painterly” effects. My dissertation takes this artform as its focus, broadly seeking to illuminate the complex and dynamic legacy of relief sculpture during the late 16th century in Italy. Primarily I concentrate on a group of bronze casters working in the Marche region during the late Cinquecento, who produced a number of bronze reliefs in and around the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto — home to the Virgin Mary’s miraculous flying house! In this presentation I will speak about
my time as a doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, especially my travel throughout the Marche as supported by the Forster-Hahn Award. This travel has been crucial for advancing my project: from completing archival and library research, to conducting an extensive photographic campaign of late Cinquecento relief, to exchanging ideas with a diverse, international group of experts in the field of Renaissance studies.
Becky Luo, 2022 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Articulating Sociality: Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections
In a 1991 lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute, Martin Wong announced, “Everyone thinks all I paint are Puerto Ricans, but secretly I paint Chinatown. For about the last ten years I’ve been accumulating a secret stash.” The following photograph documents an underpainting that would become the back of Iglesia Pentecostal, one of nine in a series of storefront paintings. The painting on the verso reveals inklings of secrecy throughout the artist’s interplay of language, visual motifs, and faces, signaling an ambiguous position within the communities he represented. Such ambiguities destabilize belonging as a constant; his acceptance into various social spheres is conditional and mutable. The research trip to NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections critically contributed to my understanding of Wong’s artworks as occupying a social function. In the fragmented phrases and unfinished sketches of his papers, Wong reflects on, interrogates, and utilizes art to navigate community.
The lecture is dedicated to an attempt at a “phenomenology” of female bust portraits of the Quattrocento. The focus is on the enigmatic bust of an unknown woman by Francesco Laurana in the Viennese Kunstkammer, which is characterized by its unusual polychrome. In the context of a comparative object analysis and against the cultural-historical background of a Petrarchan topic, the question of how this and other female busts ‘communicate’ with the viewer and what significance their fragmentary object character has will be pursued. Although not primarily motivated by the art-historical “passion for identifying” (Didi-Huberman), the considerations ultimately lead to a proposed new identification.
At Durham, Professor Endres will work on his current book project on “Style” as an interdisciplinary category of the study of texts, images and music. As part of his project, he will be in close collaboration with Professor Jonathan Long from Durham’s School of Modern Languages & Cultures. Professor Long is also the co-director of the Center for Visual Arts and Culture at Durham. The collaboration is based on their mutual research interest in German Literature, literary theory, and the study of visual culture in relation to literary artefacts.
The Getty Research Institute hosted the fifth annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcased the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into three sessions, the symposium included nine individual presentations, panel discussions moderated by faculty mentors, and Q&A sessions with the audience. 
In 1564 Florentine monk and intellectual Vincenzo Borghini deemed basso rilievo the ‘dolce amaro’ of the arts: ‘sweet’ because sculptors might approach the capacity of painting to depict elements of an istoria, but also ‘bitter’ because relief could neither render a convincing painterly illusion of depth nor offer the multiple views of sculpture in the round. Borghini’s opinion of relief as a kind of ‘imperfect hybrid’ (Ostrow 2004, 336) is far from unique: indeed, such ambivalence typifies most writings on relief—themselves very few and far between—from the early modern period. Yet, as uneasy as art theoreticians were with this art form, relief permeated the built environment and daily lives of contemporary Italians, as it invested objects ranging from monumental architectural façades to miniature plaquettes. A partial and ‘imperfect’ amalgamation of painting and sculpture perhaps, but such in-betweenness allowed reliefs to use the means of both in order to engage viewers across an incredibly broad array of socio-spatial contexts. Foregrounding the idea of embodied spectatorship, my presentation will examine both textual accounts and artifacts that respond to particular aspects of such interaction, including that of a spectator’s mobility, tactile engagement, and the changeable environments that conditioned their encounters with relief sculpture. While similar, phenomenologically-oriented approaches have been fruitfully applied to the study of Renaissance sculpture in the round and even painting, these concerns remain underexplored with respect to relief sculpture. Here the production of the late 16th-century ‘Recanati School’ of bronze casters will form my primary case study: not only did these artists develop an unusually strong tradition of bronze relief, but their work spanned a wide variety of different socio-religious spaces—from doors, to chapel walls, to statue bases—in and around the Basilica della Santa Casa di Loreto.