Please join us for the in-person return of the Brink Carrot Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Tuesday, April 26 at 5:15pm
ARTS 333
Camilla Querin, 2021 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Though It is Dark, Still I Sing: Brazilian Art from the Military Dictatorship to the 34th São Paulo Biennial and Back
“Though It Is Dark, Still I Sing” is the title of the 34th São Paulo Biennial. It is a sentence that encapsulates also the somber atmosphere and the defiant attitude that artists displayed during the military dictatorship in Brazil, producing artworks to illuminate the socio-political situation and express dissent. In this presentation I will talk about my visit to the Biennial and the interviews I conducted with artists and curators in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which allowed me to collect important information to conclude my dissertation that looks at artistic practices of resistance during the authoritarian regime.
Jesse Rocha, 2021 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Emotional Histories and Documentation in the ACT UP Archives
The Richard G. Carrott award allowed me to travel to New York City in September 2021, where I worked with materials in the Special Collections of the New York Public Library. These objects included posters, stickers, and video records from AIDS activist groups ACT UP and Gran Fury. In particular, the video objects sparked my interest, as they reflected the emotional histories, social textures, and documentary impulses of a generation of artists and activists. My presentation will discuss how this research trip has influenced my thesis work on gay male artists in 1980’s Brazil.
Homer Charles Arnold, 2021 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
Popping up: How CARP Invented the Itinerant Gallery in Los Angeles
During the 1970s, the exhibition initiative Carp produced revolutionary pop-up exhibitions throughout California. Working in response to the decade’s pluralism, Carp’s directors Barbara Burden and Marilyn Nix jettisoned traditional exhibition practices utilizing singular gallery spaces in favor of multiple sites including television stations and Wilshire Boulevard. Their approach invented the postmodern curator by attending to both the artwork and its site. My project reveals how Burden and Nix generated an exhibition format that became standardized. Carp’s archive is currently held in Redding, California. Access to these materials, made possible by the Forster-Hahn award, revealed the scope of Carp’s projects.
HUMANS
Although urban dwellers would have had to contend with the inconveniences associated with large-scale municipal projects, they also would have witnessed the engineering of new landscapes and the speed with which steel beams, poured concrete and panes of glass were assembled into museums, apartment blocks, and recreational buildings. It was in this visual context that some began to question the ontological limits of the art object and conceptualize projects at the scale of the newly built environments. In Lygia Clark’s work from the mid-1950s, she proposed moving her geometric compositions from the easel to the interior walls of the modern buildings under construction, documenting her environmental compositions with architectural maquettes in 1956. She went so far as to renounce her career as an artist—temporarily — while campaigning for the integration of visual art and architecture. Similarly, Abraham Palatnik also wanted to visually activate these new interior spaces, although for him it happened with colored light. Utilizing his training as a mechanical engineer, he built mechanized light boxes that projected a sequence of chromatic compositions generated by a system of pulleys, gears, levers, and lightbulbs contained within. In São Paulo, Geraldo de Barros produced an enormous photographic series, Fotoformas (1946-1951). Like Palatnik in Rio, light was often his subject-matter, although for Barros it was the natural light refracting through different building materials and architectural features, like textured glass or open doors. Often the light and shadows are so stark that they create compositions of geometric abstraction, a phenomenon that would become increasingly common as the city became progressively vertical. This talk demonstrates some of the ways that artists reimagined the possibilities of architecture amid a building frenzy.
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz is a research institute of the Max Planck Society dedicated to the history of art and architecture. Its main areas of focus are the art and visual culture of Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean sphere in the global context. The scientific advisory board is composed of internationally respected academics from Germany and abroad. Its task is to evaluate the Institute’s academic activities on a regular basis.